Dean Del Mastro, a former member of Parliament, was sentenced today to one month in prison for violating the Canada Elections Act by overspending on his campaign, failing to report a personal contribution and knowingly submitting a falsified document. He has filed an appeal of the conviction.
READ MORE: 1-month jail sentence for ex-MP Del Mastro
Del Mastro is hardly the first sitting or former MP to be convicted for breaking the law though. Although it doesn’t happen often, there have been several examples throughout history.
Here are a few:
Svend Robinson
Svend Robinson was the MP for various ridings in Burnaby, BC from 1979 to 2004. A member of the NDP, he was Canada’s first openly gay MP, announcing it publicly in 1988.
In April 2004, Robinson stole an expensive ring from a jewellery auction. He returned it and turned himself in to police a few days later. Later that month, he held a press conference at which he admitted to the crime and announced that he would not seek re-election.
He pleaded guilty to the theft and was given a conditional discharge and sentenced to one year of probation and 100 hours of community service for the crime.
“I have been sitting here since approximately 9:30 this morning, some two hours and 15 minutes or so, listening to a gut-wrenching tale about a man who has achieved much more than most, and who has taken a fall, probably more than most, all for a bobble, a trinket, a ring,” said the judge during Robinson’s sentencing.
Robinson ran again for office in 2006, but was defeated by Liberal candidate Hedy Fry.
Jack Ramsay
Jack Ramsay ran for the Reform Party in 1993 and became member of Parliament for Crowfoot, Alberta. He served as Citizenship and Immigration and Justice critic for his party while in Parliament.
In 1999, Ramsay, still a sitting MP, was convicted of the attempted rape of a 14-year-old girl in 1969, when he was the corporal in charge of the RCMP detachment in Pelican Narrows, a remote Aboriginal community in Northern Saskatchewan. At the time, he was sentenced to nine months in prison, though the conviction was later overturned due to errors in the trial judge’s charge to the jury, according to a CBC article.
A new trial was ordered, and Ramsay pleaded guilty to a charge of indecent assault. He was sentenced in 2001 to one year of probation and 120 hours of community service.
Although he was kicked out of the Reform Party, Ramsay kept his seat in the House of Commons while appealing his attempted rape conviction, sitting first as an Independent Canadian Alliance member and then an Independent. He was however defeated in the 2000 election.
Fred Rose
Fred Rose originally ran for the Communist Party in the riding of Cartier, Quebec in 1935, and was defeated. He ran again, successfully this time, as a Labour Progressive candidate (Labour Progressive being the new name of the Communist Party after it was officially banned) in a by-election in 1943 and sat in the House of Commons until 1947.
Rose, the only Communist to sit in the House of Commons, left politics in a spectacular way: he was convicted of espionage. Igor Gouzenko, a clerk in the Russian embassy in Ottawa, defected to Canada and brought with him a number of documents demonstrating the existence of a Soviet spy ring in the Canadian government. Rose was implicated in the Gouzenko affair and was convicted of conspiring to unlawfully communicate information to the Soviet Union – including information on a type of powerful explosive, “RDX”.
He was sentenced to six years in prison and served four and half years. Soon after his release, he went into exile in Czechoslovakia and then Poland. His Canadian citizenship was revoked in 1957 and he never returned to Canada. He died in 1983.
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