C. T. Bate

Who was C. T. Bate?

Charles Thornton Bate was mayor of Ottawa in 1884.

He was born in Cornwall, England in 1825, the son of Henry Newell Bate and Lisette Meyer. The family emigrated to St. Catharines, Ontario in 1833. In the 1850s he founded a large wholesale grocery business, "C. T. Bate & Co.", in Ottawa, Ontario with his brother, Henry Newell Bate, who became the first head of the Ottawa Improvement Commission, later the National Capital Commission and who was knighted in 1910.

Mr. Bate was mayor when Ottawa became the first city in Canada to be completely lit by electricity, after nearly two years of debate. President of the Ottawa Electric Light Company and the Ottawa Gas Company, Bate served on the first board of the Bank of Ottawa, which later merged with Scotiabank.

In Ottawa, An Illustrated History, John H. Taylor wrote, "In the late nineteenth century, only the Ottawa merchandiser C.T. Bate, appears to have had any standing in the Canadian financial community".