Randy White (politician)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Randy White (born September 3, 1948 in Halifax, Nova Scotia) is an accountant and former Canadian politician. White was first elected to the Canadian House of Commons as the Reform Party Member of Parliament (MP) for Fraser Valley West, British Columbia in the 1993 federal election.
In the 1997 election, he was re-elected for the riding of Langley—Abbotsford, and became a Canadian Alliance MP in 2000 when Reform was joined by dissident members of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.
White served as the Reform Party's House Leader from 1997 to 2000 and as the Canadian Alliance House Leader from 2001 to 2002. He also served as Caucus Chair in 2001, and as Deputy Caucus Chair in 2002. He joined the new Conservative Party of Canada upon the merger of the Alliance with the Progressive Conservative Party in early 2004.
White has attracted controversy during his parliamentary career. While the Reform party discovered that Liberal Party Senator Andrew Thompson was living in Mexico while continuing to collect his salary as a senator, White hired a mariachi band to play in the lobby of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. White donned a sombrero, and performed an unusual version of the "Mexican Hat Dance". While some observers noted that the stunt drew attention to a perceived abuse by Senator Thompson, others commented that White's antics drew the House of Commons into disrepute.
On the eve of the 2004 election, White, a social conservative, taped an interview for a documentary in which he mused that the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian constitution might be employed by a Conservative government to outlaw same-sex marriage. White is quoted as saying "If the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is going to be used as the crutch to carry forward all of the issues that social libertarians want, then there's got to be for us conservatives out there a way to put checks and balances in there." This statement played into the hands of the Liberal Party's campaign strategy to portray the Conservatives as extremists. Conservative leader Stephen Harper stressed that White's comments did not represent party policy, but the damage was nonetheless done as it compounded other social conservative views that were expressed by various Conservative MPs and candidates throughout the campign.
White left politics in 2006 and did not run in the 2006 federal election. He has continued activity in the area of drug policy, including founding the conservative anti-harm reduction group The Drug Prevention Network of Canada
White is a former member of the Royal Canadian Air Force.
