Ellen Meiksins Wood, author and third wife of Ed Broadbent, dead at 73

OTTAWA—Ellen Meiksins Wood, the third wife of former NDP leader Ed Broadbent, has died of cancer at the couple’s Ottawa home at the age of 73.

The Broadbent Institute, a non-partisan, progressive think tank which the former politician founded in 2011, announced her death today.

Meiksins Wood was a noted political theorist and socialist historian, author of a number of books and a professor at York University for three decades.

She was born in New York in 1942 and educated at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles, where she earned a PhD in political science.

She moved to Canada with her first husband, fellow political theorist Neal Wood, in 1967.

With her teaching and writings, she earned a reputation as one of the left’s foremost theorists on democracy and history. She was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in 1996.

She and her husband spent time in Britain and Canada before his death in 2003.

After Broadbent’s second wife, Lucille, died in 2006, he and Meiksins Wood, an old acquaintance and academic colleague, re-connected. They were married in 2014.

Meiksins Wood is survived by Broadbent and her brothers, Peter Meiksins of Cleveland and Robert Meiksins of Milwaukee.