Tom Mulcair

Thomas Joseph Mulcair (born October 24, 1954) is a Canadian lawyer and retired 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. He was elected to the House of Commons in 2007 and sat as the member of Parliament (MP) for Outremont until 2018. Before entering federal politics, Mulcair served as the member of the National Assembly of Quebec for Chomedey from 1994 to 2007, sitting as a Quebec Liberal. He was the environment minister of Quebec from 2003 until 2006 in Premier Jean Charest's government.

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. In 2003, he was selected by Premier Jean Charest to be the minister of sustainable development, environment and parks, where he passed a bill recognizing the right to live in a healthy environment and respect for biodiversity into the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms in 2006. Mulcair later resigned from cabinet in 2006 after opposing a development proposal in Mont-Orford National Park.

After his departure from Quebec politics, Mulcair was courted by federal political parties. In April 2007, he announced that he would run as the NDP candidate in Outremont. Mulcair contested a by-election in September, winning and becoming the second NDP MP to be elected in Quebec, and the only member of the NDP caucus from Quebec at the time. NDP leader Jack Layton named Mulcair as the party's Quebec lieutenant and co-deputy leader, and he held the seat in the 2008 election. In the 2011 federal election, while the Conservatives were elected to a majority government, the NDP won 59 of Quebec's 75 ridings, a rise in popularity know as the Orange Wave, and formed the Official Opposition for the first time in the party's history.

Following the death of Jack Layton, Mulcair was elected as the leader of the NDP on the fourth ballot of the 2012 leadership election, making him 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.

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.

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.