Fred Rose | |
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Member of the Canadian Parliament for Cartier |
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In office August 9, 1943 – January 30, 1947 |
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Preceded by | Peter Bercovitch |
Succeeded by | Maurice Hartt |
Personal details | |
Born |
Lublin, Russian Empire |
December 7, 1907
Died | March 16, 1983 Warsaw, Poland |
(aged 75)
Political party | Labor-Progressive |
Residence | Montreal, Quebec |
Fred Rose (born Fishel Rosenberg) (December 7, 1907 – March 16, 1983) was a Communist politician and trade union organizer in Canada. He is best known as the only member of the Canadian Parliament ever convicted of spying for a foreign country.
Rose was born to a Jewish family in Lublin in what is now Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. He emigrated to Canada as a child in 1916.
He became involved with the Young Communist League of Canada, and then joined the Communist Party of Canada while working in a factory.
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 Dr. Norman Bethune, who served first in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and later in China.
Rose was a candidate for the Communist Party of Canada in the working class Montreal-area riding of Cartier in the 1935 federal election, coming in second with 16% of the vote. He ran in the Quebec general election, 1936 in the riding of Montréal–Saint-Louis for the Communist Party of Quebec and came in third with 16.8%.