Joanne Campbell

Joanne Campbell (born March 25, 1948) is a former Canadian politician, who served on Toronto City Council from 1982 to 1985 and on Metro Toronto Council from 1982 to 1988.

Background Campbell was born in Montreal and raised in the nearby suburb of Hudson, where she was a childhood friend of her future Toronto City Council colleague Jack Layton. After Cressy announced that he would not run for reelection in the 1982 municipal election, Campbell and Barbara Hall competed for the Metro New Democratic Party endorsement to be its second candidate alongside David Reville in the Ward 7 race. On election day, however, although both won the election it was Campbell, not Reville, who finished with the higher vote total and became the "senior" alderman. and collaborated with June Rowlands to lobby for improved childcare services in the city. Campbell and other NDP-affiliated city councillors — including Reville, Layton, Richard Gilbert, Dorothy Thomas and Joe Pantalone — also collaborated on a job creation plan at the height of the early 1980s recession.

Campbell also served as the city's representative to the board of the Toronto Humane Society.

In June 1984, Campbell's first son with Cressy, Joseph, was born. Campbell was the first woman ever to give birth to a child while serving as a member of Toronto's city council. while the city was blocking the developer's application because it represented a significant loss to the city's supply of affordable housing. Under the new system, instead of the Metro Council seat going automatically to whichever city councillor had won more votes in the election, one person would be directly elected as a Metro councillor while the other would be elected as a city alderman.

Soon after the election, Campbell left the NDP bloc on council to affiliate with a new "moderate" bloc, whose other members included Rowlands, Kanter, Korwin-Kuczynski, Betty Disero, Kay Gardner and Nadine Nowlan. She continued to identify as a New Democrat politically, stating that she had chosen to leave the NDP group not because of any change in her basic ideology, but because she no longer had faith in the value of trying to create a political party structure at Toronto City Hall, and felt that the NDP caucus was missing opportunities to advance its policy goals by collaborating across party lines. She became chair of Metro Council's community services committee. In this role, she continued to champion issues such as housing and daycare, and joined with Rowlands in a filibuster against a bill that would have allowed condominium conversion of existing rental housing units. She also worked to improve relations between the Toronto Police Service and the community, most notably by helping to establish an advisory committee on community-police relations in the economically disadvantaged Regent Park neighbourhood in her ward. She was also a strong proponent of a policy, which was successfully passed in 1987, to protect municipal employees from discrimination or harassment on the basis of HIV status.

During her second council term, both the Ontario Liberal Party and the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party courted Campbell as a candidate, but she refused because her ideological affiliations remained with the New Democrats. Gilbert was selected to replace Campbell as the city's representative on Metro Council's executive committee, and Roger Hollander won a by-election on October 9, 1987 to succeed her in Ward 7.

After her term on the Social Assistance Review Board ended, Campbell was appointed as General Manager of the Metro Toronto Housing Company Ltd., Metro Toronto’s 20,000 unit social housing entity. At the time of the creation of the amalgamated City of Toronto she was appointed as General Manager of the Shelter, Housing and Support Division. She retired from this role in 1999. leaving this role in 2007 to work with Cressy on an international development project to build a YMCA, including Tobago’s first public swimming pool in Trinidad and Tobago.

After the project was completed, the duo returned to Toronto, where Cressy accepted a fundraising position with George Brown College and Campbell attended the institution as a student in its chef training program. Their son Joe was elected to Toronto City Council in the 2014 municipal election.