UPDATE 3-Canada's New Democrats reject Mulcair leadership in party vote

(Adds analysis, final three paragraphs)
By Ethan Lou
TORONTO, April 10 (Reuters) - Members of Canada's
left-leaning New Democratic Party voted on Sunday to oust their
leader, Thomas Mulcair, six months after the party suffered a
resounding defeat in a general election it had initially been
favored to win.
Delegates at a party gathering in Edmonton, Alberta, voted
52 percent for a convention to choose a new leader. Mulcair, 61,
said he would step down as head of the party, but not until a
replacement is named. The New Democrats voted to hold a
leadership convention in two years.
The next Canadian election is not expected until 2019. Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberals, who started last year's
election campaign in third place in the opinion polls, won a
parliamentary majority in the October vote.
The NDP's constitution stipulated that Mulcair needed a
simple majority to stave off a leadership vote, and he had said
he would consider a higher threshold of 70 percent. Sunday's
results fell short of either target.
Mulcair's party lost more than half its seats and fell to
third place in last year's election. In a speech before the
leadership vote, Mulcair took responsibility for the defeat, but
urged party members to "keep standing with me."
Mulcair led in opinion polls when the election campaign
started. His party, with the second most seats in the House of
Commons, had been the official opposition to the Conservative
government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
But the center-left Liberals rode a late surge to a majority
victory under the charismatic leadership of Trudeau, the son of
former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
During the campaign, Mulcair promised to balance the budget
in a bid to bolster the party's economic credentials, but the
stand alienated many grassroots supporters who wanted change
after nearly a decade of Conservative austerity.
Trudeau's Liberals outflanked the New Democrats on the left,
advocating deficit spending to spur the faltering economy.
Mulcair became NDP leader in 2012 seven months after the
death of Jack Layton, who led the party to its best-ever federal
election performance in 2011. Mulcair said on Sunday he would
remain as the member of parliament for his Montreal electoral
district.
Guy Lachapelle, a political science professor at Concordia
University in Montreal, said Mulcair's ouster represented the
loss of the party's last significant foothold in the mainly
French-speaking province of Quebec, where the party lost nearly
three-quarters of its seats in the last election.
Nelson Wiseman, a political science professor from the
University of Toronto, said the next leader would likely be an
anglophone and unlikely to command huge support in Quebec, where
the NDP had once been popular.
"The party is in serious trouble now," he said.