High school mentor instilled sense of social justice
The risk of contagion was great. Yet Quebecers welcomed them.
“They kept going down to the docks to help the poorest and the most miserable of the earth,” Mulcair says in an interview. “I guess we can compare and contrast that with today, when we sometimes forget about our obligation to help other people who are in that situation. It’s a reminder of what built Canada — that great value of sharing.”
John Mulcair worked as a labourer. His son, Thomas Joseph Mulcair — the grandfather the NDP leader was named after — moved to Montreal and became a tailor. “In the course of my career, I sometimes happened upon older lawyers who would say, ‘You know, my first suit was made by Thomas Mulcair,’ ” the grandson says.
While the Mulcairs were settling into a new country, what would become the maternal side of Thomas Mulcair’s family was well established.
His mother’s ancestors were among the earliest settlers of New France, arriving from France in the mid-1600s. One whose legacy reverberated through generations was Honoré Mercier, Mulcair’s maternal great-great-grandfather. He was premier of Quebec from 1887 to 1891.
As a young lawyer, Mercier opposed Confederation, fearing it would endanger the survival of the French language. Initially a member of the Liberal party, he co-founded the National Party, a coalition of Conservatives and Liberals, and became a staunchly nationalist premier. In one speech, he flirted with Quebec separatism, much like many premiers of all political stripes who followed him.
Mulcair’s maternal grandfather was also well established. He owned a Montreal company that sold equipment for firefighters and a big chicken farm in Sainte-Annedes-Lacs, a village he co-founded in the Laurentian Mountains, north of Montreal. He was its first mayor.
Intermarriage between the Irish and French-Canadian communities was common. Mulcair notes they shared rural roots, the Catholic religion and “resistance to the English.” In the case of his parents, they also shared big families: Henry Donnelly Mulcair grew up in a family of 10, Jeanne Hurtubise in a family of nine.
Henry and Jeanne met in 1948 in Sainte-Anne-des-Lacs when they were both 16. “Theirs was a love at first sight, and they decided then and there to spend the rest of their lives together,” Thomas Mulcair writes in his autobiography, Strength of
Conviction.
The couple would have 10 children, born between 1953 and 1971. Jeanne then went on birth control, a decision that outraged her parish priest, who refused to give her absolution — the forgiveness part in the sacrament of penance. Mulcair’s parents responded with equal outrage, deciding attendance at mass was no longer mandatory. The Mulcairs echoed the massive emptying of church pews during the socalled Quiet Revolution, a modernizing period in Quebec that began in the early 1960s.
It was also a time of growing nationalist sentiment, and Mulcair recalls aunts and uncles sometimes taking political positions his federalist parents opposed. But on the importance of preserving the French language and Quebec culture, all agreed. The older children, including Mulcair, went to English schools; the younger ones to French language primary schools before switching to English secondary schools. All became bilingual.
It’s a cultural duality that for Mulcair began with huddled Irish masses landing on Quebec’s shores.
“I guess it gives me a perspective on what’s always been important for Quebecers, but also an understanding of English Canada,” he says.
Responsibility came early
Memory tends to favour the extraordinary. But a lasting recollection of Thomas Mulcair’s is a common childhood scene — doing homework at the dining room table.
In a raucous family of 10 children — “We were quite a crew,” Mulcair says — that wasn’t as mundane as it seems. But what stands out for the NDP leader is how impervious his young self was to the surrounding racket.
“There would be little brothers and sisters running around and hollering and you wouldn’t go after them, you’d just keep doing your stuff,” he tells the Star.
As superpowers go, the ability to block out loud ambient noise isn’t quite the stuff of comic books. But Mulcair, 60, has found it useful on the campaign trail.
“If I’m giving a speech and somebody’s making a racket, like happened the other day in Winnipeg, I just smile and say, ‘You know, I come from a family of 10 kids. I can plow through this speech even with you screaming at me.’ ”
Thomas Joseph Mulcair was born at the Ottawa Civic Hospital in 1954. His parents lived at the time on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River in Gatineau.
By the time Mulcair was 5, his parents had moved to Ottawa and then Montreal before finally settling into a three-bedroom bungalow in the Montreal suburb of Laval. His father built two more bedrooms in the basement as the family grew.
His childhood was marked by adventure and responsibility. He was the second oldest child, a ranking that came with parental-type care for younger siblings.
“I could change diapers with safety pins when I was very young without stabbing myself or my younger brother and sister,” he says, proudly. “At the same time, my older sister and I were immediately the best picks for all the families in the neighbourhood for babysitters because they knew that we were reliable.”
He credits his parents, Henry Donnelly Mulcair and Jeanne Hurtubise, with teaching him to “stand up for what’s right.” In 1968, his second year at Chomedey Catho-
“At 8 or 10 years old, we were always in trouble, of course, but he was the one who would be able to talk to (the adults). He had a good way with words.” WAYNE HELLSTROM CHILDHOOD FRIEND OF MULCAIR’S
lic High School, Mulcair helped lead a sit-in that restored recess, which the principal had inexplicably cancelled.
Soon after, he decided politics would be the life for him. A high school teacher, an activist Catholic priest named Alan Cox, opened Mulcair’s eyes to injustice, partly by having Mulcair and his classmates do community work in poor Montreal neighbourhoods. “He made us understand that we need to do something about it,” Mulcair says.
Making ends meet was never easy. Mulcair helped out with a paper route when he was 10 and with his first summer job in a clothing factory when he was14. In1973, his father lost his job as an insurance company vice-president. Henry moved the family to their summer cottage at Sainte-Anne-desLacs, a hamlet in the scenic Laurentian Mountains, north of Montreal, and started a business as an insurance broker.
Also that year, Mulcair spent the first of four summers tarring roofs, hard work that would help pay his way through McGill University law school. He was accepted directly from CEGEP, the equivalent of grades 12 and 13 in Ontario.
Mulcair’s childhood summers were spent at the family cottage. Wayne Hellstrom met him there when they were both 5. He would become Mulcair’s lifelong best friend, even though participation in the Mulcair household required skills Hellstrom lacked.
“I remember a couple of times I went to lunch: there were 10 kids there and they each had two or three friends,” says Hellstrom, a urologic surgeon in New Orleans. “And we sat down at a table and the mother came out with, like, 40 sandwiches. All you saw was hands go everywhere and by the end, I don’t know if I even got a sandwich.”
Marois Lake, near the cottage, was Mulcair’s playground. When he was 8, he and Hellstrom canoed to an island and slept there overnight. He developed a lifelong passion for long-distance swimming. There was also the usual amount of youthful indiscretions.
“One time, there was a guy who had a big motorboat that we borrowed for a ride,” Hellstrom says, making clear the owner would have used a word other than borrowed. “We drained his gas tank.”
Whenever parents demanded explanations, Mulcair’s friends would inevitably choose him as their emissary.
“At 8 or 10 years old, we were always in trouble, of course, but he was the one who would be able to talk to them,” Hellstrom says. “He had a good way with words.”
The best friends were adventurers. At 15, they hitchhiked to Prince Edward Island and back. In a phone interview, Mulcair laughs deeply when asked if he slept under the stars. “Absolutely — it’s the only way to do it,” he says. “We did have a pup tent but that was only in case it rained.”
Mulcair says he and his buddy hit the road with $40 each. When told Hellstrom recalls it was $35, Mulcair laughs again: “Yeah, I probably took five off him.”
“We had an absolute ball doing it,” he adds. “But it was easy at the time. People weren’t as wary. People would pick you up.”
Hellstrom recalls only one mishap: a jar of jam broke in Mulcair’s backpack. “He had very, very sticky clothes.”
Four years later, Mulcair and Hellstrom were in charge of the bar at a friend’s wedding reception. Hellstrom remembers it as the night Mulcair pushed him into the lake. To Mulcair, it’s the night he met his wife, Catherine Pinhas, who would become a psychologist and close confidante.
It was love at first sight, just like when Mulcair’s father met his mother.
“Maybe we’re just blessed with the ability to find extraordinary women in our lives and to recognize it,” Mulcair says, when asked about the romantic coincidence. “Catherine is the most extraordinary partner that someone could ever hope to have.”
ROOTS OF THE LEADERS Last week: Stephen Harper. Next week: Justin Trudeau