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Former New Democrat cabinet minister Moe Sihota is back in politics.
Sihota was elected the head of the B.C. NDP at the party's biennial convention in Vancouver on Saturday.
He defeated the only other candidate for party president, BC Hydro strategic planner Brian Fisher by a vote of 364-96.
Sihota was first elected to the legislature as a New Democrat in 1986, and was seen as the leader of a pack of NDP pit bulls relentlessly hammering the Social Credit government of Bill Vander Zalm.
After the NDP formed government in the 1990s, Sihota held the cabinet portfolios of education, environment and social development, but was either forced to resign or booted from cabinet three times in the span of a decade over various controversies.
He opted not to seek re-election in 2001, when the NDP was decimated in an election that brought Gordon Campbell's Liberals to power.
He was the first Indo-Canadian to be elected to any federal or provincial riding, and the first to hold the post of cabinet minister in a Canadian province.
Sihota, a businessman and broadcaster, is a member of the political panel on CBC Radio One's The Early Edition.
The governing Liberals quickly jumped on Sihota's election as party president, sending out a news release titled "Moe of the same," which highlighted the controversies from his days in office while casting him as a relic from an NDP government whose popularity was battered when it was tossed from office.
With files from The Candian PressShare Tools
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