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 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.
Morton obtained his B.A. from
Colorado College and earned his Masters and Ph.D. in
political economy from the
University of Toronto. 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. His columns have appeared in the
National Post, the
Calgary Herald, the
Globe and Mail and the
Calgary Sun.
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 appoined him parliamentary Director of Policy and Research for the party. That same year, he was one of a group of six Albertans (including
Stephen Harperâ€"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 roll, 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. He was the only Conservative MLA to publicly oppose the
Prosperity Bonus. 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."
*
Biography for Dr. Ted Morton on the website of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta*
Ted Morton Official Website
