Alum elected mayor of Sault Ste. Marie

Faculty of Law - Common Law Section
Elections
Alumni
Faculty of Law - Common Law Section
Mayor SSM_MShoemaker
Alum Matthew Shoemaker, LLB ’12, has been elected mayor of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

Shoemaker, who was first elected to City Council in 2014, is a partner at Wishart Law Firm, LLP, which he joined as an articling student.

While at the Faculty, he won the Justice Gilles Létourneau & Colonel Michel Drapeau Prize for Canadian Military Law Studies and was published in the Canadian Parliamentary Review and the Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law for his article “Bilingualism and Bijuralism at the Supreme Court of Canada”.

Shoemaker, fluent in French and conversational in Italian, obtained his LLM from Osgoode Hall in 2019.

Sault Ste. Marie, which has a population of 72,000, is located at the St. Mary's River on the Canada-U.S. border and is the third largest city in Northern Ontario. To the south, across the river, is the United States and the Michigan city of the same name.

Shoemaker said his time at uOttawa definitely trained him in “many of the skills necessary that ultimately led to my win on election night.”

“It was a long process though. For 8 years I’ve been on City Council and have critically analyzed every agenda item before us. The critical analysis skills that I learned while in law school helped me enormously in this aspect of the job.

“Another essential skill was my ability to debate, which helped during the campaign itself. There were four debates throughout the campaign and my ability to form and defend a position is something I honed while a student at uOttawa (and since, in practice).”

He said completing law school was also a “boost to my credibility” when he first ran for city council in 2014 (at age 26) and helped him compete with people who had many years of life and business experience.

“I look at my time in Ottawa as formative to the last decade of my work life and I am grateful for all uOttawa offered me. “

Professor Adam Dodek, who taught Shoemaker public law, said he wasn’t surprised in the least to see him run for office.

"From his first days as a law student, Matt demonstrated a deep engagement with government and a keen desire to participate in discussions about issues of the day,” said Dodek. "His success is no surprise."

The Common Law Section congratulates Shoemaker on his election and wishes him continued success.