described as toxic, McDonough entered the leadership race in the spring of 1995. The conditions were similar to the ones she faced during her first leadership campaign in 1980: a divided party that was self-immolating. However, the party was also hobbled by unpopular provincial NDP governments in Ontario and British Columbia. Indeed, the NDP had suffered particularly severe losses in those two provinces at the federal level in 1993, losing all of its Ontario MPs, and all but two of its British Columbia MPs, more than half of its caucus. Prior to the NDP leadership convention on October 14, 1995, McDonough was widely viewed as an also-ran behind the leading contenders, Svend Robinson and Lorne Nystrom, but at the convention she placed second on the first ballot, ahead of Nystrom in what was almost a three-way split. Although Robinson had placed first on that ballot, he felt that most of Nystrom's supporters would go to McDonough on the second ballot, giving her the victory. Thus, he conceded to McDonough before a second ballot could be held. On a motion by Robinson, the convention formally acclaimed McDonough as the party's new leader. McDonough became the first person from Atlantic Canada to lead a major party since Robert Stanfield retired as the Progressive Conservatives' leader in 1976. Unusually for a major-party leader, she did not have one of her MPs in a safe seat resign so she could get into Parliament via a by-election, opting instead to make a third bid for her home riding of Halifax in the next general election. In the 1997 election, her first as leader, the party won 21 seats. This included a historic breakthrough in the Atlantic provinces, a region where it had only won three seats in its entire history prior to 1997. McDonough herself won Halifax by 11,000 votes, pushing Liberal incumbent Mary Clancy into third place. She would continue to win it consecutively three more times until she retired from politics in 2008. During the next few years, McDonough's leadership of the party elicited controversy. Union leaders were lukewarm in their support of her, often threatening to break away from the NDP, in particular the Canadian Auto Workers' president Buzz Hargrove. She was widely seen within the NDP as trying to pull the party toward the centre of the political spectrum, in the Third Way mode of Tony Blair although when she made