Fred Rose (born Fishel Rosenberg; 7 December 1907 – 16 March 1983) was a Polish-Canadian politician and trade union organizer, best known for being the only member of the Canadian Parliament to ever be convicted of a charge related to spying for a foreign country. A member of the Communist Party of Canada and Labor-Progressive Party, he served as the MP for Cartier from 1943 to 1947. He was expelled from his seat after being found guilty of conspiring to steal weapons research for the Soviet Union.
Shortly after his release from prison, Rose moved to Poland to start an import-export business. While there, his Canadian citizenship was revoked, which prevented him from returning to Canada. His appeal against the revoking of his citizenship ultimately failed, but in 1958, then Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Ellen Fairclough introduced the "Fred Rose amendment" to the Citizenship Act so that such a removal of Canadian citizenship could never happen again.
Early life
Rose was born to a Polish Jewish family in Lublin, which was then part of the Russian Empire and now is in Poland. One of the six children in the family, he attended the "Gymnase Humaniste de Lublin," a Jewish high school in which he learned to speak French. He emigrated to Canada as a child in 1920, where he attended Baron Byng High School.
Communism
In 1925, he became involved with the Young Communist League of Canada
Rose was jailed during the 1930s for sedition, and won the hatred of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis for writing about the close connections between the Duplessis government and the fascist governments of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. He was a close associate of Norman Bethune, a doctor who had aided antifascist and communist fighters first in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and later in China.
Electoral career
thumb|right|200px|1945 election poster
He was a candidate for the Communist Party of Canada in the working-class riding of Cartier, in the Montreal area in the 1935 federal election, coming in second with 16.28% of the votes. He ran in the 1936 Quebec general election in the riding of Montréal–Saint-Louis for the Communist Party of Quebec and came in third, at 16.8%.
In the early stages of World War II, the Communist Party of Canada was formally banned, and many of its leaders interned by the Padlock Law. After a major public campaign, the party was legally reorganized as the Labor-Progressive Party.
Rose ran as a Labor-Progressive candidate in a 1943 by-election in the federal riding of Cartier.
Gouzenko Affair
thumb|right|Rose (right) 1946
Rose was caught up in the world political sea change following World War II, when the Soviet Union, a major wartime ally, was now perceived as an enemy in the new reality of the Cold War. Igor Gouzenko, a young cipher clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, was recalled to his homeland in July 1945. Rather than return home, Gouzenko defected with documents in September 1945 and claimed to have evidence of a massive Soviet spy ring operating in Canada and the United States. which he said was designed to "smear honest and patriotic Canadians." Rose was ultimately found guilty of conspiring to turn over information about the explosive RDX to the Soviets, and was sentenced to six years in prison, a term just one day longer than was required to deprive him of his elected seat in the House of Commons.
Rose wrote to Speaker Gaspard Fauteux from St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary on 24 January 1947:
His letter was returned to him unread, and on 30 January 1947, he was formally expelled from the House of Commons. Years later, former federal cabinet minister Allan MacEachen acknowledged that the pages of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King's diary dealing with Rose had gone missing, as had most of the other records dealing with his case.
Rose died on 16 March 1983 in Warsaw, having never returned to Canada.