The definitive portrait of Thomas Mulcair

 Macleans:

Mulcair attended Vanier College, where he says he was “very, very active” in student politics. He was among the leaders of a student strike, which ended, he says with characteristic bluster, when the administration “had to meet all of our demands and come crawling back.” Activism didn’t hurt his grades: he was accepted directly out of Vanier into McGill University’s prestigious law school in 1973 at 18, a rarity. “The first year was quite daunting,” he says. “The reading was monumental.”

To this day, Mulcair’s formidable intellect and ability to quickly master large volumes of written material is often cited by those who work with him on policy files. He did more than hit the books at law school, though, becoming president of its undergraduate students’ association. But Mulcair is less than glowingly nostalgic when he reflects on his McGill years. “The faculty wasn’t very open,” he says. “There was still a 1940s wall between faculty and students.” And for the former Catholic-school social-causes volunteer, McGill’s establishment aura wasn’t entirely congenial. “I wouldn’t have back then, and I still wouldn’t today, describe McGill as progressive,” he says. There were exceptions. The venerable Frank Scott—constitutional law expert, poet, and long-time stalwart of Canadian socialism—gave a guest lecture series that thrilled him. “It was really quite something,” Mulcair says. In contrast to a faculty he often found closed off from the political and social concerns of students, Mulcair says the grand old man was “all openness.”

Yet Scott, a founding figure in the NDP and its predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, didn’t quite draw Mulcair into his partisan fold. Julius Grey, a Montreal lawyer who has known Mulcair well since the late 1970s, sees his friend as an example of Quebec’s distinctive sub-species of Catholic “centre-left progressive.” Many in the CCF and then the NDP were inspired, like Grey himself, by socialist ideas close to those at the heart of the British Labour Party. But in Quebec, Grey says, Catholic progressives—like Trudeau, his friend Gérard Pelletier, the journalist and politician, and Claude Ryan, whom Mulcair would come to revere—blazed another trail. They were a varied group, but a common denominator was the influence of “personalism,” a French intellectual movement that spread among liberal Catholics in the middle of the last century. It emphasized individual responsibility—rather than, say, class conflict—as the moral underpinning for Catholics seeking reforms such as greater economic equality.

Mulcair says he and Charest worked well together for a time, but their relationship soured. The rift was partly about ideology. In Quebec, the main partisan dividing line is between federalists and separatists. That made the provincial Liberal party home for federalists across a sometimes uncomfortably wide ideological band. Charest, a former federal Conservative leader, governed from well to Mulcair’s right. As premier, he tried to reduce the clout of Quebec’s unions, for instance—one of several steps that angered the province’s left. Charest faced protests on the streets.

From retirement and in failing health, Ryan voiced misgivings to his protege in a final phone conversation. “I remember his words well: ‘The way things are going doesn’t respect Liberalism in terms of social responsibility,’ ” Mulcair says. “He was sending a clear message to me as one of his close acolytes in the new government that he thought it was drifting too far right.”

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