James Karygiannis ( ; , ; born May 2, 1955) is a Canadian former politician. He formerly served in the House of Commons of Canada as a Liberal MP from 1988 to 2014, and as member of the Toronto City Council from 2014 until 2020, when his seat was vacated due to campaign spending violations.
Karygiannis served concurrently as the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development and Minister responsible for Democratic Renewal (2005) and was previously parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Transport (2003–2005).
In opposition, Karygiannis attracted substantive attention from the media and various ethnic community groups as he took polemical stances on foreign policy issues and as part of his role as multiculturalism critic.
On April 1, 2014, he resigned his seat as a Member of Parliament in order to stand in the Toronto municipal election for Toronto City Councillor in Ward 39, and subsequently was elected to that seat. In November 2019, Karygiannis was removed from office for exceeding election expenses in the 2018 municipal election. He was then reinstated and removed twice during the ensuing legal saga that resulted in his final removal from office on September 24, 2020.
Personal life
Karygiannis was born in Athens, Greece. Before entering politics, Karygiannis was a businessman and industrial engineer. He immigrated to Canada in 1966, and has a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Toronto. He also holds a degree of Fellowship of Business Administration from the Canadian School of Management. He is married with four daughters.
Politics
Karygiannis has been involved with politics as a Liberal since the late 1980s, first in provincial politics and later as a federal MP. He ran as a candidate of the Ontario Liberal Party for the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in the 1987 provincial election. He lost to David Reville of the Ontario New Democratic Party by about 1,500 votes. He was elected to the Canadian House of Commons the following year in the federal election, defeating Progressive Conservative incumbent W. Paul McCrossan by 858 votes in the newly created riding of Scarborough—Agincourt.
Karygiannis was one of the more socially conservative members of the Liberal caucus, and is opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage. In June 2005, however, he strongly criticized other socially-conservative Liberals who had threatened to bring down the government on the marriage issue.
In government
He won a landslide re-election in the 1993 federal election as the Liberals won a majority government, and was easily re-elected in subsequent federal elections.
Karygiannis was a prominent Toronto organizer for Jean Chrétien in the Liberal Party's 1990 leadership contest, and was credited with delivering considerable support to Chrétien from the city's Greek community.
In 2002, Karygiannis was voted "laziest MP" in a poll of Parliamentary staffers by The Hill Times.
Known as a Chrétien loyalist throughout the 1990s, Karygiannis announced in 2002 that he would support Paul Martin in the next Liberal leadership contest. In making his decision, he told an interviewer that it was time for Chrétien to retire "with dignity", rather than risk a potentially divisive leadership review. When Martin became Liberal party leader on December 12, 2003, he appointed Karygiannis as parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Transport.
In April 2004, Karygiannis brought forward a private member's motion which recognized the death of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923 as a genocide. The motion was approved by parliament 153 to 68, with support among Liberal backbench and opposition MPs, though Prime Minister Martin and his cabinet did not show up for the free vote and insisted that the motion is non-binding. Foreign Minister Bill Graham has defended the government's position that the event constituted a "tragedy" rather than the purposeful extermination of minority Armenians. In response to Martin's assertion that foreign policy rests with the cabinet, Karygiannis said that a clear majority of Parliament saw it differently and urged Martin to live up to his promise to give MPs real clout. The Turkish government was strongly critical of the motion and argued that Canadian MPs were rewriting history, while the Turkish Embassy suggested that relations between the two countries would be harmed as a result. Local press has also described his genocide recognition cause as one that "splits cultural communities".