Talk:Stephen Lewis

Biography assessment rating comment
The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article. -- Abebenjoe 21:36, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I've now rated it a Start article, still needs an infobox for his UN and Aids work. Also references and inline citations would be useful and would bring this article up to at least a B class, if not a GA class.Abebenjoe 00:16, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Donald C. MacDonald's resignation
Although people may want to portray Stephen Lewis as an all-out saint, he isn't...no one is. With regards to Donald C. MacDonald's resignation, Lewis and the UAW's Canadian director Dennis McDermott, vigorously fought to overturn an unanimous decision by 25 Ontario union leaders at the 1968 CLC convention that supported Donald C. as the leader (this is the same convention that elected the other notable CCF/NDP Donald MacDonald as the leader of the CLC). So the UAW and Lewis were instrumental in bringing about MacDonald's resignation before the 1970 provincial NDP convention. This is outlined in MacDonald's The Happy Warrior Chapter ll: Last of the Leadership Years 1967 to 1970, pages 146-156. To say that Stephen had little or nothing to do with Donald's departure in 1970 is disingenuous: the facts are that he was very much at the centre of the movement to replace him. That's why it's an "engineered" resignation. MacDonald did not want a lot of in-fighting that a formal leadership challenge would cause, so, for the sake of party unity, he decided not to seek another term as the Ontario leader. The change of leadership close to an election probably cost the NDP at a minimum the official opposition and even a possible minority government, we'll never know. Abebenjoe 06:35, 7 March 2007 (UTC)