Alexa McDonough - Federal Leadership

Federal Leadership

As the fortunes of the Nova Scotia NDP were slowly rising during the mid-1990s, the same could not be said of its federal counterpart. The 1993 Canadian federal election was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster for the NDP. Under Audrey McLaughlin's leadership, the party suffered its worst defeat since the late 1950s, in terms of seats, when it was then called the CCF. When looking at the popular vote, it was the worst ever election for a federal social-democratic party in the 20th century, with just seven percent of the vote. The party only had nine seats, three short of the twelve seats needed to have official party status in the House of Commons, and all the extra funding, research, office space and Question Period privileges it accords.

In the aftermath of the 1993 election, the party set about reforming its policies and purpose, with McLaughlin announcing on April 18, 1994, that she would step down as leader by 1996. McLaughlin, faced with internal squabbles eerily like the ones that occurred in the Nova Scotia party back in 1980, advanced her departure from the end of 1996 to the end of 1995. With an internal party atmosphere that could best be described as toxic, McDonough entered the leadership race in the spring of 1995. The conditions were similar to the ones she faced during her first leadership campaign in 1980: a divided party that was self-immolating. However, the party was also hobbled by unpopular provincial NDP governments in Ontario and British Columbia. Indeed, the NDP had suffered particularly severe losses in those two provinces at the federal level in 1993, losing all of its Ontario MPs and all but two of its British Columbia MPs—more than half of its caucus.

Prior to the NDP leadership convention on October 14, 1995, McDonough was widely viewed as an also-ran behind the leading contenders, Svend Robinson and Lorne Nystrom, but at the convention she placed second on the first ballot, ahead of Nystrom in what was almost a three way vote split. Although Robinson had placed first on that ballot, he felt that most of Nystrom's supporters would go to McDonough on the second ballot, giving her the victory. Thus, he conceded to McDonough before a second ballot could be held, and moved a motion to formally appoint her as the new leader. McDonough became the first person from Atlantic Canada to lead a major party since Robert Stanfield retired as the Progressive Conservatives' leader in 1976. Unusually for a major-party leader, she did not have one of her MPs in a safe seat resign so she could get into Parliament via a by-election, opting instead to make a third bid for her home riding of Halifax in the next general election.

In the 1997 election, her first as leader, the party won 21 seats. This included a historic breakthrough in the Atlantic provinces, a region where it had only won three seats in its entire history prior to 1997. McDonough herself won Halifax by 11,000 votes, pushing Liberal incumbent Mary Clancy into third place. She would continue to win it consecutively three more times until she retired from politics in 2008.

During the next few years, McDonough's leadership of the party elicited controversy. Union leaders were lukewarm in their support of her, often threatening to break away from the NDP, in particular, the Canadian Auto Workers's president Buzz Hargrove. She was widely seen within the NDP as trying to pull the party toward the centre of the political spectrum, in the Third Way mode of Tony Blair, although when she made her leader's speech at the party's August 1999 Ottawa policy convention, she attempted to distance herself from "Third Way" policies by stating: "We must lay out a new way for Canadians to navigate in the 21st century. Not an old way, not a 'third way,' but a made-in-Canada way...." A vote on a resolution to formally adopt Third Way policies in the party's platform, was defeated, as many union leaders opposed it and McDonough's "Canadian Way".

The Canadian Alliance under its new leader Stockwell Day presented a further challenge to McDonough's NDP. Fearful of the prospect of an Alliance government, many NDP supporters moved to the Liberals. As well, two NDP MPs, Rick Laliberte and Angela Vautour, crossed the floor to other party caucuses, reducing the NDP caucus to 19 seats. In the 2000 federal election, the NDP was held to just 13 seats, and its 8.5 percent of the popular vote, was near its historic low from the 1993 campaign. About the only solace the NDP and McDonough could take from the 2000 campaign was that they were at least able to maintain official party status in the House of Commons (if only barely), unlike McLaughlin in the 1993 campaign.

After the disappointing performance in the 2000 federal election, there were calls for party renewal, again. Some party activists perceived that the NDP had moved to the centre of the political spectrum and wanted to change that by bringing in social/political activists outside of the parliamentary process. They called their movement the New Politics Initiative, or NPI. Another group, called NDProgress, wanted to reform the party's internal structures, with procedural changes to how leaders were elected and limiting how much control Labour Unions had in the party. The NPI proposal to create a new party from the ashes of the NDP, was opposed by McDonough, and by former NDP leader, Ed Broadbent. The NPI resolution was voted down when it was presented at the party's November 2001 Winnipeg policy convention. NDProgress's resolution — to have a "One Member-One Vote" election for party leader, including a provision to limit organized labour's allotment of ballots to a maximum of 25 percent — passed. The 2001 Winnipeg convention was also where McDonough easily defeated a leadership challenge by Socialist Caucus member Marcel Hatch, who was also an NPI supporter.

The issue that highlighted McDonough's federal leadership, occurred during the twilight of her career: the fight against the Islamophobia and general anti-Arab sentiment that swept through Canada and the United States in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in September 2001. She led the charge on the national scene to repatriate Mahar Arar, an Arab-Canadian who was wrongly detained as a terrorist by United States border officials, on an erroneous tip from Canada's secret service. Throughout 2002 and 2003, McDonough campaigned for his release. When he was released, his wife, Monia Mazigh, joined the NDP and became a candidate for them in the 2004 federal election, out of recognition for the support McDonough and the party showed for her and her husband.

With Brian Masse's May 2002 by-election victory, in the Windsor West riding, the party's caucus grew to 14 members. A few weeks later, on June 6, 2002, McDonough used this positive turn in electoral fortunes to announce that she was stepping down as NDP leader. On January 25, 2003, at the Toronto leadership convention, she was succeeded by Jack Layton. She was re-elected to Parliament in the 2004 federal election and again in 2006. In the NDP's shadow cabinet, McDonough served as the critic for International Development, International Cooperation and Peace Advocacy.