Fred Bass

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Fred Bass is a former Vancouver city councillor and anti-smoking advocate.

Bass was born in New York City, New York and served as a Preventive Medicine Officer in the US Army's 7th Infantry Division in Korea and Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. After his military service, he was a Tuberculosis Control Officer for the New Jersey Deptartment of Health and Unit Medical Health Officer before moving to Canada.

Bass entered electoral politics in 1996 as a candidate for Vancouver's Green Party under the leadership of Paul Watson but was defeated by a wide margin. However, the increased share of the vote won by the Greens and of a new populist party called VOICE resulted in a total rout for the city's leftist forces in which every single non-NPA candidate was defeated. Despite proving the Greens' second-best vote-getter in the 1996 election (second only to the party's provincial leader Stuart Parker), Bass was defeated when he sought renomination by the Greens in 1999. With the support of the Greens' executive and provincial leadership, he sought and won the nomination of COPE, the party with which the Greens had just inked a coalition agreement.

Bass was first elected to city council in 1999 as a member of the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE), and topped the polls when re-elected in 2002. Bass was outspoken in his opposition to the centrist drift by his party under the leadership of Mayor Larry Campbell and received considerable media coverage for lambasting the mayor at a public meeting of the party. Some credit this public eruption of dissent as the point at which COPE's two factions became irreconcilable.

In 2004-2005, moderate members of COPE split from the party to form a new centre-left municipal party, Vision Vancouver. Bass and fellow left-wing councillors Tim Louis, David Cadman, Anne Roberts and Ellen Woodsworth remained in COPE. Bass was not re-elected in the 2005 election, finishing 12th overall with 48,248 votes.