75 Facts About Tom Mulcair

Thomas Joseph Mulcair was born on October 24,1954 and 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.

Tom Mulcair was elected to the House of Commons in 2007 and sat as the member of Parliament for Outremont until 2018.

Tom Mulcair was a senior civil servant in the Quebec provincial government, ran a private law practice, and taught law at the university level.

Tom 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.

Tom Mulcair served as the minister of sustainable development, environment and parks from 2003 until 2006, in the Liberal government of Premier Jean Charest.

Tom 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, Tom Mulcair became the leader of the Official Opposition.

Tom Mulcair advocated for balanced budgets and his leadership was said to have positioned the NDP to the right of the Liberal Party.

Tom Mulcair stated he would remain leader until the party chose a replacement.

Tom Mulcair later announced in May 2016 that he would retire from politics and would not contest his riding in the next federal election.

Tom Mulcair resigned his seat on August 3,2018, in order to accept a position in the political science department of the University of Montreal.

Tom Mulcair has been hired as an on-air political analyst for CJAD, CTV News Channel, and TVA.

Thomas Joseph Tom Mulcair was born in October 24,1954, at the Ottawa Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario.

Tom Mulcair's parents lived in the Wrightville district of Hull at the time.

Tom Mulcair's 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.

Tom Mulcair went to Laval Catholic High School, where he was influenced by Quebec's tradition of Catholic progressivism.

Tom Mulcair 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.

Tom 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.

Tom Mulcair obtained his degree in Civil Law in 1976, graduated in common law in 1977, and was admitted to the Bar in 1979.

In 1976, Tom Mulcair married Catherine Pinhas, a psychologist who was born in France to a Sephardic Jewish family from Turkey.

Tom 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 Hame, a municipal councillor; they have one son, Leonard.

Tom Mulcair has dual Canadian and French citizenship, and is fluently bilingual in English and French.

Tom Mulcair calls himself "Tom" in English and "Thomas" in French.

In 2019, Tom Mulcair said that he had been using homeopathic remedies, considered a pseudoscience by mainstream science, for about 30 years.

Tom Mulcair 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 Universite du Quebec a Trois-Rivieres.

Tom Mulcair was a board member of the group Conseil de la langue francaise, and at the time of his appointment to the Office des Professions he had been serving as president of the English speaking Catholic Council.

Tom Mulcair first entered the National Assembly in the 1994 election, winning the riding of Chomedey as a member of the Quebec Liberal Party.

Tom Mulcair was re-elected in 1998, and again in 2003 when the Liberals ousted the Parti Quebecois in the provincial election.

Tom Mulcair accused former PQ minister Yves Duhaime of influence peddling.

Duhaime filed a defamation suit in 2005 and Tom Mulcair was ordered to pay $95,000, plus legal costs.

The probe contacted Tom Mulcair to discuss a suspected bribe offered to him in 1994.

On November 25,2004, Tom Mulcair launched Quebec's Sustainable Development Plan and tabled a draft bill on sustainable development.

Tom 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.

In 2006, Tom Mulcair opposed a proposed condominium development in the mountain and ski resort of Mont Orford National Park.

Tom Mulcair's opposition to the government's development plans fuelled speculation that this was a punishment, which led Mulcair to resign from cabinet rather than accept the apparent demotion.

The testimony of Jean Charest, incoming environment minister Claude Bechard, and the owner of the company pursuing the development plan, Andre L'Esperance, all contradicted Tom Mulcair, saying that the Orford deal had been approved by Tom Mulcair before he left.

On June 21,2007, in an uncontested nomination, Tom Mulcair became the NDP's candidate in the riding of Outremont for a by-election on September 17.

Tom Mulcair won the by-election, defeating Liberal candidate Jocelyn Coulon 48 per cent to 29 per cent; the seat had been a Liberal stronghold since 1935.

Jean Lapierre suggested that Tom Mulcair was likely aided by defecting Bloc Quebecois supporters.

Tom Mulcair contradicted many federalists by defending the Quebec NDP's Sherbrooke Declaration, which claimed that a 50 per cent plus one vote is sufficient for Quebec secession.

Tom Mulcair was only the second NDP MP ever elected from Quebec, following Phil Edmonston in 1990.

Tom Mulcair is only the second non-Liberal ever to win Outremont, following Progressive Conservative Jean-Pierre Hogue in 1988.

On October 14,2008, Tom Mulcair was re-elected as the MP for Outremont, making him the first New Democrat to win a riding in Quebec during a federal general election.

Tom Mulcair defeated the federal Liberal candidate, Sebastien Dhavernas, by 14,348 votes to 12,005.

Tom Mulcair stated that Layton's death had hit him exceptionally hard, and that while he was considering a federal NDP leadership bid, he would need several weeks to make up his mind on that decision.

Tom Mulcair attracted the support of 60 of the 101 other federal NDP MPs, including Robert Chisholm and Romeo Saganash, the only two to have dropped out of the leadership race.

Tom Mulcair campaigned on reinventing the party, to strengthen its presence in Quebec, and attract voters in other parts of the country.

At the leadership convention, Tom Mulcair was elected NDP leader on the fourth ballot with 57.2 per cent of the vote, versus Topp's 42.8 per cent.

Tom Mulcair was sworn into the Privy Council for Canada on September 14,2012, entitling him to the style "The Honourable" for life.

Tom Mulcair declared his party's support for trade deals that included enforceable provisions on labour rights and environmental protection.

Tom Mulcair strongly opposed plans for the creation of the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines, which included travelling to Washington DC to lobby against American approval of Keystone, and instead promoted the creation of a pipeline to carry western Canadian oil to be refined on Canada's east coast.

Tom Mulcair promised to seek a mandate for Senate abolition during the 2015 Canadian federal election even though the Supreme Court had ruled in 2014 that abolition would require the consent of all ten provinces.

Commentators pegged several factors, including Tom Mulcair's opposing stance against the Conservative's Bill C-51 which the Liberals agreed to support and the surprise win for the Alberta NDP in the 2015 Alberta provincial election, as having helped revive the federal party's lagging fortunes.

At the NDP's party convention in April 2016, Tom Mulcair was criticized by Alberta delegates for what was seen as implicit support for the Leap Manifesto, a program which was seen as opposing Alberta's oil industry and thus a political threat to Rachel Notley's NDP government in Alberta.

Tom Mulcair was asked by his caucus to remain as leader until his replacement was selected.

Tom Mulcair resigned as MP for Outremont on August 3,2018.

Tom Mulcair's seat was won by Rachel Bendayan of the Liberal Party at the triggered by-election.

Tom Mulcair announced on December 18,2017, that he would resign from his House of Commons seat in June 2018, when the House rose for its summer break, to accept an appointment at a university.

On January 11,2018, Tom Mulcair assumed the volunteer position of chair of the board of Jour de la terre Quebec, a non-profit organization dedicated to environmental issues.

Tom Mulcair joined the political science department as a visiting professor at Universite de Montreal effective the summer of 2018.

On July 17,2018, Tom Mulcair announced that he had accepted a position as political analyst on Montreal talk radio station CJAD effective August 28,2018.

Tom Mulcair will appear on CTV News Channel starting in fall 2018, and on the French-language network TVA in a similar capacity.

Tom Mulcair said an NDP government would "create an innovation tax credit to encourage manufacturers to invest in machinery, equipment and property used in research and development".

Tom Mulcair has proposed reversing some of the corporate tax cuts advanced by the Conservative government, while keeping taxes below the United States' combined corporate tax rate.

Tom Mulcair has stated that he will not raise personal income taxes, but has promised to cancel the Conservative government's income splitting for two-parent households.

Tom Mulcair has promised to use additional tax revenue to pay for infrastructure, public transit, a new child care program, and a balanced budget.

Tom Mulcair has promised to end fossil fuel subsidies under previous governments, and introduce cap-and-trade for carbon emissions.

Tom Mulcair has promised to reverse cuts to the environmental review processes, and return to "rigorous, science-based environmental impact assessments".

Tom Mulcair pledged to call a national public inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women within 100 days of taking office, if his party is elected.

Tom Mulcair has been critical of Conservative public safety policy, saying cuts to food inspection and aeronautical safety have put Canadians at risk.

Tom Mulcair has stated that he does not believe that someone should serve jail time for minimal possession of marijuana; but he has stated that he does not support legalization.

Tom Mulcair believes that Canada can be a "positive force for peace, justice and respect for human rights around the world".

Tom Mulcair has been an opponent of Canada's involvement in the combat mission in Iraq against ISIS.

In 2014, an article in the Globe and Mail commented that Tom Mulcair had a "personal commitment to the Zionist cause", given his wife's Jewish ancestry.

Tom Mulcair called the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement against Israel as "grossly unacceptable".