and spearheaded the Lake Louise Declaration, which was Alberta's first action plan designed to fight violence against women, and the first all-Canada declaration on the subject. Leadership candidate When Getty retired in 1992, McCoy ran in the 1992 Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta leadership election to succeed him. She placed 8th in a field of nine and was eliminated on the first ballot; the contest was won by Ralph Klein. Klein did not appoint her to his cabinet, and she did not run for re-election in 1993. Right-to-work joint review committee In 1995, McCoy was asked by the government of Alberta to chair a joint review committee (JRC) into whether or not right-to-work (RTW) legislation would be beneficial to the province. The committee was formed following a motion debated on March, and announced in April 1995. It delivered its unanimous report in November of the same year. It received 225 written submissions from Albertans on the issue. The JRC ultimately did not recommend RTW legislation for Alberta, as it found no evidence of economic advantage to it. Senate of Canada McCoy was appointed to the Senate by Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, on the recommendation of Prime Minister Paul Martin, on March 24, 2005. She represented Alberta as a member of the Canadian Senators Group. Initially a member of the Progressive Conservative caucus, a rump caucus of Tory senators who had refused to join the new Conservative Party of Canada in 2003, McCoy was ultimately the last Progressive Conservative in the chamber following the retirement of Senator Lowell Murray in 2011. She changed her designation to Independent PC in 2013 and then to non-affiliated in 2016, following the decision by the government of Justin Trudeau to make the Senate a non-partisan institution and appoint independent senators. In September 2016, she and 14 other non-affiliated senators formed the Independent Senators Group to advocate for the rights of non-affiliated senators as the upper house was still organized around partisan lines resulting in non-affiliated senators being underrepresented on committees and not receiving the funding given to party caucuses. McCoy was elected facilitator of the new group for the 2016–2017 parliamentary term. In December 2016, the Senate agreed to recognize the ISG and granted it funding, and also agreed that non-affiliated senators would be appointed to Senate committees in numbers proportionate to their numbers in the Senate. On November 4, 2019, she joined the Canadian