Belinda Stronach

Belinda Stronach

Belinda Stronach is a former Member of Parliament in the Canadian House of Commons who infamously switched parties in 2005 just before a critical vote on the legalization of same sex marriage.

Prior to her political career Stronach served as Chief Executive Officer of Magna International, a global automotive company founded by her father, Frank Stronach. Prior to this she served on the company's board of directors and as it's Executive Vice-President.

In her early political career she was believed to have had ties to the Canadian Alliance Party and supported Preston Manning's bid in 2000 for leadership of the party.

In early 2004 she unsuccessfully ran for the leadership of the newly formed Conservative Party of Canada. Despite spend more money on her campaign then victor, Stephen Harper she still lost by a large margin. This was mostly seen because of her failure to attend the televised debate between the candidates, her poor performance when making her speech at the leadership convention, along with her ideology on social issues being seen as too left-wing.

However despite losing the party's leadership she went on to get elected to the Canadian House of Commons in the 2004 federal election by a extremely small margin. She representing the newly former riding, Newmarket—Aurora. In early 2005, Stronach made a highly controversial political move to gain more personal power by announced she would switch parties to join the governing Liberals. Directly after doing so she was made a Cabinet Minister in the Canadian government by Paul Martin. She was re-elected in the 2006 federal election as Liberal. But in April 2007 she announced that she would not seek re-election, and would return to Magna International as Executive Vice-Chairman.