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Fred Debrecen is a politician and political activist in Manitoba, Canada. He has been involved in causes associated with the radical and extreme right for many years, most notably in the anti-bilingualism movement. Debrecen worked for the Manitoba Telephone System for more than thirty years. He has described himself as a "market analyst", and was a prominent early supporter of the Manitoba Confederation of Regions Party during the province's debates over the legal entrenchments of french-language services in the mid-1980s. On two occassions, he was ordered to paint over anti-French slogans on his fence. He ran as a candidate of the federal Confederation of Regions Party in the 1984 election, receiving 830 votes in the riding of Winnipeg--St. James. The winning candidate, Progressive Conservative George Minaker, received over 12,000 votes. For the provincial campaign of 1986, Debrecen started an organization known as One Nation, One Language Inc. (ONOLI), which circulated petitions calling for a unilingual English Canada. He ran in the provincial riding of St. James, and received 175 votes for a distant fourth-place finish. Debrecen was a delegate at the founding convention of the Reform Party of Canada in October-November 1987. He ran again in St. James in the 1988 provincial election, this time falling to 137 votes. A third campaign in the same riding in the 1990 election netted him only 122 votes. Debrecen also ran for Mayor of Winnipeg in 1989, receiving 1647 votes and finishing eighth out of ten candidates. Facing a serious decline in membership, the Manitoba CoR changed its name to the Manitoba Reform Party in 1991. Debrecen was one of only two candidates ever to run under that party's name, in a by-election in Portage La Prairie in 1992. He improved his vote total to 388, but still placed last among four candidates. He has not run for federal or provincial office since this time. In October 2004, Debrecen was reported as having authored and distributed an anti-Semitic pamphlet describing the Holocaust as "the greatest scam in the history of man". |