Gary Dale

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Gary Dale was born in Fort St. John, British Columbia, Canada, on October 1, 1952. He spent the first nine years living in a small village called Trutch, mainly identifiable by its mile number (201) on the Alaska Highway. In 1961 he moved with his family to Dawson Creek, British Columbia and in 1963 to Toronto, Ontario.

In the fall of 1967, his family moved north of Highway 401 to what became their final home.

Dale graduated from Sir John A. Macdonald Collegiate Institute in 1971 and studied Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. He regularly attend protests, both for student rights and against wars like the one in Vietnam.

After a series of jobs in the private sector, Dale began a twenty year career in the Ontario Public Service (OPS). He developed a programming application framework, using the dBASE programming language, that became widely used across the province - even helping others win awards for the systems they developed using it. He later became an Open Source advocate and introduced a number of open source products to the OPS. He continued promoting Free and open source software after leaving the OPS.

In 1985 he moved to his current house in Scarborough.

In 1992, while serving as president of Ontario Public Service Employees Union Local 508, Dale became involved in opposition to the Social Contract through the Union/Community Action Coalition which arranged most of the protest events in the GTA. He was chosen to portray Bob Rae in the Public Services Coalition's float in the 1993 Labour Day Parade. His impromptu attempt to sit in the reviewing stand (where the Ontario New Democratic Party (NDP) leader would normally be) made the front page of the three Toronto dailies on September 7, 1993. Dale later also served on the executive of Ontario Public Service Employees Union Local 504.

In 2003 Dale was briefly the editor of Montage, the Toronto & Southwestern Ontario Mensa magazine. Although under his editorship the quality of the magazine went up, advertising revenues increased and costs went down, disagreements with the Board soon led to his departure.

For the 2003 provincial election, Dale was nominated to run for the Ontario New Democratic Party (NDP) in Scarborough East and received 12.3% of the vote, almost twice the NDP's 1999 result in that riding.

This was followed by nominations as a federal New Democratic Party candidate in the 2004 and 2006 elections in the new riding of Pickering—Scarborough East. The NDP did substantially better than it had in any recent elections in the area.

In 2004 Dale also joined the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) and later the West Hill - Highland Creek Lions Club. He quickly joined the board of both organizations. In 2005 he helped found the Scarborough Health Coalition. In 2006, Dale became a founding board member of the Canadian Muslim Union after it split from the MCC.

Dale officially left the Ontario Public Service at the end of 2005 to pursue a career providing consulting services for not-for-profit groups in the GTA.

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