Tom Mulcair

His father, Harry Donnelly Mulcair, worked in insurance and was the descendant of Irish immigrants who arrived in the Quebec City area during Great Famine (Ireland) 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.

Thomas Joseph Mulcair (born October 24, 1954) is a retired Canadian politician who served as the leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) from 2012 to 2017 and leader of the Official Opposition from 2012 to 2015.

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 (now Gatineau) at the time.

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 family, with eight children still at home, was forced to sell their home in Laval and move to the family cottage in Saint-Anne-des-Lacs.

Mulcair was forced to work 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.

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 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 (Quebec provincial police) 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 councilor; 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.

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

He was elected to the House of Commons in 2007 and sat as the member of Parliament (MP) 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.

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, Mulcair became the leader of the Official Opposition.

As leader, he took the NDP to the centre.

Though polls early in the 2015 federal election campaign indicated the possibility of an NDP minority government, the party lost just over half of its seats and resumed third-place 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 chooses a replacement.

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

He 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.