Lisa Raitt

Lisa Sarah MacCormack Raitt (born May 7, 1968) is a former Canadian politician who served as a federal Cabinet minister and member of Parliament (MP) from 2008 to 2019.

Lisa Sarah MacCormack was born on May 7, 1968, in Sydney, Nova Scotia, and raised as the youngest of seven children.

It was not until her early teens that she learned that the couple she thought were her parents were actually her grandparents, and that the woman she believed was her sister was her mother, who as a young unmarried woman had almost given up her daughter for adoption.

Her grandfather, Colin A. MacCormack, worked for a local coal mine, loading coal onto ships, and later served as city alderman, and secretary-treasurer and a lead negotiator for the Cape Breton Railway Transportation and General Workers.

Her grandmother, Mary Christina "Tootsie" (Gillis), was a businesswoman.

As a child, she participated in Girl Guides of Canada programs as a youth member.

As general counsel for the TPA, she filed a $1 billion lawsuit over 600 acres of land that was transferred in the 1990s to the City of Toronto's Toronto Economic Development Corporation (TEDCO) by the Toronto Harbour Commission (THC).

The disputed lands, mostly the infill lands of the Don River delta, constituted around 85 per cent of the THC's land assets as of the early 1990s.

The lands had been transferred in two separate agreements, in 1991 and 1994 in exchange for a permanent subsidy for the THC.

The TPA's legal claim was that the transfer had been done while the majority of directors of the THC were city-appointed, and who had acted in the city's interest and not in the commission's fiduciary interest, and that the deals crippled the THC's ability to be self-sufficient by ending any potential revenues from those lands.

Since the TPA was inheriting the role and activities of the THC, it was thus crippled itself.

The TPA and the city settled out of court in exchange for a promised bridge to the Island Airport across the Western Gap and approximately $50 million.

Raitt completed a law degree at Osgoode Hall Law School and was called to the Ontario bar in 1998.

That year, she was granted a Dr. Harold G. Fox Scholarship.

As a result, she trained with barristers of the Middle Temple in London, United Kingdom, which specialized in international trade, commerce, transportation, and arbitration.

Raitt was married to Second City alumnus, playwright, and stay-at-home dad David Raitt and has two sons, John Colin (b. 2001) and Billy (b. 2004); they are now divorced.

Raitt served as the Toronto Port Authority's (TPA) corporate secretary and general counsel, and was named harbourmaster in April 2001.

She was the first female harbourmaster of a Canadian port.

In 2002, Raitt was appointed as president and chief executive officer of the Toronto Port Authority (TPA), a federal Crown corporation that manages the Toronto Harbour as well as the Toronto City Centre Airport.

She relinquished the post of harbourmaster to Angus Armstrong in 2004.

The ground was broken on 24 August 2004, and CATS operated for six months in 2005.

The Rochester firm that initially owned the ferry had a 14-year lease on the use of the terminal that would have paid the City of Toronto $250,000 per year.

The terminal was reported to have cost $10.5 million to construct, which makes a 0.33 cost recovery factor.

A member of the Conservative Party, Raitt was elected to the House of Commons in the 2008 election, representing Halton.

The lease was terminated in December 2009 after payment of a $90,000 settlement.

The terminal has seen little use since then except to dock cruise ships and as a movie set.

During her time as CEO of the TPA, the Air Canada Jazz service to the Toronto City Centre Airport was discontinued under a legal cloud.

Raitt was responsible for the new TCCA1 ferry for passengers at the Toronto City Centre Airport, which is located at the western end of the Toronto Islands.

Raitt was quoted as "proud to have assisted in the remarkable growth of Porter Airlines" in her time at the TPA.

Trinity—Spadina MP Olivia Chow called on federal Auditor General Sheila Fraser to conduct an audit of the port authority to investigate why Minister of Transport John Baird increased the membership of the board of directors from seven to nine—and why Raitt, while CEO, was allowed to run up almost $80,000 in travel and other expenses over two years.

Shortly after her election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper named her minister of natural resources, holding the role until 2010, when she became minister of labour.

In 2013, she became minister of transport, remaining in the role until the Conservatives were defeated by the Liberal Party in the 2015 election.

Raitt was re-elected in the newly formed riding of Milton.

The bridge was never built; instead a pedestrian tunnel under the Western Gap was constructed and completed on July 30, 2015.

As chief executive officer (CEO) of the TPA, Raitt was responsible for building the International Marine Passenger Terminal, a Toronto home for the now-defunct Canadian American Transportation Systems, a Rochester, New York-based group.

On September 2, 2016, she married her longtime partner, Bruce Wood, the president and CEO of the Hamilton Port Authority.

Raitt graduated from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia with a Bachelor of Science.

She went on to do a master's degree in chemistry, specializing in environmental biochemical toxicology, at the University of Guelph.

She contested the Conservative leadership in 2017, losing to Andrew Scheer, who made her deputy party leader and deputy opposition leader, a role she would hold until she was defeated in the 2019 election.

Since leaving politics, she has been the vice chair of Global Investment Banking at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC).