James Delamere Lafferty (April 28, 1849 – July 29, 1920) was a Canadian physician and politician. Lafferty served as Registrar for the Northwest Territories Medical Ordinance regulator to professionalize the practice of medicine. he was actively involved in establishing the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta and the Canadian Medical Association's Alberta Division, which was later known as the Alberta Medical Association. He served one term as the fifth mayor of Calgary from January 1890 to January 1891. Early life Lafferty was born in Perth, Ontario in 1849 and attended local schools. He had seven brothers and four sisters. Three of his brothers became physicians, and his brother Tom became a lawyer and moved to Calgary, Alberta. Education He worked as deputy registrar of titles in Kingston to finance his further education. He graduated from Queen's University medical school in 1871. Lafferty practised medicine for a year in Perth before becoming a senior resident at Ward Island hospital (later Bellevue Hospital) in New York City and at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary. Lafferty next took a post-graduate course at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, England. Medical career In 1873, he set up practice in Pembroke, Ontario; later that same year, he married Jessie P. Grant. From 1877 to 1880, Lafferty also operated a drug store in Pembroke. In 1880, he was named associate coroner for Renfrew County. The following year, Lafferty was offered the position of chief surgeon for the eastern division of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba later that year. Lafferty and his family had moved to Regina, Saskatchewan by 1885 and then moved on to Calgary in December 1885. In Calgary, Lafferty took on the contracts to provide medical services for the CPR mainline and for the nearby Indian reservation. In 1889, he was a founding member of the North West Territories Medical Association and, in the following year, was elected to the medical council for the College of Physicians and Surgeons of the North West Territories. Lafferty served as NWT Medical Ordinance regulator, which included the geographic regions that became the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. When Alberta became a province of the Dominion of Canada, with the passage of the July 20, 1905 Alberta Act in the Canadian parliament, all existing societies or associations that regulated the medical profession, dentistry, pharmaceutical chemistry and others, under the Northwest Territories