User:Soulscanner/Sandbox/mulcair

Personal life and education
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 descendent of Irish immigrants who arrived in the Quebec City area during Great Famine (Ireland) of the 1840's. 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 administation's plan to abolish recess, and participated in weekend community work in Montreal organized by one of this teachers, Father Alan Cox.

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. 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.

Early Career
Mulcair moved to Quebec City to work in the Legislative Affairs branch in Quebec's Ministry of Justice from 1978-1980 and in the Legal Affairs Directorate of the Superior Council of the French Language 1980-82. He would also teach introductory law at Saint Lawrence College 1979-1982.

In 1983, the Quebec government cut the salaries of civil servants by 20%, so Mulcair and his young family moved to Montreal to became director of legal affairs at Alliance Quebec, a lobby group for the English-speaking community in Quebec. During that time, he played a role in amending the Charter of the French Language, in opposition to the goals of Quebec separatists. In 1985 he began a private law practice, and was named the reviser of the statutes of Manitoba following the Supreme Court of Canada ruling in the Reference re Manitoba Language Rights case. Mulcair also taught law courses to non-law students at Concordia University (1984), at the Saint Lawrence Campus of Champlain Regional College in Sainte-Foy, and at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières.

Quebec Education Minister and former Quebec Liberal Party leader Claude Ryan named Mulcair commissioner of the Appeals Committee on the Language of Instruction (1986-87) to deal with illegal English Catholic schools set up in defiance of Quebec's language laws. Mulcair credits Ryan with becoming his political mentor during this period.

Mulcair was president of the Office des professions du Québec (1987 to 1993), where he introduced reforms to make disciplinary hearings more transparent, and successfully led a major effort to have cases of alleged sexual abuse of patients decisively dealt with. Mulcair was also a board member of the group Conseil de la langue française, and at the time of his appointment to the Office des Professions he had been serving as president of the English speaking Catholic Council.