National Post (National Edition)
Mulcair’s winding Quebec journey
How an ardent Anglo advocate became a friend to Quebec nationalists
Long before he was a politician knocking on doors for votes, Tom Mulcair came calling on Valerie Ford. She owned a knitting shop in the Montreal suburb of Pointe Claire and had run afoul of Quebec’s language police because of a bilingual sign saying “Wool/Laine.”
It was the early 1980s, less than a decade after the adoption of Quebec’s Bill 101 language law, and Mulcair was director of legal affairs for the anglophone rights organization Alliance Quebec. “He said if I wanted to fight it, Alliance Quebec and him would back me all the way,” Ford recalled in an interview this week.
She went to court with other targeted merchants, leading to the landmark Supreme Court ruling Ford vs. Quebec, which struck down the government’s ban on bilingual signs. She says she could never have done it without Mulcair’s unflagging support.
“He was good. He was honest, and he cared. So many others said you’re in trouble with the law, tough (luck), just pay up and leave it. I didn’t want to,” the 77-year-old Ford said. “I guess I was defiant in those days.”
On matters related to language and Quebec nationalism, the same could be said of the federal NDP leader. When he sensed an injustice in Quebec’s language legislation, he fought it. “It is one thing to require the use of French. It’s quite another thing to forbid the use of another language,” Mulcair told a 1984 Alliance Quebec meeting on the signlaw challenge. Later, as a Liberal Member of the National Assembly, he called for an inquiry into the organized rejection of No votes in his riding and others during the 1995 referendum. “This was an orchestrated, manipulated electoral fraud,” he said at the time. Two years later, he said the best way for Quebec to avoid partition in the event of a Yes vote to sovereignty would be for the separatists to ask a clear question: “Should Quebec become an independent country tomorrow, yes or no?” The PQ would never ask such a clear question because it would be doomed to fail, he added.
Today, with francophone Quebec central to New Democrat hopes of winning the Oct. 19 election, Mulcair, 60, is not about to play up his role in challenging Bill 101 or in accusing the Yes forces of cheating in 1995. Mulcair’s two-year stint with Alliance Quebec was his debut on the public stage, but it merits only a short passage in his upcoming autobiography, Strength of Conviction. He emphasizes Alliance’s involvement in cases upholding the rights of francophones outside Quebec as much as he does its defence of anglophones. On the referendum issue, he calls the rejected ballots an anomaly but leaves it to the reader to Google the specifics.
For most Quebecers, the last referendum and the language battles of the 1970s and ‘80s are fading memories, if they are remembered at all. But to hear Bloc Québécois president Mario Beaulieu, who stepped aside as party leader last month to make way for Gilles Duceppe, Mulcair’s involvement in those episodes left an indelible blot on his record. Speaking to a group of sovereigntists last November, Beaulieu called Mulcair “this former Alliance Quebec lawyer who had the nerve to accuse the indépendantistes of cheating during the 1995 referendum,” according to a report in l’Aut’Journal. In a 2011 article in the same publication, Beaulieu criticized Mulcair’s Alliance Quebec past and referred to his “tangled” record on the language issue. As a Liberal MNA, he had been “ferociously federalist” before softening his stance upon joining the NDP, Beaulieu wrote.
In an interview this week, Beaulieu said it is too early to say whether the Bloc will be dredging up Mulcair’s distant past as it goes on the attack in the up- coming campaign. But he said it is relevant because it shows how the NDP leader “talks out of both sides of his mouth.” He cited Mulcair’s shifting position on TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline as an example. In 2012, Mulcair told a Toronto audience that a west-to-east pipeline was a “common sense solution,” but faced with mounting opposition to the project in Quebec, he now says an NDP government would not approve the pipeline until environmental assessment procedures are toughened.
“He seems to say one thing in Quebec and another thing in the rest of Canada,” Beaulieu said.
Antonia Maioni, a professor of political science at McGill University, said Mulcair’s affiliation with Alliance Quebec is double-edged. “The upside of having been in Alliance Quebec is that Mr. Mulcair knows the political terrain really well, and he probably also knows a lot more about the sovereigntist movement and about sovereigntists themselves than any other federal politician,” she said. What remains to be seen is whether his adversaries — only the Bloc would really see it as an issue — will use it to imply he cannot defend Quebec’s interests.
Maioni said she doubts the argument would have legs, in part because Mulcair’s most recent incarnation is as a proponent of the NDP’s Sherbrooke Declaration. In addition to recognizing Quebec’s “national character,” the 2005 policy paper repudiates the federal Clarity Act by stating that a simple majority of 50% plus one in a referendum would be enough for Quebec to separate. The policy is silent on the need for a clear question of the sort Mulcair proposed as a provincial politician, saying Quebec’s right to self-determination means it is up to the provincial legislature to draft the question.
Maioni said the Sherbrooke Declaration was key to the NDP’s 2011 breakthrough in Quebec under the late Jack Layton, and it remains central to the NDP’s hopes of building on that base. “It’s a really important thing that anchors the NDP in terms of where it stands on an issue that matters to Quebecers,” she said. Outside Quebec, however, its staunch nationalist flavour could be enough to scare away voters considering giving the party a chance.
While some, like Beaulieu, see Mulcair as a walking contradiction — the Bill 101 critic who considers Quebec’s right to separate sacrosanct — another interpretation is that he is the product of a complicated place who came to age at a tumultuous time.
Fresh out of McGill law school, he headed for the belly of the beast, working in Quebec City for the brand-new PQ government of René Lévesque. His job immediately before joining Alliance Quebec was with the Conseil de la langue française, the government advisory body reporting to the minister responsible for protecting the French language. After leaving Alliance Quebec in 1985, he worked for the Manitoba government overseeing the translation of its statutes into French.
Eric Maldoff, a Montreal lawyer and the first president of Alliance Quebec, said that in its early days, the organization was about building bridges; Maldoff even maintained a cordial relationship with Lévesque.
“The positioning was not a hard, ‘Screw you, we don’t believe in French.’ It was a question of reaching a mutual accommodation,” he said.
That reality, combined with Mulcair’s subsequent track record, should immunize him against attack from a separatist fringe that remains “deeply disturbed” by Alliance Quebec, he said. Polls continue to show the NDP with a commanding lead over the secondplace Bloc in Quebec. “Clearly Quebecers are not feeling this is a big problem,” Maldoff said. “He has demonstrated a high degree of sensitivity towards the French language and the French community. There may be some that try to take a shot at him, but I think they’re going to be hard-pressed to suggest that he’s some sort of radical, unsympathetic person who doesn’t understand Quebec. That’s just not going to happen.”
John Parisella, an adviser to a succession of provincial Liberal leaders and another alumnus from the early days of Alliance Quebec, agreed. “Tom is not at all anywhere close to being strident on this issue,” he said.
Over his years in politics, Mulcair became known for his hot temper. But Ford, who sold her wool shop in the late 1980s when her husband fell ill, remembers him as a soothing force. She said she was so mad at the language inspector complaining about her sign she might have shot him if she had a gun. “I was seeing red, bright red,” she said.
“But Tom Mulcair calmed me down. He showed me how to weather it.”
He was good. He was honest, and he cared