Ed Broadbent - Politics

Politics

He was a university professor when he ran and won election to the Canadian House of Commons from Oshawa—Whitby in the 1968 general election, defeating former Progressive Conservative cabinet minister Michael Starr by 15 votes. In 1971, he ran for the leadership of the party but lost to David Lewis at the NDP leadership convention. He won the 1975 leadership election to succeed Lewis, and led the party through four elections.

In his early years as leader of the party, Broadbent was criticized for his long and complex speeches on industrial organization, but he came to be known as an honest and charismatic politician in person. He was one of the first Canadian politicians to stage a large number of political events in the workplace.

The NDP finished with 30 seats in the 1984 campaign, just ten behind the Liberal Party led by John Turner. Several polls afterward showed that Broadbent was the most popular party leader in Canada. Broadbent was the only leader ever to take the NDP to first place in public opinion polling, and some pundits felt that the NDP could supplant Turner's Liberals as the primary opposition to Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives.

Nonetheless, he was not successful in translating this into an election victory in the 1988 federal election, since the Liberals reaped most of the benefits from opposing free trade. However, the NDP elected a party record 43 seats, a record unchallenged until the 2011 election, in which the NDP won 103 seats and Jack Layton became the leader of the opposition.

On the international front, while Willy Brandt was President of the Socialist International, Broadbent served as a Vice-President from 1979 to 1989. He stepped down after 15 years as federal leader of the NDP in 1989 at the Winnipeg Convention, where he was succeeded by Audrey McLaughlin. In the decade following Broadbent's retirement from politics, the federal NDP declined in popularity.

Broadbent was director of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development from 1990 to 1996. In 1993, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and was promoted to Companion in 2001.

Broadbent spent a year as Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford, in 1996-7. At the invitation of the new federal NDP leader, Jack Layton, he returned to politics in 2004, with the aid of a humorous and popular video clip, to successfully run for Parliament in the riding of Ottawa Centre, where he now lives. He easily defeated Liberal Party of Canada candidate Richard Mahoney, a close ally of Prime Minister Paul Martin.

In the NDP shadow cabinet, Broadbent was Critic for Democracy: Parliamentary & Electoral Reform, Corporate Accountability as well as Child Poverty.

On May 4, 2005, he announced that he would not seek re-election in the 2006 federal election in order to spend time with his wife, Lucille, who was suffering from cancer. She died on November 17, 2006.