Fifty-two percent of delegates to the NDP convention in Edmonton on this date in 2016 expressed non-confidence in the leadership of Tom Mulcair. A Quebecer and former provincial cabinet minister, he had led the party since 2012, attempting to modernize the party and better prepare it for the 21st century.
Mulcair continued to lead the NDP until his successor, Jagmeet Singh, was elected to succeed him in October 2017. It would seem that Mulcair had the last laugh as in the campaigns that followed his removal of leader Singh and his team have come nowhere near matching or besting the party’s showing in the 2019 and 2021 elections. He is now one of Canada’s most respected political commentators on federal politics, respected by partisans and observers of all political stripes.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.