Politics
Gray served as a Councillor for both the City of Oshawa and the Regional Municipality of Durham for nine years prior to being elected as Mayor in November 2003. The 2003 election was a benchmark for Gray - not only had he unseated a four term mayor (Nancy Diamond), but he had also pulled in more than 40% of the vote in a 5 candidate race.
Gray was re-elected for a second term on November 13, 2006 with a sweeping majority. He was later defeated by local businessman, John Henry on October 25, 2010.
Upon leaving the mayor's office in December 2010, Gray collected a severance payment of $110,821. Severance payments are made to all politicians who serve two or more consecutive terms. In January 2011 Gray had accepted employment as a solar energy consultant, and subsequently as a municipal project management consultant.
Read more about this topic: John Gray (Oshawa Politician)
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)