Tom Mulcair

Tom Mulcair (born October 24, 1954, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian politician who served as leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) from 2012 to 2017.

Mulcair was raised in largely Francophone Quebec, where his maternal great-great-grandfather had served as premier in the 1880s. He was the second oldest of 10 children and was brought up in a devoutly Roman Catholic, staunchly Liberal, and mostly Anglophone home. Interested in politics at a young age, he became an activist at Vanier College, where he helped lead a student strike. After earning a law degree (1977) at McGill University, he worked at the legislative-affairs branch of Quebec’s Justice Ministry and at the Legal Affairs Directorate of the Conseil Supérieur de la Langue Française, and he served as president of the Quebec Professions Board. By virtue of his marriage in 1976 to Catherine Pinhas, a psychologist of Sephardic Jewish descent who was born in France, Mulcair gained dual Canadian and French citizenship.

Mulcair was first elected to the Quebec National Assembly, as a Liberal in the riding of Chomedey, in 1994. During his three terms in the provincial legislature, he served as critic (spokesperson) for justice and industry while in opposition and as minister of sustainable development, environment, and parks when the Liberals formed a government in 2003. He left the government in 2006 after disagreeing with Quebec Liberal Premier Jean Charest over a plan to transfer land from the Mont Orford provincial park to condominium developers. Mulcair switched to federal politics, and in 2007 he opted to become NDP leader Jack Layton’s Quebec lieutenant. A stunning by-election victory in the previously Liberal stronghold of Outremont made Mulcair only the second-ever NDP MP to be elected in the province. After successfully retaining the seat in a general election the following year, Mulcair helped build the profile of the party in the province as deputy leader. He was credited in part with its enormously successful 2011 election campaign, in which an NDP “Orange Crush/Orange Wave” claimed 59 of the province’s 75 seats, virtually wiping out the previously dominant separatist Bloc Québécois.

Although Mulcair’s critics called him difficult to work with and prone to angry outbursts—he was fined $95,000 (Canadian) for vulgar and defamatory comments made against a former provincial minister on television—his supporters praised his intelligence and political acumen. In 2011 Layton died, and the following year Mulcair defeated six other candidates to become leader of the NDP. With that victory he also became Canada’s leader of the Official Opposition in Parliament—only the second permanent NDP leader in the country’s history to hold the honour.

In the run-up to the 2015 federal election, Mulcair and the NDP found themselves atop opinion polling in what looked to be a razor-close three-way race among the major parties. But, though Mulcair was seemingly successful during the campaign in convincing Canadians that he was sufficiently “prime ministerial” in bearing, he adopted some policy stances that appeared to be at odds with the opinions of some of the voters that were crucial to success. On one hand, in choosing to predicate spending on social programs on the achievement of a balanced budget, he ceded the NDP’s traditional position on the left to the Liberals, whose leader, Justin Trudeau, called for a three-year period of deficit spending. On the other hand, in standing firm on his own principles and supporting the right of Muslim women to wear niqabs (face- and hair-covering veils) during Canadian citizenship ceremonies (the subject of a major court ruling that was opposed by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper), Mulcair appeared to alienate many of the voters in Quebec who had been behind the “Orange Crush.” In the process, the NDP slipped in the polls as the election appeared to turn into a two-way race between the Conservatives and the Liberals.

In the event, the Liberals took 39.5 percent of the vote to win a landslide victory and form a 184-seat majority government. The NDP finished third, behind the Conservatives (who fell to 99 seats), losing its status as the official opposition by capturing only 44 seats on some 20 percent of the total vote. To add insult to injury, Mulcair barely held on to his seat in the House of Commons. Some six months later, at the 2016 NDP convention, he lost a confidence vote but continued to lead the party until Jagmeet Singh was elected as his replacement in October 2017. The following year he resigned as MP.