- For the Scottish Jacobite heroine, see Flora Macdonald
Flora Isabel MacDonald (born June 3, 1926) is a Canadian politician. She was first elected to the House of Commons in the 1972 general election as the Member of Parliament for the riding of Kingston and the Islands. She remained in parliament until her defeat in the 1988 election.
In 1976, she became the first woman to mount a serious campaign for the leadership of one of Canada's two major governing parties. (She was preceded by Rosemary Brown who ran in 1975 for the leadership of the New Democratic Party, which has never formed the federal government, and by Mary Walker-Sawka, who won two votes a the Progressive Conservative leadership convention in 1968.)
MacDonald did worse than expected, leading pundits to coin the phrase the Flora Syndrome for the phenomenon of a politician's promised support failing to materialise. It was thought that this was a result of sexism: delegates liked the candidate but in the end could not bring themselves to vote for her because she was a woman. MacDonald dropped off after the second ballot, and encouraged her supporters to vote for Joe Clark, the eventual winner.
Clark and MacDonald, both Red Tories, became allies throughout their careers. When Clark became Prime Minister of Canada in 1979, he made MacDonald the first female Secretary of State for External Affairs in Canadian history, and one of the first female foreign ministers anywhere in the world. MacDonald, in turn, supported Clark at the 1983 leadership convention, where he lost to Brian Mulroney.
MacDonald returned to government after the PC victory in the 1984 federal election, serving first as Minister of Employment and Immigration, and then as Minister of Communications under Prime Minister Mulroney.
Since losing her seat in 1988, MacDonald has devoted her time to international humanitarian work. In 2003, she briefly re-entered the political scene to oppose the merger of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and the Canadian Alliance, but was unable to prevent the folding of the Tory party into the new Conservative Party of Canada.
In 1992, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, and was promoted to Companion in 1998. She was the 1999 recipient of the Pearson Medal of Peace.
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