John A. Gamble

John Albert Gamble QC, LLB (November 24, 1933 – May 11, 2009) was a Canadian politician. He was elected to the House of Commons of Canada as a Progressive Conservative in the 1979 federal election defeating then Liberal incumbent Barney Danson and re-elected in the 1980 election, representing the riding of York North.

He had a rocky relationship with PC leader Joe Clark. He was a candidate to succeed Clark at the 1983 Progressive Conservative leadership convention, but won only seventeen votes on the first ballot, placing seventh out of eight candidates, and was eliminated. Gamble was known for his extreme anti-communist views. He became so unpopular that he was one of only two Progressive Conservative Members of Parliament to lose their seat in the 1984 general election, which produced a Progressive Conservative landslide, one of the largest majorities in the history of the Canadian House of Commons. (Bill Clarke of Vancouver Quadra was the other; he lost to Prime Minister John Turner, who needed a seat in the House.) Gamble lost to independent candidate Tony Roman, who won support from Liberals dissatisfied with their candidate and Tories who wanted to defeat Gamble.

After failing to win a nomination as a Progressive Conservative candidate for the new riding of Markham, Gamble ran without affiliation in the 1988 election in that district. He received less than five percent of the vote and came in fourth place, behind Progressive Conservative candidate Bill Attewell. On May 31, 1993, Gamble won the Reform Party's nomination in Don Valley West for the 1993 federal election, but was expelled by the party (Gamble was replaced by Julian Pope, who lost to John Godfrey) prior to the election because of his links to far-right extremists such as Paul Fromm, Ron Gostick, Wolfgang Droege, and the Heritage Front.

In the 1980s, Gamble was involved with the hard-right World Anti-Communist League as head of its affiliate the "Canadian Freedom Foundation". According to a report by the Security Intelligence Review Committee, Paul Fromm assisted Gamble in this WACL work. Gamble was later accused of having a role in the diversion of Iran arms profits to the Contras.^[1]

Gamble was born in Perth. He worked as a tax lawyer before his political career and was director of the Unionville Home Society. He died in 2009 from leukemia in Markham.

There is a John Albert Gamble fonds at Library and Archives Canada.^[4] Archival reference number is R3936.

• John A. Gamble – Parliament of Canada biography