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11 Facts About Pam Barrett

1.

Pamela T Barrett was a Canadian politician who sat in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta as a member of the New Democratic Party.

2.

Pam Barrett ran in the 1986 Alberta general election and was elected in the riding of Edmonton-Highlands.

3.

Pam Barrett defeated incumbent David Thomas King, the Minister of Technology, Research, and Telecommunications, in what many regarded as a substantial upset.

4.

Pam Barrett was named to a prominent position in the NDP Official Opposition, which for the first time in that party's history was 16 MLAs strong.

5.

Pam Barrett served as the New Democrats' Deputy House Leader from 1986 to 1993, backing up caucus leader Ray Martin.

6.

Pam Barrett retired from the legislature in 1993 owing to poor health resulting from job stress.

7.

Pam Barrett came back to politics when she contested and won the Alberta NDP leadership in 1996 following the resignation of Ross Harvey.

8.

Pam Barrett resigned the NDP leadership and her seat in 2000 after having what she claimed to be a near-death experience in a dentist's chair.

9.

Pam Barrett's near death-experience was a subject of both serious and satiric attention in the Canadian media.

10.

Pam Barrett was parodied on the CBC Television show The Royal Canadian Air Farce and featured on the front cover of the May 2000 issue of lifestyle magazine Elm Street.

11.

Pam Barrett died on January 21,2008, aged 54, at the Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton, from oesophageal cancer, after battling the disease for at least two years.