A. A. MacLeod

Albert Alexander MacLeod, widely known as A.A. MacLeod and familiarly as "Alex", was a prominent member of the Communist Party of Canada and, later, of its legal group the Labor-Progressive Party. In the mid-1930s, he was leader of the Canadian League Against War and Fascism, a popular front group founded by the party which in its last years was known as the Canadian League for Peace and Democracy. The league recruited members for the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, the Canadian contingent of the International Brigade that fought to defend the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War. The League was banned in early 1940 under the Defence of Canada Regulations along with the Communist Party itself.

MacLeod became editor of Canadian Tribune, the weekly newspaper launched in June 1940 as the unofficial organ of the banned Communist Party.

In the 1943 Ontario provincial election, he was elected as a Labour Progressive Member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario for the downtown Toronto riding of Bellwoods. His colleague, J.B. Salsberg, was also elected in the neighbouring riding of St. Andrew. MacLeod remained an MPP and led the party in the 1948 Ontario provincial election and the 1951 election in which he lost his seat.

MacLeod left the Labor-Progressive Party along with the majority of its members following Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that revealed the crimes of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Despite their ideological differences, MacLeod was a personal favourite of Progressive Conservative Premier of Ontario Premier Leslie Frost who gave MacLeod an office on the fourth floor of the legislative building at Queen's Park following his defeat and made him a paid advisor. One of MacLeod's initiatives was the naming of Highway 401, a major new cross-province expressway, the Macdonald-Cartier Freeway after Sir John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier. Macleod kept his office into the 1970s acting as an advisor to premiers John Robarts and Bill Davis.

MacLeod was the uncle of Hollywood movie actors Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine. Both Beatty and MacLaine have frequently alluded to his political beliefs as a major influence on their own liberal political philosophy.

MacLeod's son, David Leigh MacLeod, served as a senior adviser to the provincial Ontario Progressive Conservatives during the 1970s. He later worked for Beatty and was co-producer of Beatty's films Reds and Ishtar.

External links

• Ontario Legislative Assembly Parliamentarian History

• Radio address by A.A. MacLeod made during the 1943 Ontario election campaign