Albert Alexander MacLeod, widely known as A.A. MacLeod and familiarly as "Alex", was a prominent member of the Communist Party of Canada and its front group the Labour 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. 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. MacLeod was also editor of Canadian Tribune, the weekly newspaper launched in the June 1940 as the unofficial organ of the banned Communist Party. In the 1943 Ontario provincial election, MacLeod 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 until his defeat in the 1951 election. Macleod left the Labour 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 Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Despite their ideological differences, MacLeod was a personal favourite of Ontario Progressive Conservative Premier Leslie Frost who gave MacLeod an office 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 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 served as a senior advisor 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.
