Jeff Lehman

Jeff Lehman is the Chairman of the District Municipality of Muskoka, having been elected by Council in December 2022. He was previously the 46th Mayor of the City of Barrie. From 2014-2017, and again from 2021-2022, Lehman chaired Ontario’s Big City Mayors’ Caucus (LUMCO), representing Ontario’s 28 largest cities. He was re-elected in 2018 with 91% of the popular vote.

As the head of council, he lead Barrie through a period of rapid change. During his first term in office, major new campuses were developed in Barrie by IBM, TD Bank, Cogeco, Napoleon, and others, and Barrie led all metropolitan areas east of Alberta in the rate of job creation. He was also a founding director of Alectra, the second largest community-owned utility in North America, serving more than three million customers in southern Ontario. Lehman holds a Chartered Director (C.Dir) designation and has served on the Boards of Directors of 9 separate organizations over his twenty year career. His articles concerning the future of municipalities have appeared in the Globe and Mail and industry publications and he has been a frequent keynote speaker at conferences, focusing particularly on innovation in the public sector and the intersection of business, community, and government.

In 2017, he was awarded the Gil Bennett Award by the Conference Board of Canada for excellence in corporate governance education through the Director’s College. He was also named the 2017 Community Leader Influencer of the Year by the Economic Developers Council of Ontario. In 2019, the prestigious US business magazine Fast Company named Lehman number 26 in its top 100 Most Creative People in Business for his innovative solutions in government.

He holds a B.A. from Queen’s University, and a Master’s Degree with first class honours from the UK’s London School of Economics, where he lectured for two years following graduation. As an economist, he worked with cities across the country to manage redevelopment and invest in their urban infrastructure during a ten year career as a consultant before entering public life. Chair Lehman is a passionate believer in transforming urban economies through public and private entrepreneurship.