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's 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 her leader's speech at the party's August 1999 Ottawa policy convention, she attempted to distance herself from "Third Way" policies by stating: "We must lay out a new way for Canadians to navigate in the 21st century. Not an old way, not a 'third way,' but a made-in-Canada way..." A vote on a resolution to adopt Third Way policies in the party's platform formally was defeated, as many union leaders opposed it and McDonough's "Canadian Way."