Robert Metz

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article (or section) may need to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article, especially its section layout, and relevant internal links. (help)
This article has been tagged since November 2006.

Robert Metz is a politician and political activist in London,Ontario, Canada. He co-founded the Freedom Party of Ontario and served as its first leader.

The Freedom Party was founded on January 1, 1984 by Metz and Marc Emery, who subsequently founded and now leads the BC Marijuana Party. Both Metz and Emery had previously been involved in the Unparty. Both organizations were influenced by Ayn Rand's political and economic philosophies.

Although Freedom Party is strongly supportive of property rights, individual rights and capitalism, its leadership says that the party is not libertarian. It views libertarianism as a misguided political strategy and argues that libertarian parties have often promoted unsound definitions of liberty.

Metz was the first president of the Freedom Party and served as its de facto leader in the provincial election of 1985. He was chosen as the party's first official leader in 1987 and led the party through the provincial elections of 1987 and 1990.

He resigned as party leader in 1994 and was succeeded by Jack Plant, but he remained as party president and still holds the latter office as of 2006. He is also president of the Freedom Party of Canada.

Metz has frequently compared North American social democracy with fascism and Soviet-style communism, and has written in opposition to taxation, unions and universal health care coverage. He also supports legalizing all drugs, although this not official party policy. (The Freedom Party of Canada advocates the legalization only of marijuana, and Freedom Party of Ontario has no policy concerning illegal drugs).

In the early 1990s, Metz defended London-area landlord Elijah Elieff before the Ontario Human Rights Commission, after Elieff was accused of describing tenants (some of whom were immigrants from Cambodia) as "little pigs". In the course of the hearings, Metz described the OHRC as a "Gestapo" organization and accused it of racism. The OHRC concluded that Elieff had not discriminated against his tenants. This decision, however, was subsequently overturned by Ontario's Divisional Court, where Mr. Elieff chose to represent himself.

After the 1995 provincial election, Metz responded to Mike Harris's government with mixed praise and criticism (on some occasions describing the government as insufficiently right-wing). He endorsed the Reform Party of Canada in the federal elections of 1993 and 1997 (there was no Freedom Party of Canada at this time).

In 2000, Metz wrote an article criticizing what he described as the suppression of free speech in Ontario, following an incident in which Raphael Bergmann and Tyler Chilcott of London, Ontario, received a letter from London police, stating that the police believed them to be members of a far-right Northern Alliance organization and requiring them to attend the police station to explain what the letter referred to as their "extreme right-wing beliefs". After the two men took their letter to the Freedom Party headquarters, Metz and party leader Lloyd Walker wrote to the solicitor general of Ontario to complain that people who had not committed any crimes were being required to justify their political views to the police. It should be noted that neither Metz nor the Freedom Party supported the alleged views of the men who received the letter.

Metz has been interviewed on several radio and television broadcasts for the Freedom Party International in recent years (most recently in relation to the arrest of Marc Emery at the behest of US authorities) and represents the "right" on radio CHRW's programme "Left, Right, and Centre", hosted by Jim Chapman at 11:30 AM on Wednesdays.

Electoral Record: