Toronto – The most underrated politician in Ontario in 50 years has died – still without being given the recognition he deserves.
Donald C. MacDonald, who led the New Democratic Party and its predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, from 1953-70, has been called `the happy warrior,’ as if his main contribution was keeping smiling in adversity.
But he was much more. MacDonald took over when the party had only two of 90 seats in the legislature and gave it a voice that was missing and for a time led an opposition party that pound-for-pound was the most effective in memory.
For the first two years he led without a seat or desk in the Queen’s Park building, writing his press releases in his party’s nearby office and walking them over to hand to reporters.
He made slight progress in 1955, when he was elected an MPP and led a three-member caucus and, as its ablest speaker, was official critic of 20 ministries, including agriculture, although his Toronto riding had few blades of grass.
But he talked to farmers and became knowledgeable and even led it to a famous by-election win in western Ontario farmland, where NDP pleas previously had fallen on stony ground.
From 1963-67 MacDonald led a dazzling, seven-member caucus that gave the long-entrenched Progressive Conservative government more headaches than a Liberal caucus three times its size.
MacDonald provided more than his share by informed, irrepressible questioning, helped particularly by a 26-year-old Stephen Lewis, whose oratory still has not been equalled.
MacDonald and his small team focused on inadequacies in government and in the 1967 election swelled to 20 seats.
But by the late 1960s he was in his mid-50s and New Democrats talked of having a leader who seemed more in-tune with the times and Jim Renwick, a former corporation lawyer who brought huge legal expertise to the NDP team, challenged him for leader and lost.
Lewis, who supported Renwick, possibly to test the prospects for himself, then gathered support for himself behind the scenes and, when he presented this, MacDonald quickly stepped down.
MacDonald contended he could have won, but a challenge by Lewis would have enabled opponents to claim the NDP did not have confidence in its leader and hurt it in an election due in 1971.
Lewis took over as leader, but despite his oratorical dominance managed in three elections to win only 3 per cent more of the vote than it had won under MacDonald.
Lewis was seen by many not as just a good talker, but too slick -- too clever by three-quarters, one critic said. MacDonald thought Lewis attempted to jolt rather than woo voters.
There are grounds for arguing, although there is no way of settling it, MacDonald would have done as well or better, if the party had kept him.
MacDonald served as an MPP without bitterness under Lewis and his successor as leader, Michael Cassidy, until 1982, when he showed rare unselfishness.
He was among those who urged Bob Rae, then the party’s articulate finance critic in the Commons, to run for Ontario leader to revive the party after Cassidy.
Rae won and needed a provincial seat and asked Renwick, whose riding was in the same area of Toronto as his federal seat, to step aside, but Renwick thought he had as good credentials to stay and refused.
Rae asked others without success and MacDonald then felt, having encouraged Rae to run, he should give him the seat he had held for 27 years and could have retained forever, and Rae took it and went on to become premier.
Rae ironically has left the NDP and is a Liberal, hoping to become prime minister, which must have been galling to the man whose whole life was standing by his party.
Eric Dowd is a veteran member of the press gallery at Queen’s Park.
