Thomas Mulcair

Canadian politician

• Born: October 24, 1954
• Place of Birth: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Education: Laval Catholic High School; Vanier College; McGill University

Significance: Thomas Mulcair was a Canadian politician and Member of Parliament representing Outremont, Quebec. He served as the leader of the New Democratic Party from 2012 to 2017.

Background

Thomas Joseph Mulcair was born at the Ottawa Civic Hospital and raised in what is now Gatineau and in Laval, which is a suburb of Montreal. His parents, Jeanne and Harry Mulcair, had ten children, of whom he was the second born. His mother taught school and his father worked in the insurance industry. The household was devoutly Roman Catholic, and his parents’ politics were liberal. In Francophone Quebec, Mulcair’s home leaned toward the Anglophone view.

It could be said that Mulcair came to politics naturally: His mother’s great-grandfather, Honoré Mercier, had been the ninth Premier of Quebec. Her great-great-grandfather, Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chaveau, was Quebec’s first post-Confederation Premier.

Mulcair’s undergraduate degree from Vanier College was in social sciences. He entered law school at McGill University at the age of 18 and worked a variety of jobs in order to pay for his education. In 1977, he was awarded degrees in civil law and common law.

His interest in politics was evident as a student when he helped lead a student strike at Vanier. He then served on the McGill Student Union council and was elected president of the McGill Law Students Association.

Political Career

Mulcair’s first political job after earning his law degree in 1977 was with the legislative-affairs branch of the Quebec Justice Ministry. He also worked at the Legal Affairs Directorate of the Conseil Supérieur de la Langue Française (Superior Council of the French Language) and was the president of the Quebec Professions Board.

He was first elected to political office in 1994. He joined the Quebec National Assembly as a Liberal in the riding of Chomedey, an electoral district in the western part of Laval. He served three terms as a Member of the National Assembly. In opposition, he was the spokesperson for justice and industry. When the Liberals formed a government in 2003, Mulcair served as the Minister of Sustainable Development, Environment, and Parks.

He left the government in 2006 when Quebec’s Liberal premier wanted to transfer land from a provincial park to a condominium developer. Mulcair switched to national politics. In 2007 he also moved further left, becoming the Quebec lieutenant of the National Democratic Party (NDP) leader, Jack Layton.

Mulcair shocked Canadian politics by winning the seat in Outremont, a Liberal stronghold. Mulcair was only the second NDP Member of Parliament ever elected in Quebec. He defended the seat the next year, and as deputy leader of the NDP in Quebec, he began to raise the party’s profile. In 2011 he played an important role in the NDP’s "Orange Wave" campaign, in which the small party stunned Canadian politics by winning fifty-nine of Quebec’s seventy-five seats. The NDP nearly eliminated the separatist Bloc Québécois and became the Official Opposition in Parliament.

Following Layton’s death in 2012, Mulcair became the leader of the NDP, beating out six other candidates for the post. He was only the second sitting head of the NDP to be Canada’s leader of the Official Opposition.

However, in 2015 Mulcair adopted policy positions that moved the NDP away from its position to the left of the Liberals. He also stood on principle on social issues, which opened him to attacks from the right. Even though the NDP entered the federal election season on top of the national polls, what had been a three-way contest turned into a two-way race between the Liberals and the Conservatives. The NDP held only forty-four seats in a third-place finish. Mulcair himself barely retained his seat.

Mulcair was often seen as a pugnacious figure, very loyal to his friends but high-handed, derisive, and intolerant of his opponents, including those in his own party. He was fined $95,000 (Canadian) for making vulgar, defamatory remarks on television about a provincial minister, for example. These qualities of his personality served him well in opposition of Conservative governments, and his dogged persistence was also a benefit in the NDP’s efforts to promote left-leaning social programs. His intelligence and political skills were very valuable to the party. But his prickly personality also meant that he did not always have widespread support within the NDP.

His controversial comments and positions influenced the NDP to begin to withdraw its support. Mulcair lost his position as leader in October 2017 to Jagmeet Singh. He was subsequently appointed Energy Critic in the NDP's shadow cabinet. In August 2018, Mulcair resigned as MP and took a position in the science department at the University of Montreal. He was also working as a political analyst for several news outlets in Canada.

Impact

Mulcair did for the NDP what no one had done before. He became a leader in Quebec by forcing his party to run a two-language campaign there. Winning fifty-nine seats in the province was unheard of prior to Mulcair’s campaign.

Mulcair pointed out, though, that public efforts, such as making sure that political advertisements are in both French and English, with attention paid to accurate use of the French language, were not the key to his success. He worked hard and deliberately to set up the networks of campaign workers and the party infrastructure that all successful political campaigns demand.

In the process, he turned the NDP into a viable national party, one that could contend for Canada’s leadership. Although Mulcair’s policy shifts in 2015 proved to be unappealing to the electorate, costing the party fifty-one seats in the federal election, putting the party back into third place nationally, the results were not entirely negative. By holding forty-four seats, the NDP remained stronger than it had been before. Even in a broad defeat, Mulcair still delivered the party’s second-best showing ever.

More importantly, in many respects, Mulcair pushed forward significant left-leaning policy issues. For example, relations between the federal government and Canada’s First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples gained greater importance as a national issue.

Personal Life

In 1976 Mulcair married Catherine Pinhas, a psychologist who was born in France. Consequently, Mulcair had dual Canadian and French citizenship. They had two sons. Matt, the eldest, was a sergeant in the provincial police in Quebec and the father of Mulcair’s two grandchildren. Their second son, Greg, was an aerospace engineer who taught at John Abbott College. Having grown up in Francophone Quebec, and through marriage to a citizen of France, Mulcair was fluently bilingual. He called himself "Tom" in English and "Thomas" in French.

Bibliography

Flanagan, Tom. Winning Power: Canadian Campaigning in the Twenty-first Century. McGill, 2014.

Geddes, John. "Smart, tough, and nasty: the definitive portrait of Thomas Mulcair." Maclean’s, 19 Sept. 2012, www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-fights-of-his-life. Accessed 13 Oct. 2024.

Gidluck, Lynn. Visionaries, Crusaders, and Firebrands: The Idealistic Canadians Who Built the NDP. Lorimer, 2012.

Harper, Stephen, and Thomas Mulcair. The 2015 Canadian Federal Election Debate on Foreign Policy: The Munk Debates. House of Anansi Press, 2015.

"Mulcair, The Hon. Thomas J., P.C., B.C.L, LL.B." Parliament of Canada, www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/26684. Accessed 13 Oct. 2024.

Mulcair, Tom. Strength of Conviction. Dundurn, 2015.

Rae, Bob. What’s Happened to Politics? Simon, 2015.