Ted Morton
Frederick Lee (Ted) Morton, PhD. (born 1949, Los Angeles, California) is a former university professor, an Albertan politician and currently a Member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta. He is currently a candidate for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta. He is particularly well known for his criticisms of the Canadian judiciary.
He moved to Wyoming in 1952, where his father worked in the oil and gas exploration business. In 1991, Morton and his wife Bambi became Canadian citizens.
Academic career
Morton obtained his B.A. from Colorado College and earned his Masters and Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Toronto. During university Ted was active in the anti-Vietnam war effort. In 1981, Ted joined the faculty of the University of Calgary as a political science professor. He remained in that position for 22 years.
While at the University of Calgary, Morton was a part of a group of academics called the Calgary School whose teaching and writing exercised a very significant influence on the future of conservatism in Canada.
He has published five books, one of which won the 1992 Alberta Writers' Guild award, and more than fifty scholarly articles.[citation needed] His columns have appeared in the National Post, the Calgary Herald, the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Sun.
Political career
Morton was an early supporter of the Triple-E Senate Committee and a public critic of the Meech Lake (1987) and Charlottetown (1992) Accords.
He was elected as a Reform Party Senator-in-Waiting in the 1998 Alberta Senate nominee election.
In 2001, Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day appointed him Parliamentary Director of Policy and Research for the party. That same year, he was one of a group of six Albertans (including Stephen Harper—later to become Prime Minister in 2006) who authored the “Alberta Agenda“, also known as the "firewall letter", a manifesto that calls on the government of Alberta to use all of its constitutional powers to reduce the influence of the Federal government on the lives and personal finances of Albertans.
In the 2004 Alberta general election, Morton won the newly created seat of Foothills-Rocky View and now sits as an MLA for the Alberta Progressive Conservatives. In that role, he has advocated for tax cuts, the maintenance of the traditional restrictions on forms of marriage, for increased saving of energy revenues, for a lobbyist registry, and for fixed election dates.[citation needed] He was the only Conservative MLA to publicly oppose the Prosperity Bonus.[citation needed] Within six months of his election, the Calgary Herald gave Morton the highest grade of all new Calgary-area MLAs and rated him “Most likely to succeed.”[citation needed]