Ted Hsu
Kingston 44° 18' 19.49" N, 76° 25' 42.16" W Politics Person
Theodore "Ted" Hsu, MP ( /ˈʃuː/; Chinese: 徐正陶; born March 4, 1964) is a Canadian physicist and politician from Ontario, Canada. He is the Member of Parliament for the riding of Kingston and the Islands and sits in the Canadian House of Commons as the Liberal Party's Critic for Science and Technology.
Early life and career[edit]
Ted Hsu was born in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1964 to James and Marjorie. When he was six months old the family moved to Kingston, Ontario where his father joined Queen’s University as a professor of chemical engineering. He has two younger brothers, Bob and Leon. Hsu is of Chinese descent and is fluent in the French and Mandarin languages He graduated in 1980 from Loyalist Collegiate and Vocational Institute in Kingston, at age 16. Hsu was a talented chess player in his youth, eventually reaching Class A strength. In 1984, he graduated from Queen’s University with a B.Sc. Hons. in Physics, and then obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University in 1989. He did post-doctoral research in Chalk River, Vancouver, and France.
Hsu has worked as a researcher and trader in Paris and Philadelphia for Banque Nationale de Paris, and as an executive director in the Tokyo office of Morgan Stanley. Recently, he was the executive director of SWITCH, a Kingston-based not-for-profit association that promotes job creation and investment in sustainable energy.
Politics[edit]
He served for four years as the treasurer of the Kingston and the Islands Federal Liberal Association, and was an active member of its Policy Committee. He worked in the 2007 and 2008 provincial and federal Liberal campaigns for John Gerretsen MPP and Peter Milliken MP. Following Milliken's announcement in summer 2010 that he would not run again, a nomination contest was set up, and in November, Hsu won the Liberal nomination for the next federal election. He defeated four other contenders: former Kingston Mayor Harvey Rosen, Queen's University Law Dean Bill Flanagan, former Kingston City Councillor Bittu George, and law professor Philip Osanic.
In the federal election held on May 2, 2011, Hsu beat out Conservative candidate Alicia Gordon by less than 3,000 votes. The election was the Liberal Party's worst showing in its history and Hsu was one of only two new Liberals elected in the country.
On June 1, 2011, interim Liberal leader Bob Rae announced that Hsu would serve in the Liberal Party shadow cabinet as the Critic for Science and Technology, and for the Federal Economic Development Agency of both Southern and Northern Ontario. On November 21, 2011, Hsu was the first runner-up to Conservative MP Chris Alexander as Rookie of the Year, in MacLean's Magazine annual Parliamentarians of the Year awards.