CALGARY—Texas Senator Ted Cruz is causing quite a stir. He has ambitions to be president of the United States and yet he was born in Calgary and lived here until he was 4-years-old.

Being born outside the U.S. is a definite no-no for anyone who wants to occupy the Oval Office.

So suddenly Cruz, who if he were any more to the right would fall off the edge of that wing, wants to strip himself of his Canadian citizenship and pull up his Alberta roots to satisfy all those birthers in the United States who still don’t believe Barack Obama was born on American soil.

At first I thought this story was nothing more than a summer trifle, another amusing take on some of the strange fixations of our American cousins.

But then to my amazement I realized that I knew Ted’s parents when they lived in Calgary. I had even seen infant Ted a few times while he was still swaddled in the comforts of the Canadian welfare state.

Ted’s parents, Eleanor and Rafael Cruz, worked with my ex-husband in the Calgary oilpatch. My ex was a geophysicist at once high-flying Dome Petroleum; Eleanor and Rafael took the seismic data that geophysicists gathered and computerized it so it was easier to see where the underground oil reservoirs might be.

This was cutting edge stuff at the time (1968-1971) and it was clear that Eleanor was the brains of the outfit while Rafael was the salesman. He spent a lot of time taking geophysicists out for drinks at various oilpatch watering holes in hopes of selling them on contracts with his company.

I couldn’t believe it when I discovered that Rafael is now a fiery evangelical pastor in Dallas who often preaches about family values and how Barack Obama is just like Fidel Castro.

But I guess there’s a lot of salesmanship involved in that line of work as well.

The Cruzes lived in a neighbourhood across the street from Calgary’s largest hospital — The Foothills — in a Spanish-style split level.

My ex and I socialized with them a fair bit but I don’t remember any heavy duty political conversations that might have influenced young Ted even though Rafael was a refugee from Castro’s Cuba, which at the time was the bête noire of the Cold War.

Eleanor was very much a reserved east coast American who never seemed really at home in Calgary.

We drifted apart after our babies arrived — my daughter in 1969, Ted in December 1970. A few years later the Cruzes moved to Houston

This little bit of history all seems quite ironic now that Senator Cruz is leading a crusade to repeal Obamacare because it smacks of socialism even though it expands health-care insurance coverage to millions of Americans

The petition on his website reads: “I do NOT support socializing health care in America. I understand that, in every other nation that has socialized health care, the result has predictably been poorer quality health care, a crushing tax burden, scarcity and rationing, and complete government control of individual medical decisions.”

You’d think that a Canadian citizen who was born in a Canadian “socialist” hospital would know better.

By late 1970 when Ted was born, Alberta had finally joined the national medicare plan. The Cruzes would have received all medical care, including delivery of baby Ted, for next to nothing. Even before 1970, the Alberta government had provided free maternity care under a version of health-care insurance known at the time as Manning Care.

And despite what Cruz says about complete government control of individual health decisions, I am sure his mother got to choose the obstetrician and pediatrician she wanted and that no one would have interfered with the decisions taken by her and those doctors.

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But then again if you were born in Canada but you want to be president of the United States it’s important to shuck that left-wing taint.

And you certainly wouldn’t want anyone to know that you actually benefitted from all that socialism.

Gillian Steward is a Calgary writer and journalist, and former managing editor of the Calgary Herald. Her column appears every other week. gsteward@telus.net

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