The divisive diplomat
Name: Chris Alexander Age: 48 Current job: Former MP and immigration minister Charles Taylor, the world renowned philosopher at McGill University, once said this to a Star columnist about Chris Alexander: “For a highly educated man, Alexander says the most stupid things.”
That’s pretty harsh, and somewhat — to pull a word from the philosophic canon — subjective. “Stupid,” one might say, is a matter of opinion.
Whatever the case, Alexander, a former diplomat and Conservative cabinet minister, is among the crowded slate of candidates vying for the party’s leadership.
Born in Toronto in 1968, Alexander was an only child. He grew up and went to McGill, before completing a graduate degree at Oxford University and joining Canada’s foreign service in 1991. From there he began a diplomatic career for which he has been roundly praised, first in Moscow and then, more famously, in Kabul, where he served for two years as Canada’s first resident Afghanistan ambassador and worked as a United Nations official from 2005 to 2009.
He entered politics two years later, when he was elected in Ajax and joined the Conservative government in Ottawa. He was widely hailed as a rising star in the party, given his foreign experience, command of both official languages and Oxford bona fides.
After serving as parliamentary secretary to the defence minister for two years, he was appointed immigration minister in 2013.
Four years later, he’s fighting for the leadership of the party from outside the parliamentary bubble. He was turfed by Ajax voters in 2015, on the heels of a string of pronouncements and policy positions that has left him associated with what University of the Fraser Valley political scientist Hamish Telford called “the excessive partisanship of the last government.”
Alexander has a history of snapping at journalists, for example. He once called parliamentary journalists “partisans” and griped on the CBC that the media didn’t cover the Syrian refugee crisis enough as his government took heat for its policies after the shocking circulation of the photograph of Alan Kurdi, a dead toddler pictured face down on a Mediterranean beach.
In opposing a court decision that allowed women to wear niqabs during citizenship ceremonies, Alexander was accused of likening Muslims to terrorists.
More recently, Alexander was filmed at the head of a crowd protesting Alberta’s carbon tax, waving his hand as if keeping time while the assembly chanted “Lock her up!” in reference to Premier Rachel Notley. Chance of winning: While educated and bilingual, with a deep well of experience, Alexander’s stumbles and associations with the hyper-partisan elements of the Harper government probably make him a longshot. —Alex Ballingall