Representative Party of Ontario
The Representative Party of Ontario was a reserved provincial political party name in the Province of Ontario, Canada. The party's request to register the name and abbreviation was submitted in early September 2004, verified late October-early November and reserved on Friday, December 17, 2004. The name was judged to be not acceptable by Elections Ontario on March 10, 2005.
The Representative Party of Ontario hoped to become the grassroot Reform-oriented alternative to the main Liberal, Progressive Conservative and New Democratic parties in the province.
The party's traditional populist beliefs in representative and direct democracy follow those of the politics of pre-Confederation Reform Party leader William Lyon Mackenzie, former United Farmers of Ontario premier Ernest Charles Drury and former Ontario Cooperative Commonwealth Federation member Agnes Campbell Macphail. It planned to adopt a statement of principles, policies and platform built on a "people-first-politics" constitution. The constitution was to be ratified in a democratically-held assembly by on a one-member one-vote basis.
The party's interim leader, Bill Cook, ran in the Dufferin-Peel-Wellington-Grey by-election of 2005 as the "Independent Representative" candidate. He placed sixth out of eight candidates. Soon after this, Cook and the Representative Party of Ontario were folded back into the Reform Party of Ontario in 2007, led by Bradley J. Harness, who cofounded the federal Ontario Party of Canada with George Burns in 2002. Harness became the leader, Cook the deputy leader and agriculture critic, and Joshua E. Eriksen as its provincial party president of the RPO.
