I lived in Calgary in the early 80's when westerners were just getting started with organizing the Reform Party. Working in a white collar office in downtown Calgary I was surrounded by mostly university educated white males who were religious fanatics and proud to be "anti-paki, anti-heeb, anti-frog, anti-fag, anti-native". They supported Jim Keisgtra and his anti-Holocaust teachings. When they were not bailing out of the city to go camping, they found comfort each weekend as (1) church elders (most were Pentecostals) and (2) organizers for the Reform Party in Calgary. Yes they railed against the same government policies that a lot of us find faulty but they also found common ground in their hatreds.
My prejudices and generalizations come not from meeting you but from meeting the likes of those people and what they not too quietly espoused. I will always remember that those racists were the original foot soldiers of the Reform Party. I ended up buying my way out of my contract in Calgary, taking a 13% pay decrease and paying my own moving expense to come back east so that my children were not exposed to their children.
The ironic fact today is that Calgary now has the fastest growing French population in Canada and I believe the highest enrollment in French immersion programs...."There goes the neighborhood" and I smirk at how that must really piss off a lot of the old Reformers out there today.
