British Columbia: RIP Jim Fulton

Jim Fulton, the bombastic former NDP MP and long-time head of the
David Suzuki Foundation, died Sunday after a battle with cancer.
Mr. Fulton was born in 1950 in Edmonton and was a parole officer. In
1979, he ran for the New Democratic Party and unseated a Liberal
cabinet minister in Skeena in northwestern British Columbia. He was
environment critic for about half of his 14 years in Parliament.

He
once famously slapped a B.C. salmon on the House of Commons desk of
then prime minister Brian Mulroney to attract attention to
environmental issues. Among Mr. Fulton’s accomplishments as an MP was
leading the push to preserve part of his beloved Queen Charlotte
Islands as a national park. He retired from politics in 1993 and
became executive director of the Suzuki foundation, a Vancouver-based
environmental advocacy group. “He’s a great man; he’ll be deeply
missed, around the world, not just in B.C. or Canada. He was a person
of international reputation,” Mr. Gill said. Mr. Fulton was diagnosed
as having colon cancer several years ago. In the face of disease, his
spirit was undaunted. He told me, ‘Gill, get your ass checked.’ He
became a one-man promoter of colonoscopy.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081222.wbcfulton22/BNStory/politics/home

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