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With all the news of “scary” candidates, the candidate I am most afraid of in this election is Anne McGrath.

Who’s she? She’s the NDP candidate in Calgary-Varsity, though you’d never know it from her literature. It’s emblazoned with the colours of the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta, blue with a slight tinge of orange. She’s endorsed by the Firefighters of Alberta, a group you might associate with the conservatives because of Bill Smith, a former firefighter who ran for Calgary mayor in 2017.

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But McGrath is actually running for the NDP. And in 1984 she ran for the Communist Party of Canada as a 26-year-old education student at the University of Alberta.

Now you might say what someone believed more than 30 years ago has no bearing on who they are today. But after the vicious attack on Jason Kenney’s student activism in San Francisco, the NDP can’t say that now, can they?

In the 1984 Edmonton Journal article about her candidacy, McGrath said that Canada “needs to bring under public ownership the United States multinational branch plants, banks, natural resource companies, auto and steel industries. By taking public control of our economy we can ensure the kind of investment that will create jobs for young Canadians.”