Alexa McDonough.
Alexa McDonough. Credit: Mitchel Raphael/Facebook Credit: Mitchel Raphael/Facebook

When Alexa McDonough became leader of the federal New Democrats in 1995 the party was at a low ebb.

In the 1993 federal election the NDP had had its worst showing since 1958. It won only nine seats, three short of the 12 needed for official parliamentary status.

Parliamentary status brings with it the right to ask questions during question period, sit on committees, and receive funds for research and policy staff. A party without status is like a wounded bird struggling to keep pace with the flock.

The only consolation for NDPers was that they did better than the erstwhile governing Conservatives, led by Kim Campbell. They hung on to only two seats.

Alexa – as almost everybody called her – was not exactly a dark horse candidate for the NDP leadership in 1995. But she was less well known than her two rivals.

Svend Robinson and Lorne Nystrom had both been members of Parliament for more than a decade. In 1995, Robinson was in his fifth term as an MP from British Columbia. Nystrom had sat in the House of Commons for a quarter century before his defeat in the 1993 rout.

The national media knew Alexa’s two rivals very well; Alexa, not so much.

To that point, McDonough had spent her entire political career in Nova Scotia. There, she earned respect beyond partisan lines, and had become the first woman leader of a major political party in Canada – the Nova Scotia NDP. But her status down east hardly resonated in Ottawa.

At the October 1995 leadership convention, New Democratic delegates chose Alexa in almost a back-handed way.

After the first ballot, Svend Robinson was in the lead, although not by much. Alexa, to the surprise of many, slightly edged out Lorne Nystrom for second place.

But there would be no more ballots.

After the first round of voting, Robinson looked around the room and saw supporters of Nystrom flocking in large numbers to Alexa. In the interests of party unity, the B.C. MP and notional candidate of the party’s left wing decided to pull out of the race. He quietly put on an Alexa button and asked the convention to declare McDonough the winner, unanimously.

A dark time for progressives in Canada

The new leader had her work cut out for her.

The political and media culture of the country had moved far to the right over the 11 years of rule first by Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives and then by the deficit-and-debt obsessed Chrétien-Martin Liberals.

The Liberal government’s federal budget of 1995 had instituted the deepest cuts to social, cultural and environmental spending Canadians had seen since the Second World War.

In 1993, Jean Chrétien had campaigned on a platform of hope. He promised an activist role for the federal government, centred on a job-creating infrastructure program, designed to pull the country out of the Conservatives’ recession.

The words “debt” and “deficit” barely appeared in the Liberal platform. But once the Liberals took power, those two words completely took over their agenda.

In 1995, the Liberal government slashed health and social transfers to the provinces, cut federal unemployment benefits, and eviscerated the CBC’s budget with bigger cuts than any Conservative government ever dared make. They also radically cut all other cultural funding, and got the federal government out of the housing business altogether. For good measure, the Liberals drastically reduced the size of the federal public service.

Neither the provinces nor the press protested.

The federal government had convinced the premiers that without harsh austerity measures the country would fall off a fiscal cliff. It also bought the premiers off with new federal-provincial fiscal arrangements which allowed provincial governments to use federally transferred funds virtually as they wished, with hardly any conditions.

As for the media, the Liberals had ready allies among such influential national outlets as The Globe and Mail. For the most part, the media’s only criticism was that the tough medicine was long overdue.

In their efforts to rapidly bring the government’s books into balance the Liberals stubbornly refused to raise any taxes on anyone, not even on the wealthiest individuals and most profitable corporations. Almost the entire burden of the deficit-cutting exercise would fall on the most vulnerable.

In Parliament, there was nary a peep of dissent.

The Reform Party provided the main opposition from English Canada and could hardly object to the Liberals borrowing their economic policy.

The Bloc Québécois had most of the Quebec seats, enough to form the Official Opposition with not much more than 10 per cent of the popular vote – a perverse consequence of our first-past-the-post electoral system.

The Bloc called itself social democratic, but its leader, Lucien Bouchard, a former Conservative cabinet minister, was a deficit-hating free enterpriser at heart. In any case, the Quebec-based party had little interest in federal policies. Its main focus was on helping its provincial partner, the governing Parti Québécois, win the second referendum on sovereignty.

Such was the daunting environment the new NDP leader had to confront.

Worked to activate the grassroots

Alexa McDonough did not have a seat in the House when she won the leadership, and chose not to ask one of the handful of NDP MPs to step aside so she could run in a byelection. Instead, she worked assiduously at the grassroots level, seeking to fan the dispirited embers of progressive opinion in the country.

Mainstream media mostly ignored the new NDP leader. They had decided – wrongly, it turned out – that the New Democrats were a spent force. Most influential media personalities viewed the NDP as an out-of-touch party attached to old-fashioned big-government and class-warfare policies which were irrelevant in the brave, new neo-conservative world.

But others listened.

NDP activists, especially in the trade union movement, complained the Canadian political field had tilted way too far to the right. The country needed a reinvigorated social-democratic movement to achieve some balance, they said. Alexa spoke to that concern – to anyone who would listen.

When the election came in 1997, Alexa took a big gamble and ran in her home riding of Halifax, a seat the NDP had never won. McDonough herself had been the losing NDP candidate twice, in the federal elections of 1979 and 1980.

Alexa’s gamble paid off. She won handsomely and would go on to win the Halifax riding three more times. After Alexa retired, Megan Leslie went on to win the Halifax seat two more times for the New Democrats.

And the NDP leader was not alone in Atlantic Canada. For the first time in its history the party had a respectable Atlantic caucus, a signal accomplishment for Alexa.

The party now had 21 seats in the House and a platform to push back against the Liberals’ small-c conservative agenda. New Democrats brought issues such as housing and homelessness and drug decriminalization to the floor of the House of Commons, for the first time in years.

The party got squeezed in the polarized election of 2000, in which the Reform Party had reinvented itself as the Canadian Alliance.

The Alliance’s new leader, former Alberta cabinet minister Stockwell Day, seemed more attractive and charismatic than the professorial, bespectacled Preston Manning whom he had replaced.

It looked for a while as though Day actually had a chance at ousting the Liberals, who were showing signs of wear and tear. That scared many erstwhile NDP supporters, especially in the West, who chose to vote “strategically” for the Liberals.

Alexa’s team managed to win enough seats to keep parliamentary status, and Alexa soldiered on.

Arguably, the New Democrats punched above their weight. Alexa and her team continued to offer principled, progressive opposition to the Chrétien-Martin regime.

Alexa herself took a great interest in human rights and international affairs.

During the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, Alexa and the New Democrats were the only MPs who dared utter any criticism of Israeli excesses.

Following the terror attacks in the U.S. on September 11, 2001, Muslims faced discrimination and hate in Western countries. Alexa had the courage to swim against the current and fight against anti-Islamic backlash. In a now-famous speech in the House, on October 2, 2011, she said:

“We need Canadians to know that Osama is a Canadian name, that Mohammed is a Canadian name and that worshipping in a mosque is a Canadian tradition.”

In a post on Facebook in honour of Alexa, former NDP deputy leader Libby Davies remembers that period this way:

“I can see her now, staring down Jean Chrétien in question period, demanding that he reject Bush’s call to be complicit in the war on Iraq. He mocked her. She never flinched. Day after day she pushed him and pushed him. Eventually he did the right thing. Alexa’s leadership on that was key.

Then later, her steadfast advocacy for Maher Arar, day after day, in question period, in the media, and supporting his wife Monia Mazigh, and her family, to free her husband from imprisonment and torture in Syria. I can tell you it wasn’t a popular time to do this. Alexa defended his innocence and his human rights – her moral compass was so strong; she withstood all the nasty politics and deflections.”

After she stepped down from the leadership, making way for Jack Layton, Alexa followed in the tradition of other party leaders such as the NDP’s first leader, Tommy Douglas, and Progressive Conservative Joe Clark. She remained a member of the House for another six years.

As an MP Alexa continued to nourish her passion for world affairs and human rights as her party’s critic for International Development, International Cooperation and Peace Advocacy.

When she decided not to run again and move back to Nova Scotia permanently in 2008, she told Ottawa folks she wanted to be there to help the NDP win power provincially for the first time – which it did, the very next year.

The federal New Democratic Party had its ups and downs during Alexa’s time as leader, and since then.

But it is important to remember how fraught the situation was for the party and for progressives in Canada, more generally, more than two and a half decades ago. Alexa took on the difficult task of re-building the NDP and establishing it, once again, as a force for social justice and positive change on the national scene. And she succeeded.

Keeping the movement alive and relevant during its darkest hour might indeed be Alexa’s greatest legacy.

After her death, one Nova Scotia Liberal partisan paid tribute to Alexa by quoting her own words:

“It’s downright dangerous to fly without a left wing.”

Karl Nerenberg

Karl Nerenberg joined rabble in 2011 to cover Canadian politics. He has worked as a journalist and filmmaker for many decades, including two and a half decades at CBC/Radio-Canada. Among his career highlights...