[4] After working at the steel plant again and completing further education, MacLeod was employed by YMCA, first in North Sydney and Halifax in Nova Scotia and then as an executive member in Chicago.
While in Nova Scotia, they campaigned in the 1933 provincial election for J.B. McLachlan, the veteran union leader and Communist who was running as a "Workers' United Front" candidate.
[5] In 1934, MacLeod focused his attention on organizing the founding conference of the Canadian League Against War and Fascism, which took place in Toronto in October.
With more than 500 delegates in attendance from a range of leftist and labour groups, this was a major step in the Communist Party's shift to the popular front strategy.
[1] In 1936, MacLeod led the Canadian delegation at the World Peace Congress in Brussels and shortly afterwards he became the first North American to witness the Spanish Civil War.
[1] He jointly published a pamphlet summarizing the critical situation in the Spanish Republic, where a socialist government had come to power earlier that year and was facing a fascist rebellion.
He was active in recruiting volunteers for the International Brigade and successfully argued for the creation of a separate Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion in order to recognize the Canadian participation.
[1] As a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the eruption of World War II, the League was banned in 1940 under the Defence of Canada Regulations along with the Communist Party itself.
[13] Following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, MacLeod actively promoted the war effort, speaking for the Victory Loan Committee and at major public rallies in support of wartime mobilization.
Within the provincial legislative assembly, writes Salsberg's biographer Gerald Tulchinsky, the LPP members "exploited their leverage, however limited, to greatest advantage, focusing on labour and human rights issues".
[18] In another initiative, he proposed the naming of Highway 401, a major new cross-province expressway, as the Macdonald-Cartier Freeway after Sir John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier.
MacLeod acted as an advisor to Premier John Robarts and worked closely with Clare Westcott and then-Education Minister Bill Davis on several projects concerning Canadian history.
[20] One of Beatty's biographers has commented that his aunt and uncle were "the private inspiration" behind his portrait of Louise Bryant and John Reed in his 1981 film Reds.