Gordon Gilchrist

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James Gordon Gilchrist (born 11 August 1928 in Toronto, Ontario) was a Progressive Conservative party member of the Canadian House of Commons. He was a businessman by career.

He was a Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament for Ontario's Scarborough East electoral district which he won in the 1979 federal election and again in 1980. Gilchrist left national politics in 1984 and did not campaign in that year's federal elections after being convicted of an income tax offence.^[1] He had served in the 31st and 32nd Canadian Parliaments.

Gilchrist subsequently moved to the Peterborough area. He turned to local politics and has sat on the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board since the mid-1990s.

On March 7, 2008, several groups including the Kawartha Muslim Religious Association held a press conference in which they demanded Gilchrist's resignation after a letter of his was published in a local newspaper stating that "most" immigrants don't understand Canadian values and "bring their old-country feuds and hatreds to be paraded and re-fought on Canadian soil."^[1]

Gilchrist has rejected the call for his resignation saying, "Why should I? I'm not a racist. There was nothing racist about my letter."^[1]

His son Steve Gilchrist was a Cabinet Minister in Ontario during the Mike Harris government.