Alexa Anne McDonough: is a Canadian politician who became the first woman to lead a major political party in Canada when she was elected leader of the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party in the 1980s. She served as a member of the Nova Scotia Legislature from 1984 to 1994, representing the electoral districts of Halifax-Chebecto and Halifax-Fairview. She stepped down as leader of the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party and as a member of the Legislature in 1994, then ran for the leadership of the federal New Democratic Party and was elected in 1995 as leader of the federal New Democratic Party. She was elected to Parliament for the federal electoral district of Halifax in 1997. She stepped down as leader of the party in 2003, but continued as a member of Parliament for two more terms until retiring from politics in 2008. In 2009, she became interim president of the University of Mount Saint Vincent, and was appointed He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in December of that year. McDonough was born to Alex Anne Shaw in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1944, to Jane MacKinnon and Lloyd Robert Shaw, a wealthy businessman committed to progressive politics. He was the former first research director of the New Democratic Party and the National Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and was an early financial backer of the New Democratic Party when it was formed in 1961. McDonough became involved in social activism at an early age when, at the age of 14, she led a church youth group in publicizing the conditions of Africville, a low-income suburb of Halifax. She attended Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, her family's alma mater. Two years later, she transferred to Dalhousie University in Halifax, where she earned a BA in sociology and psychology in 1965. She became a social worker, and during the 1970 Nova Scotia general election, she worked for the Liberal Party under Gerald Reagan, writing the social policy platform. She quickly became completely attuned to Reagan and the Liberals, and joined the New Democratic Party in 1974. McDonough's first contact with electoral politics was during the 1979 and 1980 federal elections. She ran unsuccessfully in both elections in the Halifax riding. In the 1980 federal election, she lost to former Nova Scotia leader Gerald Reagan, the same politician she had supported in 1970. Immediately after the 1980 federal election, in the spring, Jeremy Ackerman stepped down as leader of the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party. At this time, there was a growing rift between the Cape Breton and mainland wings of the party. This rift erupted in June when Paul McEwan, the NDP member of the legislative assembly for Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, was expelled from the party for his continued public statements about internal party disagreements, including the suggestion that Jeremy Ackerman had resigned. Due to some “Trotskyist elements” in the provincial assembly, which was largely from the mainland, and to make matters worse for the new leader, four NDP members of the Legislative Assembly, all from Cape Breton constituencies, voted 3-1 to keep him on the party committee with Lynn J. Arsenault, the North Cape Breton Legislative Assemblyman, as the only negative vote. The exclusion of Paul McEwan was one of the dominant issues during the leadership race that went down. In late September, Jimmy Ackerman was appointed to a senior government job that required him to resign from the Legislative Assembly and terminate his membership in the NDP. Buddy Mischern, a candidate for the party’s leadership and a member of the Cape Breton Centre Legislative Assembly, was appointed interim leader on October 2 of that year. Despite these fierce battles, and the failure to secure a seat in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly, McDonough decided to enter the leadership race. The other candidate in the race to replace Jeremy Ackerman was Arsenault. The election was held on Halifax, and a leadership vote was held on November 16, 1980. McDonough received 237 votes compared to Arsenault's 42 and Paddy Mischern's, giving her the first landslide election victory. As a result of this victory, she became the first woman in Canada to lead a major political party. Her first decision was to settle the McEwan issue. On December 9, 1980, she managed to get her former rivals for the party leadership to vote McEwan off the party committee and the party. Because she did not have a seat in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly, only two seats were left for the party, as McEwan became an independent and Ackerman's seat was vacant due to his resignation. McDonough sat in the visitors' gallery of the House of Assembly for a year before she was able to run for a seat in the Nova Scotia general election of 1980. McDonough ran in her first provincial election as leader in Halifax, where the Liberals were The Conservatives were nearly even in terms of voter support, and the NDP had been a distant third in the previous election. She won her seat, the NDP's first on the Nova Scotia mainland, but the NDP lost all its seats on Cape Breton Island. MacDonough spent the next three years as the only New Democrat, and the only woman, in the House of Assembly. She broke the old buddy network that had permeated Nova Scotia politics at the time by trying to dismantle the province's "entrenched patronage system." MacDonough was very popular throughout Nova Scotia, consistently leading in party leadership polls, but her popularity did not carry over to the rest of the party. She served as party leader for three more elections, and then formed a party committee with no more than three members, all from the mainland, including the future Nova Scotia NDP leader; Robert Chisholm. After fourteen years as leader of the New Democratic Party - which at the time made her the longest-serving leader of a major political party - she stepped down as party leader on November 19, 1994. John Holm, a member of the Legislative Assembly for Sackville-Copcoed, took over as interim leader until Chisholm was elected party leader in 1996. While the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party was on the rise in the mid-1990s, the same was not true of its federal counterpart. The 1993 Canadian federal election was nothing short of a disaster for the NDP. Under Audrey McLaughlin, the party suffered its worst defeat in terms of seats since the late 1950s when it was called the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. When looking at the popular vote, it was the worst election ever for a federal social democratic party in the 20th century, with just 7% of the vote. The party won just 9 seats, less than The twelve seats required to gain official party status in the House of Commons, and all the additional funding, research, workplaces, and question-period privileges it received. After the 1993 election, the party embarked on a reform of its policies and objectives, with McLaughlin announcing on April 18, 1994, that she would step down as party leader by 1996. McLaughlin faced internal party wrangling similar to that of 1980, which led to her departure being accelerated from late 1996 to late 1995. With the party's internal conditions at best toxic, McDonough entered the leadership race in the spring of 1995. The conditions were similar to those she faced in her first leadership campaign in 1980; A divided party destroys itself. However, what holds the party back is the unpopular New Democratic Party government in Ontario and British Columbia. The party even suffered severe losses in those provinces at the federal level in 1993, losing all of its members of parliament in Ontario, and all but two in British Columbia; More than half of the party group. Before the October 14, 1995, NDP leadership election, she was seen as trailing her major rivals Svend Robinson and Lorne Nystrom, but she came in second on the first ballot, ahead of Nystrom by votes split three-way. Although Robinson came in first, he felt that most of Nystrom's supporters would vote for McDonough on the second ballot, giving her the win. Thus, he conceded to McDonough before the second ballot was held. With Nystrom's position, McDonough was hailed as the new party leader. She became the first Atlantic Canadian to lead a major party since Robert Stanfield, the Conservative and Progressive leader, retired in 1976. Unusually for leaders of major parties, she had no MPs who had resigned, so she could enter Parliament through a by-election, choosing to run for a third term in her Halifax riding in the next general election. In the 1997 election—her first—McDonough was elected to the party. As leader, the party won 21 seats, a historic achievement in the Atlantic provinces; A province that had won only three seats in its history before 1997, MacDonough won by about 11,000 votes, pushing the Liberal Mary Clancy into third place, and she went on to win three consecutive terms until she retired from politics in 2008. Over the next few years, MacDonough's leadership was highly controversial. Union leaders were not enthusiastic about her support, threatening to leave the party, especially Buzz Hagrove, the president of the Auto Workers Union. She was seen within the party as trying to pull the party toward the center of political affiliations - Tony Blair's Third Way policies, although in her 1999 speech to the party on the Ottawa Policy Agreement she tried to distance herself from the Third Way policies, saying: "We must chart a new path for Canadians to follow in the 21st century, not an old path, not a third way; a path that is Canada's own." The vote on the bill was abstained. A decision to adopt Third Way policies in the party platform, which many union leaders opposed along with their opposition to "Canada's Own Way". The Canadian Alliance, under its new leader Stockwell Day, presented a new challenge to MacDonough's New Democratic Party. Fearing the possibility of a coalition government, many NDP supporters switched to the Liberals. Similarly, two NDP MPs, Rick Lalbert and Angela Vautour, switched to other caucuses, reducing the caucus to 19 seats. At the 2000 federal election, the party retained only 13 seats and 8.5 percent of the popular vote, its lowest in history since the 1993 campaign. The only consolation for the party and for McDonough from the 2000 campaign was that they retained the party's official position in the House of Commons, unlike McLaughlin in 1993. After the disappointing performance in the 2000 federal election, there were calls again for a revamp of the party. Some party activists realized that the party needed to move to the center of the diverse political fabric and wanted to change that by bringing in social/political activists from outside the parliamentary process. They called their movement the New Politics Initiative. Another group, the NDP Revival, wanted to reform the party's internal structures, along with some procedural changes to how party leaders were elected. The party, and to reduce the control of labor unions in the party. The proposal for a new policy initiative to create a new party from the ashes of the New Democratic Party was opposed by both McDonough and former party leader Ed Broadbent. The draft resolution was narrowly defeated when it was introduced at the party's meeting in Winnipeg in November 2001. The resolution of the New Democratic Party Renaissance Group was passed; A one-person, one-vote electoral system, including a provision to limit the Labor quota at the ballot box to 25 percent, was also at this meeting. McDonough overcame a leadership challenge from a Socialist caucus member, Marshall Hutz, who was also a supporter of the New Policy Initiative. The issue that highlighted McDonough’s leadership during the end of her political career was the fight against Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment that swept Canada and the United States in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. She led a national campaign for the return of Maher Arar, an Arab Canadian who had been wrongly arrested as a terrorist by U.S. border officials based on a false tip from the Canadian Intelligence Service. McDonough campaigned in 2002 and 2003 for his release. When he was released, his wife, Mounia Mazigh, joined the New Democratic Party and became their candidate in the 2014 federal election in recognition of the support he had received. McDonough and the party showed her and her husband. With Brian Massey's victory in the 2002 by-election in Windsor West, the party group increased to 14 members. Several weeks later, on June 5, 2002, McDonough took advantage of this positive shift in electoral interests to announce that she was stepping down as leader of the New Democratic Party. On January 25, 2003, in the Toronto election, 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 critic for international development, international cooperation, and peace advocacy. On June 2, McDonough announced that she would not stand in the Halifax riding at the election, making the announcement at the Lord Nelson Hotel, the same venue where she had celebrated her victory as Halifax MP. She said she would continue as Halifax MP until the next federal election. On June 29, In 2009, McDonough was announced as interim president of Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, beginning her one-year appointment in August 2009. It was announced on December 30, 2009, that she would be appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada for her pioneering work in Nova Scotia and as leader of the New Democratic Party. She received an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia on May 13, 2012. Her first marriage was to Peter McDonough, a lawyer in Halifax, with whom she has two sons; Justin, and Travis. In 1993, she separated from Peter MacDonough, although she claimed that her political career had no role in it. In 1994, just before stepping down as Nova Scotia leader, she had a hysterectomy, and waited until she had recovered before announcing her resignation. During her time as leader of the New Democratic Unionist Party, she had affairs with David MacDonald; He is a Progressive Conservative MP for Toronto-Rosedale Centre and a cabinet minister. MacDonald was the New Democratic Party candidate for Toronto Centre in the 1997 election, and in the previous election, as a Progressive Conservative, and like every other Progressive Conservative candidate in Ontario in 1993, he was defeated. The couple separated before the 2004 federal election. MacDonough's focus in retirement has been her seven grandchildren, friends, and travel. On May 3, 2013, MacDonough announced that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer by mammogram. She has received treatment and is now doing well.