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Ken Campbell (born January 19 1934) is a Canadian fundamentalist Christian evangelist and political figure who was the final leader of the Social Credit Party of Canada from 1990 to 1993. He became prominent in the Toronto area in the 1970s as a crusader against homosexuals and abortion rights founding Renaissance Canada to promote his views.
He held frequent rallies against gay rights in particular and regularly took out full page ads in newspapers campaigning against the "homosexual agenda" and "secular humanism". Such ads frequently appeared shortly after a court decision on gay rights, such as the 1998 Supreme Court ruling in Vriend v. Alberta.
In the 1980s and 1990s Campbell ran in elections at all levels, particularly in the provincial riding of "St George-St David" which included the centre of Toronto's gay community clustered around Church and Wellesley streets. In the mid-1980s, he founded a group called Choose Life Canada which picketed abortion clinics in Toronto and other Ontario cities.
Campbell took over the near-moribund Social Credit Party of Canada in 1990 and ran in a by-election in Oshawa, Ontario coming in eighth place with 96 votes. He renamed the party the "Christian Freedom Social Credit Party" and later the "Christian Freedom Party" but it failed to run at least 50 candidates in the 1993 Canadian election resulting in its loss of party status. As a result Campbell was forced to run as an independent in the 1993 Canadian election and came in last in a field of six candidates running in Oakville, Ontario. He ran a final time in a 1996 federal by-election in Hamilton East coming in fifth place with 287 votes.
The party has been deregistered but still exists as an incorporated non-profit entity as the "Social Credit Party of Canada, Incorporated" headed by Campbell who occasionally uses it as a podium for his political activities in order to preserve his church's status as a religious charity.
For a number of years, Campbell hosted a daily evangelical radio show on a small Toronto area radio station. Around 2000 Campbell moved himself and his ministry from Ontario to the interior of British Columbia where he now operates.
Ironically, a different Ken Campbell was one of Canada's most prominent HIV/AIDS awareness activists in the early 1990s, appearing in public service announcements funded by the Ontario government's Ministry of Health.
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