October 28, 1998 - Glen Murray

Winnipeg’s Glen Murray becomes Canada’s first openly gay mayor. Glen Murray was born in Montreal on October 27, 1957. After graduating from Concordia University in Quebec, he worked for Canada Post, which transferred him to Winnipeg in 1985. In 1990, Murray ran for city council with a left-of-centre civic party; he was popular enough to win and get re-elected. That made him decide to run for mayor in 1998, despite some supporters’ concerns about how his homosexuality would affect his chances. Murray was not only openly gay, but he was featured in a 1992 documentary, “A Kind of Family,” in which he narrated his struggles of adopting a teenaged boy and trying to bring some stability to his life after a childhood marked by years of being bounced from one foster home to another. On October 28, 1998, after a campaign in which some of his opponents made an issue of his sexual orientation, Glen Murray was elected mayor of Winnipeg with 50.5 per cent of the vote. That made him Canada’s first openly gay mayor of a major city. He was re-elected in 2002, but cut his term short to run for the federal Liberal Party the spring of 2004. Although Murray was one of Prime Minister Paul Martin’s “star” candidates, he was defeated on June 28, 2004, losing to Conservative MP Steven Fletcher.

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