David Iftody
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David Iftody (June 15, 1956—February 5, 2001) was a Canadian politician. He served in the Canadian House of Commons from 1993 to 2000, representing the Manitoba riding of Provencher for the Liberal Party.
Iftody was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He worked at the Manitoba Youth Care Centre from 1977 to 1982, received a B.S.W. from the University of Manitoba in 1985, and earned an M.P.A. from the same institution two years later. Iftody later moved to Ottawa, Ontario, where he worked as a management consultant and was owner and president of the firm Animus Research. He also lectured at the Faculty of Law at Carleton University.
He returned to Manitoba to contest Provencher in the 1993 federal election, and won a relatively narrow victory over an opponent from the Reform Party. The Liberals won a majority government, and Iftody served as a government backbencher. He served on the House of Commons Finance Committee, and criticized Canada's major banks for not providing enough support to small businesses (Globe and Mail, 2 May 1994). In 1996, he brought forward a private member's bill to prevent Canadian banks from acquiring each other via hostile takeovers (Winnipeg Free Press, 9 April 1997). The following year, he argued that cabinet acted with undue haste in approving the Bank of Nova Scotia's takeover of National Trust (WFP, 7 August 1997).
Iftody was of Romanian background, and in 1997 helped the Canadian government convince Romania to support an international treaty banning land mines (WFP, 12 November 1997). He also criticized Shell Oil for its human rights record in Nigeria, claiming that the company had violated "the elementary standards of the international code of conduct for business" by failing to intervene against government abuses (G&M, 19 June 1996).
A committed Catholic, Iftody was also part of the socially conservative wing of the Liberal Party. In late 1994, he opposed his government's plans to add sexual orientation as a protected category under Canada's hate crimes legislation (G&M, 27 October 1994). He later opposed similar legislation protecting homosexuals under the Canadian Human Rights Act (Winnipeg Free Press, 30 April 1996). He denied being part of a parliamentary "God squad", but expressed a personal view that homosexuality was "spiritually unhealthy" (WFP, 15 March 2000). He also opposed the principle of a national Canadian gun registry, and voted against the bill enabling the registry on its final reading (G&M, 14 June 1995).
Iftody's opposition to the gun registry was popular in his riding, and he was re-elected in the 1997 election despite a strong challenge from the Reform Party. The Liberal Party lost all of its other rural Manitoba seats in this election. Iftody served as parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development from 1998 to 2000.
In late 1997, Iftody intervened to rescue a woman from a potential sexual assault in an Ottawa boarding house. Hearing a struggle in a room near his own, he discovered a man holding the house owner against a wall. He stopped the attack, and detained the attacker until the police arrived (WFP, 15 December 1997).
Iftody was defeated in the 2000 election, losing to Canadian Alliance candidate Vic Toews by a significant margin. He died unexpectedly in early February 2001, after suffering internal bleeding in his liver following a snowmobile accident. The House of Commons paid tribute to him the following day (WFP, 7 February 2001). In 2003, Providence College in Otterburne began an annual series called the David Iftody Memorial Lectures (WFP, 18 February 2003).
