She was a New Democratic Party member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1985 to 1995 and served as a high-profile cabinet minister in the government of Bob Rae.
[2] Terry was a New Democratic Party member of the House of Commons of Canada from 1972 to 1974 and served as president of Ryerson Polytechnical Institute from 1988 to 1995.
She ran on a campaign criticizing Tory incumbent Al Kolyn of being lax on environmental issues and on the closing of the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital in 1979.
[7] She won the election defeating both second place Liberal candidate Frank Sgarlata by 2,037 votes and Kolyn who finished third.
[12] In January 1989, Grier sponsored a private member's bill that proposed to ban the sale of irradiated foods in Ontario.
The government eventually authorized the creation of three new landfill sites near Toronto, one of which was located on prime farmland.
Grier also set limits on the amount of chlorine that pulp and paper mills could dump into rivers and lakes, and rejected one particular downtown Toronto housing project on the grounds that removing industrial waste from the region was prohibitively expensive.
[18] The NDP were defeated in the 1995 provincial election, and Grier finished third in her bid for re-election in Etobicoke—Lakeshore, losing to Progressive Conservative Morley Kells.
[21] Grier was named Visiting Environmentalist at the University of Toronto in 1997, and remains involved in environmental concerns.