Ken Campbell (evangelist)

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Ken Campbell (January 19, 1934 - August 28, 2006) was a Canadian fundamentalist Baptist evangelist and political figure. He was the final leader of the Social Credit Party of Canada from 1990 to 1993.

He became prominent in the Toronto area in the 1970s as a crusader against homosexuals and abortion rights, founding "Renaissance Canada" to promote his views. He held frequent rallies against gay rights and regularly took out full page ads in newspapers, campaigning against the "homosexual agenda" and "secular humanism". Many such ads were printed following court decisions on gay rights, such as the 1998 Supreme Court ruling in Vriend v. Alberta. In 1980, Campbell published a book entitled No Small Stir: A Spiritual Strategy For Salting and Saving A Secular Society, with a forward from Jerry Falwell.

Campbell ran in elections at all levels in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in the provincial riding of St. George—St. David, which included the centre of Toronto's gay community clustered around Church and Wellesley streets. In the mid-1980s, he founded a group called Choose Life Canada, which picketed abortion clinics in Toronto and other Ontario cities. On one occasion, he attempted to conduct a "citizen's arrest" against provincial Attorney General Ian Scott, after Scott refused to shut down an abortion clinic run by Henry Morgentaler (Campbell later ran against Scott in St. George—St. David as a candidate of the Family Coalition Party in the 1990 provincial election.) He campaigned as a fringe candidate for Mayor of Toronto the following year, but urged voters to support June Rowlands rather than himself to prevent Jack Layton from winning.

He once ran for mayor of Milton, Ontario against long-time mayor Gordon Krantz to protest having to pay the education portion of his municipal property taxes. Camppbell refused to pay on the basis that he disagreed with the school curriculum. Campbell sent Krantz a letter during the campaign, saying that if he were elected, he would be too busy to be mayor so he would "deputize" Krantz and have him do the job. ^[1]

Campbell took over the near-moribund Social Credit Party of Canada in 1990, and ran in a by-election in Oshawa. He placed eighth, with 96 votes. He renamed the party the "Christian Freedom Social Credit Party" and later the "Christian Freedom Party", but it was unable to run 50 candidates in the 1993 election, and was deregistered by Elections Canada. As a result, Campbell was forced to run as an independent, finishing last in a field of six candidates in Oakville. He ran a final time in a 1996 federal by-election in Hamilton East, finishing in fifth place with 287 votes.

The party has been deregistered, but still exists as an incorporated non-profit entity as the "Social Credit Party of Canada, Incorporated". He occasionally used it as a podium for his political activities in order to preserve his church's status as a religious charity.

For a number of years, Campbell hosted a daily Christian evangelical radio show on a small Toronto area station. In 1999, he protested a same-sex wedding ceremony at Brent Hawkes's Metropolitan Community Church. Around 2000, while recovering from prostate cancer, Campbell moved himself and his ministry from Ontario to the interior of British Columbia.

In 2003, Campbell declared that Toronto's SARS epidemic would cease when the city ended its Gay Pride Parade (which he described as an "AIDS Parade").[1]

He died August 28, 2006, in palliative care in a Delta, British Columbia, hospital.[2]

A different Ken Campbell was one of Canada's most prominent HIV/AIDS awareness activists in the early 1990s, appearing in public service announcements funded by the Ontario government's Ministry of Health.