Charles Thornton Bate (February 10, 1825 – April 10, 1889) was mayor of Ottawa in 1884.^[1]

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 (the move having been rejected as unnecessary by Ottawa's previous mayor Charles Mackintosh). President of the Ottawa Electric Light Company^[2] 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".

References

• Legislative Assembly of Ontario
• Dave Mullington (2005), Chain of Office : Biographical Sketches of the Early Mayors of Ottawa (1847-1948), GeneralStore PublishingHouse, pp. 64–65, ISBN 978-1-897113-17-2, retrieved 14 October 2011
• Star Iron Tower Co (1886), American electrical directory, Star Iron Tower Co., pp. 366–, retrieved 14 October 2011