Tom Mulcair
Thomas Joseph Mulcair is a Canadian lawyer and retired politician who served as the leader of the New Democratic Party from 2012 to 2017 and leader of the Official Opposition from 2012 to 2015. He was elected to the House of Commons in 2007 and sat as the member of Parliament for Outremont until 2018.
Mulcair was a senior civil servant in the Quebec provincial government, ran a private law practice, and taught law at the university level. Mulcair joined the federal NDP in 1974 and was the provincial member of the National Assembly of Quebec for the riding of Chomedey in Laval from 1994 to 2007, holding the seat for the Quebec Liberal Party. He served as the minister of sustainable development, environment and parks from 2003 until 2006, in the Liberal government of Premier Jean Charest. Elected MP for Outremont in a by-election in 2007, he was named co-deputy leader of the NDP shortly afterwards, and won re-election to his seat three times. On May 26, 2011, he was named the New Democratic Party's Opposition house leader and also served as the NDP's Quebec lieutenant.
Mulcair was elected as the leader of the NDP on the fourth ballot of the 2012 leadership election. The NDP having the second-largest caucus in the House of Commons meant that he became the leader of the Official Opposition. As leader, Mulcair generally positioned the NDP to the right of the Liberal Party on fiscal policy, which included advocating for balanced budgets. Though polls early in the 2015 federal election campaign indicated the possibility of an NDP minority government, the party lost over half of its seats and resumed third party status. During a leadership review vote held at the 2016 federal NDP convention, 52 per cent of the delegates voted to hold a leadership election in October 2017. Mulcair stated he would remain leader until the party chose a replacement. He later announced in May 2016 that he would retire from politics and would not contest his riding in the next federal election.
Mulcair resigned his seat on August 3, 2018, in order to accept a position in the political science department of the University of Montreal. He has also been hired as an on-air political analyst for CJAD, CTV News Channel, and TVA. In 2026, he joined the Strategic Advisory Board of Wellington Advocacy.
Personal life and education
Thomas Joseph Mulcair was born in October 24, 1954, at the Ottawa Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario. His parents lived in the Wrightville district of Hull at the time.His father, Harry Donnelly Mulcair, worked in insurance and was the descendant of Irish immigrants who arrived in the Quebec City area during the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s. His paternal grandfather moved to Montreal to become a tailor. His mother, Jeanne Hurtubise, a school teacher, was French Canadian and the great-granddaughter of Quebec premiers Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau and Honoré Mercier. Her father was a businessman and the founding mayor of Sainte-Anne-des-Lacs in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal, where she met her husband in 1948.
The Mulcairs soon moved to the middle-class district of Chomedey in Laval, a suburb of Montreal, where Thomas would grow up as the second-eldest in a close-knit family of ten children. It was a bilingual, Catholic household where children were educated in English and French Catholic schools, although the family stopped attending Mass over a disagreement with the parish priest about birth control. Both parents were supporters of the Quebec Liberal Party. Mulcair went to Laval Catholic High School, where he was influenced by Quebec's tradition of Catholic progressivism. He got interested in politics and activism after organizing a successful sit-in to protest the administration’s plan to abolish recess, and participated in weekend community work in Montreal organized by one of this teachers, Father Alan Cox.
After high school and graduating in social sciences from CEGEP Vanier College in 1973, Mulcair started law school at McGill University at age 18. That same year, his father lost his job. The parents, with eight children still at home, sold their home in Laval and moved to the family cottage in Saint-Anne-des-Lacs. Mulcair worked summers in construction, tarring roofs to pay for law school and housing, while borrowing money from his older sister to pay for books.
A strong believer in social justice, he joined the NDP at age 19. During his penultimate year, he was elected president of the McGill Law Students Association, and sat on the council of the McGill Student Union. He obtained his degree in Civil Law in 1976, graduated in common law in 1977, and was admitted to the Bar in 1979.
In 1976, Mulcair married Catherine Pinhas, a psychologist who was born in France to a Sephardic Jewish family from Turkey. The couple have two sons. The oldest, Matt, is a sergeant in the Sûreté du Québec and married to Jasmyne Côté, an elementary school teacher; they have two children, Juliette and Raphaël. Mulcair and Pinhas's second son, Greg, is an aerospace engineer who teaches physics and engineering technologies at John Abbott College and is married to Catherine Hamé, a municipal councillor; they have one son, Leonard.
Mulcair has dual Canadian and French citizenship, and is fluently bilingual in English and French. He calls himself "Tom" in English and "Thomas" in French. In 2019, Mulcair said that he had been using homeopathic remedies, considered a pseudoscience by mainstream science, for about 30 years.
Early career
Mulcair moved to Quebec City to work in the Legislative Affairs branch in Quebec's Ministry of Justice from 1978-1980 and in the Legal Affairs Directorate of the Superior Council of the French Language 1980-1982. He would also teach introductory law at Saint Lawrence College 1979-1982.In 1983, the Quebec government cut the salaries of civil servants by 20%, so Mulcair and his young family moved to Montreal to became director of legal affairs at Alliance Quebec, a lobby group for the English-speaking community in Quebec. During that time, he played a role in amending the Charter of the French Language, in opposition to the goals of Quebec separatists. In 1985 he began a private law practice and was named the reviser of the statutes of Manitoba following the Supreme Court of Canada ruling in the Reference re Manitoba Language Rights case. Mulcair also taught law courses to non-law students at Concordia University, at the Saint Lawrence Campus of Champlain Regional College in Sainte-Foy, and at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières.
Quebec Education Minister and former Quebec Liberal Party leader Claude Ryan named Mulcair commissioner of the Appeals Committee on the Language of Instruction to deal with illegal English Catholic schools set up in defiance of Quebec's language laws. Mulcair credits Ryan with becoming his political mentor during this period.
Mulcair was president of the Office des professions du Québec, where he introduced reforms to make disciplinary hearings more transparent and successfully led a major effort to have cases of alleged sexual abuse of patients decisively dealt with. Mulcair was also a board member of the group Conseil de la langue française, and at the time of his appointment to the Office des Professions he had been serving as president of the English speaking Catholic Council.
Provincial politics
Mulcair first entered the National Assembly in the 1994 election, winning the riding of Chomedey as a member of the Quebec Liberal Party. Mulcair claims he ran as a Liberal because at the time, it was the only credible federalist provincial party in Quebec. In that era, Quebec was the only province where the NDP was not fully organized; its Quebec wing had seceded in 1990 to preach sovereigntism. He was re-elected in 1998, and again in 2003 when the Liberals ousted the Parti Québécois in the provincial election.After the 1995 referendum, Mulcair was eminent in demanding an inquiry about the rejection of thousands of ballots for the 'No' side.
According to Le Devoir journalist Michel David, Mulcair is the person who coined the expression Pinocchio syndrome, which was the title of a book by André Pratte published in 1997 about lies in politics. In the book, Mulcair speaks about why he believes lying is common in politics, because, according to him, "people feel free to manipulate journalists and say just about anything."
Newly elected Premier Jean Charest named Mulcair minister of sustainable development, environment and parks. At the time of his appointment to Cabinet he had been serving on several volunteer boards including The Montreal Oral School for the Deaf, Operation Enfant Soleil and the Saint-Patrick's Society. During his tenure he was a supporter of the Kyoto Protocol, and drafted a bill amending the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms to include the right to live in a healthy environment. The bill passed in 2006.
Mulcair accused former PQ minister Yves Duhaime of influence peddling. Duhaime filed a defamation suit in 2005 and Mulcair was ordered to pay $95,000, plus legal costs. In 2010 the provincial police anti-corruption squad in Quebec investigated Laval mayor Gilles Vaillancourt for allegations of bribing several provincial politicians. The probe contacted Mulcair to discuss a suspected bribe offered to him in 1994. Mulcair claims he never looked in the envelope and handed it back to the mayor.
Sustainable development and infrastructure
On November 25, 2004, Mulcair launched Quebec's Sustainable Development Plan and tabled a draft bill on sustainable development. Also included was a proposed amendment to the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms to create a new right, the right to live in a healthy environment that respects biodiversity, in accordance with the guidelines and standards set out in the act. Mulcair's Sustainable Development Plan was based on the successful European model and was described as one of the most avant-garde in North America. Mulcair followed the proposal by embarking on a 21-city public consultation tour, and the bill was unanimously adopted by the National Assembly of Quebec in April 2006.Accomplishments related to infrastructure included the completion of Autoroute 30 between Vaudreuil and Brossard, Autoroute 50 between Gatineau and Lachute, the widening of Route 175 between Stoneham and Saguenay, the widening of Route 185 from Rivière-du-Loup to the New Brunswick border and the introduction of a toll bridge which would complete Autoroute 25 between Montreal and Laval.