At the time of the ndp’s founding in August 1961, Quebec’s Quiet Revolution was well underway. Premier Jean Lesage, the popular leader of a progressive Liberal government, activated the province’s fiscal and legal authority after his election in 1960 to accelerate the process of francophone Quebecers becoming masters of their own house. The move to nationalize hydroelectricity assets, create investment funds for local businesses and expand social programs produced a sense of confidence and opportunity in Quebec. This lent credibility to the state as a vehicle for positive change, and it went hand in hand with a rising nationalist sentiment. By the late 1960s, most of the left in Quebec was wrapped up in the burgeoning sovereignty movement. They were fighting for a sovereign Quebec, not a social democratic Canada.
The ndp recognized Quebec as a nation within Canada at its founding meeting, and its first leader, Tommy Douglas, embraced asymmetrical federalism. Douglas held up the creation of the Canada and Quebec pension plans in the 1960s as a way for national programs to be established while recognizing Quebec’s distinct status. Jack and his mentor at McGill University, Charles Taylor, would later argue that flexible federalism was an approach that could work for Canada and satisfy the aims of social democracy alongside the needs of Quebec.
A series of events foiled the federal ndp’s attempts to make inroads in Quebec over the next four decades: Trudeaumania in 1968; the constitutional wrangling throughout the 1970s and early 1980s; Brian Mulroney’s Conservative sweep in 1984, his free trade offer in 1988, the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990; and the rise and domination of the Bloc Québécois over the next twenty years.
There were glimmers of hope for us in each of these developments, but they proved fleeting.
In the 1960s, Tommy Douglas had made a strong push towards Quebec. Douglas recruited charismatic lawyer Robert Cliche, who became associate president of the federal ndp and leader of the Quebec ndp. Cliche ran in the Beauce riding in 1965, losing by only three thousand votes. Charles Taylor also ran a strong campaign in the same election in Mount Royal against a young Pierre Trudeau, capturing 30 per cent of the vote and garnering national attention. In 1968, Cliche took another run at an ndp breakthrough in the Duvernay riding near Montreal and fell just short; he captured 44 per cent of the vote, losing by fewer than twenty-five hundred votes.
(At the provincial level, labour activist David Côté won the ccf’s first and only provincial seat in the Quebec National Assembly in 1944. The Quebec ndp ran a small number of candidates in the 1970s and 1980s but never garnered more than 2.5 per cent of the popular vote in a provincial election. The provincial ndp in Quebec disbanded in 1989.)
In the mid-1980s, ndp leader Ed Broadbent, despite his weak French, invested resources and time into the federal party’s Quebec organization and reached out to the Quebec labour movement. Broadbent was popular, and the party was credible enough at the time for former Progressive Conservative mp Robert Toupin, who had recently become an independent representing the Terrebonne riding in suburban Montreal, to cross the floor to join the ndp caucus in 1986. (Toupin returned to being an independent within a year and would subsequently lose as an independent candidate in the 1988 general election.) In 1987, the ndp held its first-ever policy convention in Montreal, where the reception was warm.
Momentum appeared to be on the party’s side heading into the 1988 election. Membership in Quebec totalled twenty thousand. But Quebecers embraced free trade and stuck with Mulroney. Broadbent did manage to increase the party’s support to 14 per cent of the vote in Quebec, cracking double digits for the first time and securing three times as much support as during his first campaign as leader in 1979. But despite a strong team of star candidates, including Rémy Trudel, François Beaulne and Paul “The Butcher” Vachon, the ndp failed to elect a single Quebec mp and came second in only seven ridings, including Témiscamingue (38 per cent of the vote), Chambly (32 per cent) and Abitibi (26 per cent). The party was not strong in any part of Montreal, though we had pockets of support in Montérégie, Mauricie, around Quebec City and in the sovereigntist heartland, the Saguenay.
“Not winning a seat in 1988 in Quebec was a huge setback,” recalls Broadbent, who resigned shortly after the election. The results in Quebec were a key motivating factor in his decision. “We did well in B.C. and Ontario,” Broadbent remembers, “but we didn’t do as well as a lot of people hoped, and certainly I was down. It was the first time ever I was down—because we didn’t get the breakthrough.”
In 1990, under federal leader Audrey McLaughlin, consumer advocate Phil Edmonston became the first New Democrat elected in Quebec. Edmonston had placed a strong second behind the pc candidate in the francophone Chambly riding, southeast of Montreal, in 1988, and he agreed to carry the ndp banner there again when a by-election arose.
Edmonston won the by-election by twenty thousand votes, capturing 68 per cent of the vote. Many party activists thought that after thirty years, the ndp was finally on its way to establishing a strong presence in Quebec. The victory was short lived, however. The party failed to do the necessary outreach and policy work to build on the by-election win, and McLaughlin neglected to appoint Edmonston to a senior critic position, which would have shown Quebec voters that they mattered.
Edmonston and many New Democrats across Canada were devastated when the Meech Lake Accord, a set of constitutional amendments including the recognition of Quebec as a distinct society, died in June 1990. Edmonston’s own constituency staff became full-time organizers for the upstart Bloc Québécois, founded by sitting Liberal and Progressive Conservative Quebec mps under the leadership of former Mulroney cabinet minister Lucien Bouchard. The new caucus of Bloc mps in Parliament became the vehicle to articulate Quebec frustrations with Ottawa. In the summer of 1990, the Bloc announced it would contest a by-election in the Laurier–Sainte-Marie riding, with Gilles Duceppe as their candidate. Overnight, ndp candidate Louise O’Neill, who was until then favoured to win the by-election over the Liberals, finished a distant third.
By the time of the 1993 general election on October 25, just one year after the second attempt at constitutional amendments through the Charlottetown Accord had failed, support for independence in Quebec was way up. Edmonston decided not to run again, and the ndp’s fortunes tanked in Quebec. Province-wide, the party’s vote dropped to below 2 per cent, helping to create our worst-ever showing in a national campaign: the ndp captured less than 7 per cent of the popular vote in Canada. In the Chambly riding, the ndp lost sixty-five percentage points, garnering just 3 per cent of the popular vote in the riding.
The Bloc, a party dedicated to breaking up the country, became Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, winning fifty-four of Quebec’s seventy-five seats and sweeping nearly all the province’s francophone ridings. After a short run that looked so promising, the ndp returned to its traditional spot in Quebec politics—completely off the radar.
Jack knew this history well, but he was undeterred. Jack thought it was the wrong approach to force Quebecers to choose between being Canadians and being Quebecers. They were Canadians by virtue of being Quebecers, and Quebec was part of Canada. Their route to citizenship was through their collective identity. He also recognized that Quebec nationalists weren’t automatically separatists: to think so was to ignore an important—and volatile—segment of the voting population. Mulroney had courted nationalists. So had Paul Martin.
Leaving Quebec nationalist voters to the Bloc was a real risk to national unity, Jack believed. He wanted to reach these Quebecers along with the large number of disaffected Quebec Liberal voters who over the years had lost faith in their party. These two disparate groups of voters would become part of Jack’s coalition in Quebec, but there would be a long way to go before we could get them to look at us seriously. That had become painfully clear in September 2003, when we assembled a focus group of francophone Liberal and Bloc voters to probe what they thought of the ndp and Jack, still new to his role as party leader.
A few of us from party headquarters in Ottawa drove to Montreal to listen in. Focus groups don’t give you quantitative data like polling does. But a few hours of probing more deeply into what voters are thinking, and testing your arguments, is valuable qualitative research. We sat quietly to observe behind the two-way mirror.
There were a few tidbits of good news. We could sense a desire in the focus group for an alternative to the Bloc and the federal Liberals. People liked our values. But to them, the ndp was a party of “elsewhere in Canada” that they didn’t really trust—a Prairie party, an Ontario party or a B.C. party. Another key message was that people wouldn’t support us until we ran credible candidates who could win. One of the focus group participants thought the ndp had actually stopped running candidates in Quebec; he recommended we start up again if we wanted to earn his vote. One woman said the ndp reminded her of a little ant: the party worked hard and was determined, but it was small and easily squished. As frustrating as it was to hear, we knew she was right: the ndp at the time was easy to dismiss and even easier to step on without anybody ever noticing.
Back in Ottawa, we began a fight inside the party to invest more time and money in Quebec. Jack and his inner circle pushed back when some in the party argued forcefully that it was a waste of time and money. They wanted to focus on Quebec after we had made gains in the traditional areas of support like Ontario, B.C. and the Prairies. Jack’s side argued that gains in our traditional areas of support would fully return only if we could show we were making gains in Quebec. So far, the best we’d been able to do was make small incremental gains. We’d increased our popular vote from 4.6 per cent in the 2004 election to 7.5 per cent in 2006. That was better than the 1.8 per cent we got in 2000, but it also bolstered the naysayers, inside the party and beyond, who said that history was stacked against Jack and Quebec wasn’t worth our efforts. We disagreed, but we knew Jack’s Clarity Act misstep in 2004 had pointed to a larger problem. The party couldn’t improvise on fundamental issues like national unity in the middle of an election campaign, which is how Jack’s comments came across to the public in Quebec and across Canada.
Our team in Quebec was devastated with the 2004 results. With Jack as leader and some better-calibre candidates, the team had hoped to pick up one or two seats, including the Manicouagan riding, where leadership candidate Pierre Ducasse was running. Ducasse did increase the ndp vote five-fold, but coming from such a weak starting position meant he came in third with 10 per cent of the vote.
The Quebec membership went through some soul-searching. The ndp had been a follower in Quebec since the time of the Quiet Revolution. When the Parti Québécois held a referendum on sovereignty association in 1980, we opposed it. When the federal Liberals repatriated the constitution in 1982, we supported them. When the Progressive Conservatives rolled the dice with the Meech Lake Accord, and later the Charlottetown Accord, we followed. In response to the 1995 referendum, the Liberal Party had drafted the Clarity Act to spell out the conditions under which the federal government would enter into negotiations with a province to separate. We supported the legislation.
We’d been bystanders to the initiatives of the real Quebec political actors. It was time for us to become proactive, to go on the offensive. After the 1997 election, McDonough had tried to tackle the Quebec puzzle when she commissioned the Social Democratic Forum on Canada’s Future. The panel included prominent Quebecers such as Charles Taylor, Nycole Turmel, vice-president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada at the time, and social activist Marianne Roy. Its mandate involved recognizing and respecting the Quebec people in a meaningful way. But when the panel completed its work in 1999, McDonough, who struggled with French, had failed to articulate explicitly how the values of Quebecers and the New Democrats intersected and how the party saw Quebec’s role within Canada.
Jack’s Quebec team, under the leadership of organizer Rebecca Blaikie, continued to build on the infrastructure side. But we also had important policy work to do. It was time for the federalist social democratic party to develop a progressive modern vision for Quebec in a united Canada.
We knew the national question was not the main preoccupation for our Quebec membership, but having a cohesive answer to it was the price of admission for a party vying to form government.
In the weeks following the 2004 campaign, ndp activists in Quebec met to discuss how the party could articulate positions on a variety of issues, from the recognition of Quebec’s national character to cooperative federalism. Pierre Ducasse, associate vice-president of the party at the time, proposed that, instead of a series of policy statements, the ndp should draft a declaration that threaded together a coherent, comprehensive social democratic position on Quebec’s role within the federation.
The team agreed, and Jack tapped a group led by Ducasse to begin drafting the declaration. In January 2005, Jack hired Ducasse to work in his leader’s office on Parliament Hill. As someone who had both the ear of the leader and the trust of the Quebec membership, Ducasse’s job was to complete the draft and present it to Jack for review.
That spring, Jack circulated the draft among the members of the caucus for feedback. Not surprisingly, the issue of what constituted a clear outcome in a referendum was a sticking point. But these discussions were happening in private now, not on the campaign trail during a federal election.
“The paper has been circulated,” Jack wrote to Ducasse in an email on April 19. “Bill Blaikie raised concerns about the second-to-last paragraph in the section dealing with any referendum vote. The paragraph discusses the ndp’s position should there be a 50% +1 vote etc. You should try to speak with him before the meeting tomorrow if you can. Perhaps including some of the wording from the Supreme Court decision itself. We’re going to have some work to do here. It won’t be easy. But the paper gives us a great opportunity to move this forward.”
Ducasse understood that bridging the gap would be a challenge. “I’ll try to set up something with him,” he responded by email. “But ultimately, reworking the writing will not necessarily be enough. We all know there is a very real difference of opinion. I’m sure you understand that we can’t dilute the policy to a point where it doesn’t say anything. But I’ll do all that I can.”
Jack knew he was walking a tightrope, but he remained positive. “Our goal is to do the hard work needed to forge a consensus if this is possible,” Jack replied to Ducasse. “The easiest steps (!) were securing agreement to this point. Now we have Ed Broadbent and Bill Blaikie who were literally in the House through the two decades (in Ed’s case three decades) where these matters were discussed. Do not get discouraged. Be constantly optimistic. There is no other way. Words can be nuanced and language adjusted to find solutions. Rely on the specifics of the Supreme Court ruling to help.”
The caucus discussions continued, as did conversations with Brian Topp. Topp spoke at length with Jack about the Supreme Court ruling. Before drafting the Clarity Act, the Liberal government under Jean Chrétien had sent a reference to the top court in 1998 to clarify the legality of a unilateral declaration of independence. The ruling would later inform the Clarity Act, which passed in Parliament with the support of the ndp in 2000.
The Court said that if Quebecers voted on a clear question with a clear majority, then the federal government would have an obligation to open the negotiation process. But neither the court nor the Clarity Act outlined precisely what the threshold for triggering negotiations was. The policy being proposed stated that the “ndp would recognize a majority decision (50% + 1) of the Quebec people in the event of a referendum on the political status.”
For Jack it was unacceptable to have Quebec outside of the constitutional family forever. Bringing them in, he believed, was a two-step process: first, you relentlessly present your case for a strong, progressive Canada that respects the people of Quebec, and second, you only secure the signature when you are guaranteed success.
Using this perspective to inform their thinking, Topp and Jack, along with Karl Bélanger, talked through language around Quebec for the ndp to use in the upcoming campaign and beyond. They settled on “Winning conditions for Canada in Quebec.” Karl pushed for this phrase because he felt it summarized the ndp’s vision and wouldn’t get Jack bogged down in legal details.
It was a play on a famous Lucien Bouchard statement: he had said he wouldn’t hold a referendum unless he was able to put together the winning conditions. Jack tested out the line sporadically in interviews and scrums before the election campaign got underway at the end of November 2005, but he first used it with meaningful impact in the leaders’ debates in Montreal in January. The line has remained in the ndp’s toolbox ever since.
Jack talked through these themes with the caucus, and in the end, he was able to get buy-in. The draft document, dubbed the Sherbrooke Declaration, was presented to the general council of the Quebec section of the party in Sherbrooke, Quebec, on May 7, 2005. The declaration cleared its first hurdle when the group voted overwhelmingly to adopt it.
In speaking to reporters at the time, Jack was careful to emphasize the ndp’s support for asymmetrical federalism. “I know that the Quebec wing is in the middle of adopting an interesting proposition on the place of the Quebec nation in an asymmetric, cooperative and flexible Canada,” he told the media. “I very much like this approach that is being developed and that confirms and reaffirms the principles we have already upheld.”
The declaration was an important element of our Quebec strategy. If it was adopted by the federal membership at the party’s next policy convention, the ndp would have, for the first time, a comprehensive policy on Quebec’s role within Canada.
It was no fluke that we decided to hold our convention in Quebec City in September 2006. It was part of our campaign to court Quebecers and show them how much they mattered to Jack and the ndp. We couldn’t screw it up.
As director of communications in the leader’s office at the time, my job was to showcase the party as a serious player vying for the support of Quebecers. Jack’s ground rules were clear: all staffers dealing with delegates, the media and the public were to be francophones or bilingual. Our keynote speakers would be Quebec headliners, and our panel chairs and moderators would speak for equal amounts of time in French and English. We would ensure that French was spoken on the floor from the microphones during policy debates, and these debates would highlight issues that showcased how the party’s values were in sync with those of Quebecers.
Making sure the Sherbrooke Declaration, already endorsed by the Quebec section of the party, became ndp policy was also vital; otherwise, the ndp would fall flat on its face in front of the whole province. The stakes were high—and Jack would wear the defeat if we failed.
In the run-up to the convention, members of the party’s Quebec council called riding associations across the country to garner support. They asked members to read the declaration, talk about it and get back with any questions they might have. By the time the Quebec City convention opened, the Quebec team had reached out to more than half of all the riding associations, the first time such a comprehensive internal outreach had been done within the federal party.
Jack had been doing his own outreach campaign in Quebec. In the months leading up to our Quebec City convention, there were a lot of quiet conversations. There was also public speculation about Tom Mulcair’s political career.
On February 27, just weeks after the 2006 federal election, Mulcair had quit Quebec premier Jean Charest’s Cabinet in a very public dispute. Mulcair had been serving as the province’s environment minister, and he refused to support a project to transfer lands in the Mont-Orford provincial park to condo developers. He decided to leave the Cabinet table and sit as a backbencher rather than accept a demotion to minister of government services.
After he left Charest’s Cabinet, Mulcair politely turned down overtures from the Green Party. He also talked to the federal Conservatives. During this period, he also considered hanging up his skates and walking away from politics, perhaps joining a law firm or doing environmental consultant work.
Mulcair and Jack didn’t know each other, though they had met briefly years earlier. In 2002, when Jack was serving as president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, he was in Laval, Quebec, for a meeting. At the time, Mulcair represented the Laval riding of Chomedey in the National Assembly as a member of the Opposition Liberals. The fcm had called Charest’s office, requesting a meeting with a provincial representative while Jack was in town. Charest’s office sent Mulcair.
Jack and Mulcair met at the Cosmodome, Laval’s space and science centre. The meeting was straightforward and uneventful. Neither man had a handler with him and neither had any idea who the other was, even though Mulcair had met Jack’s father, Robert Layton, years earlier. In 1984, the elder Layton, a newly appointed cabinet minister in Mulroney’s government, was looking for a chief of staff and interviewed Mulcair at his Beaconsfield home. At the time, Mulcair was the director of legal affairs for the English-speaking rights group Alliance Quebec, which wanted to get plugged in to the new government in Ottawa. (Years later, when Mulcair recounted this story to Jack, Jack replied, “Yeah, but I got you.”)
Not long after Mulcair’s resignation from Charest’s Cabinet in 2006, Pierre Ducasse struck up a relationship with Graham Carpenter, Mulcair’s assistant in his Chomedy riding office. Each knew his boss wanted to meet with the other’s, and it was their job to help set things up.
Jack knew it would be a real catch if Mulcair were to deliver a keynote address on sustainable development at the forthcoming convention in Quebec City. He asked, and Mulcair, who was weighing his political options, said yes.
“I’ve just talked with Thomas Mulcair about speaking at convention,” Jack told convention coordinator Ira Dubinsky over the phone a few weeks before the event. Dubinsky put the phone on his shoulder and googled Mulcair while Jack was talking. “Oh, this is a big deal,” Ira thought to himself.
“When it was announced Tom would be a speaker, no one knew where it would lead,” recalls Rebecca Blaikie, whose job it was to get as many Quebecers to attend the convention as possible. She had begun using the draft Sherbrooke Declaration as an organizing tool to entice people in Quebec to come to the convention and join the party. Having the document helped, but people expressed lingering doubts. “Oui, mais,” Blaikie often heard.
The convention lineup already featured high-profile party stalwarts such as Shirley Douglas and Stephen Lewis, and the last-minute addition required some last-minute juggling, but it was well worth the short-term chaos.
Jack had made a commitment to professionalize the party, and we put on a slick show at the convention with strong visuals for the cameras. It was part of our effort to build a refreshed ndp brand around Jack, whom our polling and focus groups had consistently shown was more popular than the party itself. “That attracted me,” Mulcair explained later of the quality of the people in the organization.
Tom spoke about sustainable development and how the federal government under the Liberals had let Canada down. After he left the podium, a group of Quebec media scrummed him. Jack’s plan—to show the Quebec media and political establishment that the ndp was serious about makings gains in the province—appeared to be working.
For ndp veteran Raymond Guardia, who had spent years toiling away in Quebec on behalf of the party, the convention was electrifying. Guardia chaired most of the proceedings, and he could sense the energy in the room, especially when delegates endorsed the Sherbrooke Declaration as party policy.
“You’d have to go back nearly twenty years, to the 1987 convention in Montreal, for the last time Quebec New Democrats felt this good. The feeling among those from Quebec was amazing,” he recalls. Following the passage of the declaration, thousands of delegates broke into spontaneous chanting of the French version of the party’s name: “npd! npd!”
This was Jack’s coming-out party, too. After a disappointing first election as leader in 2004 and an effort in the winter campaign of 2005–06 that failed to see the promised breakthrough in key urban areas, Jack had a lot riding on the convention. His gamble with Mulcair and his determination to pass the Sherbrooke Declaration were part of his larger effort to put his stamp on the party.
At each federal convention of the ndp, delegates are asked whether they want to trigger a leadership contest. It is a public litmus test of how much support the leader has inside the party and an important number over which the media obsess. Every leader knows that anything lower than 75 per cent support in this vote of confidence will be cited by political opponents and the press as evidence you’ve lost the party’s grassroots. Jack was preoccupied with the vote all weekend.
The referendum on Jack’s leadership took place on the morning of the final day of convention, before his address to delegates. He nervously awaited the results in the green room backstage with his chief of staff, Bob Gallagher. After party officials counted the ballots, they gave me the numbers so that I could convey them to Jack before he headed to the stage.
“We got the results. Ready?” I asked.
Jack, reviewing the speech he was about to deliver, looked up and replied. “Yeah, go.”
“Congratulations—92 per cent,” I said.
A big smile crossed his face. Jack knew what it meant. Delegates from across the country, including a sizable group from Quebec, had endorsed his leadership in convincing numbers. Despite the disappointing results from his two election campaigns, he had a mandate to take the party from one satisfied to sit on the sidelines to one that wanted to govern.
Five years earlier, his party had been going through a full-blown midlife crisis. Now, it was united, focussed and laying the foundations for a breakthrough.
Making inroads in Quebec was vital to make the party into a viable player for power, and the successful convention in Quebec City was a critical step in this process. We now had the Sherbrooke Declaration and had shown Quebec that someone of Tom Mulcair’s stature didn’t think of the ndp as an ant. Now, Jack had to close the deal with Mulcair.
It was November 7, 2006, and Jack had been courting Mulcair for a few months to join the ndp and become his Quebec lieutenant. He figured the atmosphere of the historic Mon Village restaurant, located just off the Trans-Canada Highway near his hometown of Hudson, Quebec, was the perfect spot for Jack and Olivia to enjoy a nice meal with Mulcair and his wife, Catherine. The restaurant’s stone fireplaces and wood panelling made it comfortable but not too fancy or stuffy, and on this quiet Tuesday night the four of them had a section all to themselves, so they could speak freely without worrying about being overheard.
The couple hit it off over prime rib and red wine. The conversation was easy, bouncing around from kids and travel to policy and politics. Olivia was charming and Jack was his easygoing self, recalls Mulcair. “The dinner was the turning point,” he says.
Catherine was vital in making the decision about her husband’s next steps. The couple had been together since they were teenagers, and they always made decisions together. “Catherine was strongly impressed by Jack as a person and the vision he talked about with us that night, and he continued afterwards to show a soft touch,” says Mulcair.
A few days later, on November 10, Jack followed up with a thank-you email to Mulcair: “Merci à Catherine pour s’être joint à nous! J’espère qu’il y aura encore souvent des occasions dans le futur.” (Thank you to Catherine for joining us! I hope there will be many such occasions in the future.)
Over the next little while, Mulcair and his wife “thought about it quite a bit,” he recalls.
“Are you convinced that you don’t want to do politics anymore?” Catherine asked her husband, who had an offer from a law firm in hand.
“Of course I’m not done with politics. I like it too much,” he replied.
“So, what’s your best fit?” she asked.
“I really like Layton. I like the vision,” said Mulcair.
Shortly after the dinner in Hudson in November, the ndp put down another marker on Quebec. The Bloc, attempting to box in the other parties in the House of Commons, tabled a motion: “That this House recognize that Quebecers form a nation.” The ndp had held that position for decades, and there seemed to be broad support within caucus to support the motion. The Bloc quickly amended the motion on November 22 to include the words “currently within Canada.”
Caucus member Charlie Angus, the popular mp from northern Ontario, laid out the problem about the Bloc’s curveball in an email to Jack. “Now that the Bloc have amended their motion to a ‘nation within Canada, now, for the time being, until something better comes along, etc...’ it has to change our response. No amount of internal ndp gymnastics can erase the cynicism... I look forward to us standing as a unified caucus to give these guys the thumbs down,” Angus wrote to the ndp leader.
“The Bloc carries the tone of a casual date... I’m with him [Canada] at the moment ‘wink wink.’ Something fundamentally insincere,” agreed Jack in his email reply.
In response to the Bloc, Stephen Harper introduced his own motion. “That this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada,” it read.
Jack confirmed the ndp would support the Conservative motion. “Mr. Speaker, I am proud to represent a party that, for decades, has supported recognition of Quebecers’ nationhood,” Jack said in the House of Commons on November 22.
“Quebecers are an important people within Canada, a people with an amazing four-hundred-year history, an extraordinary people, proud of their values, proud of their history, an important people not only here in Canada, but around the world and in La Francophonie.
“We are proud of Quebec. I am proud to have been born in Quebec and to have grown up there, proud that my grandfather was a minister in the Government of Quebec. I am proud, like anyone who lives or has lived in Quebec and who knows that Quebecers form a nation.
“We have long supported this concept, because it is a question of respect for our fellow citizens who live in Quebec.”
Forty-five years after the ndp had recognized the people of Quebec as a nation, the House of Commons followed suit. The motion passed on November 27 with the backing of the entire ndp caucus. Whether the Bloc had been laying a trap for Parliament as a whole, for Harper’s Conservatives or for the ndp, it was the Liberal Party that was divided on this fundamental question. Liberal mps represented fifteen of the sixteen “no” votes; the sixteenth was independent mp Garth Turner.
The following weekend, the federal Liberal Party, divided on the question of the Québécois forming a nation, held its leadership convention in Montreal. The hotly contested race had been getting plenty of media coverage: the country was watching closely to see who would succeed Paul Martin. But ground zero for the sponsorship scandal wasn’t the smartest choice for the struggling Liberals. It was another example of how the party was becoming tone deaf. We were there on December 2, the day of their leadership vote, to remind them of that.
“Welcome to Montreal,” beamed the headline of the red pamphlet we’d produced to hand out to delegates and the media. Inside, readers would find a tour itinerary: a “Map to the Scars.”
Locations to visit included the site of the inquiry led by Justice John Gomery and Restaurant Frank, where various Liberal operatives had received envelopes full of cash.
I was at the convention to do some media commentary and to spin for the ndp, along with Olivia and Karl Bélanger, Jack’s press secretary. It was fun to watch delegates read our pamphlet and to generally make trouble for our opponents. It was less fun when the outcome of the leadership vote was not what we had predicted.
Our war room back in Ottawa, headed by Kathleen Monk, deputy director of Strategic Communications who joined the leader’s office in August 2006, had come up with a few scenarios and drafted well-developed responses for each of them. Our research team had put together extensive notes on both Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae, because we assumed one of these two men would win the leadership. We didn’t have much of an angle on Stéphane Dion, only that he was an out-of-touch intellectual, a divisive and aloof figure in his home province.
Just before the results of the final ballot were announced, George Heyman, now an ndp mla in the B.C. legislature for the Vancouver–Fairview riding, had emailed Jack to ask how he thought the race was going to play out. “I’m waiting for the final Lib vote and it looks like Dion (I know you wanted Iggy for the match-up) and wonder what you think of this potential match-up and who you think will actually take it?” wrote Heyman, president of the B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union at the time.
Jack replied that he was now “betting on Dion” and sensed an opening for the ndp: “I believe that we have potential to do well with Dion.” Not long after this email exchange, Dion bested Ignatieff on the final ballot. As Dion stumbled through his victory speech, Karl Bélanger was at the back of the convention hall, standing with his Bloc counterpart Frédéric Lepage. The two high-fived each other. “We both thought, for very different reasons, that this was the best result that could happen to our respective parties,” Bélanger explained years later.
The following morning, Jack directed caucus researcher Kevin Dorse to pull together a report on Dion’s weak record as environment minister. “Someone also needs to sit me down and interview me on my work in/on environment. It goes way back and consists of many, many actions. We should develop a record of them so that we can do a ‘compare and contrast’ exercise. People just don’t know and we need to set the record straight,” Jack wrote to Dorse on December 3.
The wall-to-wall media coverage of the Liberal convention, nearly unanimously positive, created a surge in the party’s support, and it was costing us dearly. Just five days after Dion was elected leader, the Liberals had surged to 38 per cent of national support, a six-point lead over the Conservatives according to an Ipsos-Reid poll. Jack and the ndp were at 13 per cent. Two days later, ekos Research had the Liberals ahead by seven points, at 40 per cent compared with 33 per cent for the Conservatives. We were at 10 per cent.
Dion was a sympathetic character to ndp voters, we would learn. He was a well-meaning, heart-in-the-right place academic, portrayed as an environmentalist, and our supporters didn’t like it when we attacked him. In the weeks following his selection as leader, a significant number of ndp donors cancelled their automatic monthly contributions. (Months later, after seeing Dion in action, they had returned.)
Other national polls in the weeks that followed, including polls by Decima and the Strategic Counsel, showed the honeymoon continuing. The Liberals were firmly in the lead, and we were stuck in the low teens. We had seen honeymoons before, and as students of history, we knew this was to be expected. The eastern-based media has always been obsessed with the Liberals, and this becomes even more pronounced during a leadership race. But we were still concerned, nonetheless.
Of course, the Liberal record on the environment was deplorable. Dion had sat around the Liberal Cabinet table for years, part of the team that promised to meet the Kyoto target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent, then oversaw a 30 per cent increase—a worse record than even the U.S. had under George W. Bush. After being appointed environment minister by Martin in 2004, Dion had joined the Conservatives in voting against mandatory fuel efficiency for all cars in February 2005. A few months later, when he set up a Chemicals Sector Sustainability Table to consult on pollution issue, Dion named the vice-president of Imperial Oil’s Chemicals Division as one of its co-chairs. In December 2005, Dion had won accolades for chairing the international conference to extend the Kyoto Protocol. We had seen this Liberal play before: support an agreement, then fail to act on it. But when Dion made the environment the central plank of his leadership campaign, his actual record hadn’t seemed to matter.
In an email to Jack on December 10, long-time friend Peter Tabuns, former head of Greenpeace Canada and currently an ndp member of the Ontario legislature, asked if the ndp was “putting together a media strategy to promote its green cred? It makes many of us nuts to see Dion outscoring us. I know bounce is bounce but I worry about the potential for it to stick. Any thoughts?”
“We have similar concerns,” Jack replied on December 11, explaining that whenever the ndp highlighted green issues, “it pushes up Dion’s votes.”
In mid-January of 2007, just as we were plotting how we would position Jack and the party against the new leader of the Liberal Party, I got a call from a senior staffer in the Prime Minister’s Office. He asked if I could meet him on the following Sunday morning. We met in the restaurant of the Delta Hotel in downtown Ottawa.
“I wanted to give you the heads-up on a campaign we will be launching soon,” the Conservative operative told me. He handed me a dvd in a case featuring a photo of a shrugging Dion. The headline “Not a Leader” was scrolled across the cover in a big chunky font. When I got home, I slapped it into my dvd player to have a look.
“What kind of leader is Stéphane Dion?” the announcer barked. The ad cut to a brutal exchange from a Liberal Party leadership debate held on October 16, 2006, between Dion and Michael Ignatieff.
Ignatieff: “Stéphane, we didn’t get it done.” [Ignatieff was referring to meeting the Liberal commitments on climate change.] “We didn’t get it done and we have to get it done.”
Dion: “This is unfair.”
Ignatieff: “We didn’t get it done.”
Dion: “This is unfair... you don’t know what you speak about. Do you think it’s easy to set priorities?”
Ignatieff: “Excuse me?”
After this exchange, the narrator of the ad concluded, “Leaders set priorities. Leaders get things done. Stéphane Dion. Not a Leader. Not worth the risk.”
The ad made its debut on February 4 during the Super Bowl. That was just the beginning of a massive Conservative ad buy that generated tremendous media and was devastatingly effective. Despite Dion’s ten years in the House of Commons, very few Canadians outside of Quebec knew who he was. The ad let Dion do the talking. Its message was reaffirmed by Dion’s weak performance and meek persona on Parliament Hill in the early days of his leadership.
Our own work in Quebec continued. Landing Tom Mulcair would have a domino effect. On January 15, Jack had emailed Rebecca Blaikie, Mulcair and high-profile civil rights lawyer Julius Grey about moving “recruitment into high gear.” Jack explained he had just spoken with Cree leader Romeo Saganash about running for the ndp. “He has always felt the ndp was closest to his values,” Jack wrote. “He’s been approached by all parties to run, but never by us. He appreciated the approach. He said that if Tom Mulcair and Julius Grey are running, he will run for sure!! (Hear that Tom and Julius?)”
All this behind-the-scenes work was about to pay off. On February 20, Mulcair announced he would not be a Quebec Liberal candidate in the provincial election scheduled for that spring. A few weeks later, Mulcair was ready to send another strong public signal that he was serious about the ndp.
“I’ll show up,” Mulcair told Jack regarding Jack’s upcoming speech on Afghanistan at the Université de Montréal on March 7. The two also planned to have lunch together that day, and Bélanger alerted a photographer from the Canadian Press about that. People plugged into Quebec politics would understand what it meant when they saw pictures of Tom sitting in the front row to hear Jack’s speech and of the two of them lunching together that day at a nearby restaurant.
Conservative ads about Dion certainly helped the Conservatives, but they also helped Jack and the ndp. So did Dion’s lacklustre performance in the House of Commons. By March, Dion’s lead in the poll was gone, and the Liberals would never regain that lost ground. In every major poll conducted in March and April of 2007, the Conservatives were back on top, with gaps as high as seventeen points between them and the Liberals.
The ndp climbed out of the low teens, but we couldn’t get beyond the high teens. Still, we saw some glimmers of hope. On April 17, pollster Nik Nanos published numbers that showed what Jack and his Quebec team had felt for a while: our Quebec numbers would go up dramatically if we could shake free Bloc voters. The ndp was at 13 per cent in the Nanos poll, and we would go up ten points and overtake the Liberals if the Bloc were not on the ballot. But of course they were on the ballot. That meant the challenge was distinguishing ourselves from the Bloc in just the right way. With our policy and organizational capacities now in place, we just needed the final ingredient: some strong, quality candidates to show Quebec we could win.
On April 14, Tom Mulcair called to tell Jack he had made his final decision: he was coming on board. “We can make the announcement at the end of the month or in May,” Mulcair said.
“Why don’t you just come up to Ottawa?” suggested Jack. “We’ll meet to close the deal and we’ll make the announcement tomorrow.”
Things didn’t come together quite that quickly, but Rebecca Blaikie had less than a week to organize the press event. She was summoned from Montreal to party headquarters in Ottawa on April 15, where she joined Bob Gallagher, Mulcair, Jack and me for a meeting in the boardroom. She went back to Montreal that evening to begin mapping out the logistics of the announcement, set for April 20 on Mont Royal.
We knew our opponents would do their best to muddy the waters by playing up Mulcair’s talks with the Conservatives after he left Charest’s Cabinet, but he was ready for it. “It was made clear to me, in no uncertain terms, that there was no question that they would ever change their anti-Kyoto stand,” Mulcair told reporters at the press conference to announce he was Jack’s new Quebec lieutenant. “So when I watch the federal Conservatives use the Liberal mismanagement of the file as an excuse to continue doing nothing, I say that people deserve better.”
A week after Mulcair’s announcement, Hubert Bauch of the Montreal Gazette wrote a weekend feature about what Mulcair’s move could mean for the ndp and federal politics in Quebec. Under the headline, “ndp Plots Quebec Breakthrough,” Bauch also put it in perspective: Tom was no opportunist.
“To be ndp in Quebec you gotta believe,” Bauch wrote. “Not just in the standing dogma of what is the most ideological of national political parties, but believe that this time could be the time, the first time ever the ndp doesn’t get wiped off the Quebec map in a federal election.”
Bauch acknowledged that Mulcair “brings to the ndp both experience in the corridors of power and street cred on the hot button issues of the day.” Mulcair’s move to the ndp also signalled a shift. “The Bloc was a comfortable place to park their votes... it was in large part a protest vote, but I think people are ready for a change,” Mulcair told Bauch. “Quebecers are looking more for solutions than confrontation. That opens doors for us.”
That thirst for change had also been evident in the provincial election held just a few weeks prior to the announcement. The right-of-centre Action démocratique du Québec had become the Official Opposition in the National Assembly in Quebec City. Some mistook these results as a turn to the right in Quebec, but we saw it as a willingness by voters to break out of the federalist/separatist divide between the established parties. This was borne out in polls showing that many adq voters were considering the ndp federally.
After Mulcair’s announcement, our attention turned immediately to the question of whether he should run in the Outremont riding in an upcoming by-election or wait until the next general election. The Liberal mp from Outremont, Jean Lapierre, a nationalist and founder of the Bloc who’d been recruited by Paul Martin to be his Quebec lieutenant, had resigned on January 28, not long after Dion was elected leader. The prime minister had until July 28 to announce the date of the by-election.
We knew we could run a strong campaign in Outremont with Mulcair as our candidate, but it was a long-established Liberal stronghold. The Liberals had held the seat since 1935, with just one exception: 1988, when Quebec voters went along with Mulroney’s free trade offer. Jack sought the advice of the working group set up under Brian Topp’s leadership after the 2006 campaign to get ready for the next election.
Jack presented the group with different scenarios. Should we run Mulcair in Outremont or hold back and run him later? If he won, he would set our course in Quebec. If he lost but made gains, we could still sell ourselves as a party on the march in Quebec. But what if Mulcair lost and didn’t want to run a second time?
Topp recommended forcefully that Mulcair run in Outremont. “Even if he doesn’t win, it will be understandable. People there have been voting Liberal for so long, nobody could credibly claim failure. If we make it a close race, we can build on that momentum for next time,” Topp told the group.
Jack also wanted to talk it through with Mulcair and Rebecca Blaikie. The three set out on a tour of the province, and during a visit to Trois-Rivières on May 24, Blaikie broached the topic. The three of them were sitting on a patio having a drink and catching up on work. Jack lifted his head from his papers, Mulcair remembers.
“I’d need some pretty convincing arguments to make me believe that I don’t run my Quebec lieutenant in the first riding that opens in Quebec,” he said to Mulcair. “I promise to you that we will use every resource we can to make this thing happen.” Then Jack put his head back down and returned to his work.
By the time Harper announced that the by-election would be held on September 17, Jack and Mulcair had already decided to go for it. It was a huge gamble, but we decided to bet the house on Outremont.
On the morning of September 17, I picked up Jack from his Centre Block office, and we drove to Montreal together to spend voting day in Outremont. We knew from Mulcair and our local team on the ground that things were looking good, so Jack was upbeat but nervous. Outremont was a Liberal fortress, and we were in uncharted territory.
Jack spent most of the time on his phone while I drove. When Jack was nervous or apprehensive, that’s what he did: he worked the phones. I was more confident and as such had made plans to stay the night in Montreal to celebrate. “I think we’re going to win in Quebec, and it’s going to be a late night,” I’d told my wife, Sarah, the night before. I’d be leaving her alone with our two-year-old and our six-month-old baby.
The moment Jack and I began our tour of zone houses in the riding, the places volunteers gathered to pull the vote, I knew I was right to feel confident. The campaign team had built an army of 450 volunteers, mostly young people. They wanted to win, and they were revved up.
Late that afternoon, as we were walking south on Avenue du Parc near one of the campaign offices, a city bus stopped at a red light beside us. When the passengers saw Jack, they started to yell at him to come over and shake hands with them through the windows. He was a rock star, and I knew then something very different was happening.
Jack had promised Mulcair an A-plus campaign, and the party delivered. Jack had turned to Raymond Guardia to run the campaign. The veteran Quebec organizer had been in the trenches for more than two decades, and he’d been around for the ndp’s only other victory in Quebec, the 1990 by-election win in Chambly.
When the party’s director of organization, Heather Fraser, had first approached Guardia to serve as campaign manager, he’d said he wasn’t interested. Then, Jack stepped in to ask. “I know you don’t like to be pressured, but we really need to do this,” Jack had said to Guardia at a party fundraiser at Julius Grey’s house in Westmount.
Guardia had agreed, but he didn’t want to do it alone. He reached out to Broadbent’s former principal secretary George Nakitsas. Nakitsas had first joined the ndp in 1967, when he was growing up in Montreal. He had worked with Guardia and Topp in the Chambly by-election and had been Ed Broadbent’s chief of staff, but now lived in Brampton, Ontario. “You have to come and do this with me,” Guardia told him. “I need you to help.” Nakitsas agreed to join Guardia.
The strategy was simple. Convince the media and the voters that the race was wide open, that anyone could win it. Then, make it a three-way race between the Liberals, the Bloc and us. Finally, pare it down to a race between the ndp and the Liberals. Our idea was to focus on the environment and the Afghanistan war, because we knew Quebecers lined up with the ndp on these issues. The incumbent Liberals were offside.
Mulcair had spent years in the Quebec Liberal Party, and he had never really had to fight for his seat, like New Democrats did. In his first campaign in 1994, he ran in Chomedey, a safe federalist seat, and received 68 per cent of the vote. He cracked 70 per cent in 1998 and won by twenty thousand votes in 2003. Now, Mulcair had been introduced to our campaign playbook, which he dubbed “ndp Alchemy.”
Mulcair wasn’t used to going door to door to canvas in his own riding. Blaikie served as translator as he waded through the dynamics of an ndp Election Planning Committee and our tracking system on voting intentions, known as “marks.” Voters identified as unwavering supporters are marked as a 1, so that we make sure to pull their vote on election day. Voters who are definitely not voting for us are identified as a 5; we don’t waste any time on them. Those leaning towards the ndp are either a “2 or a 3, and we reach out to try to persuade them. A voter leaning heavily against us is identified as a 4.
Outremont was not a classic ndp campaign, however. We were starting from scratch there: we had few marks from previous campaigns. We were also running a high-profile politician and a former provincial cabinet minister. Mulcair and the party were both doing something new. He was in a new political family, getting used to a new way of campaigning. The ndp had never run such a high-profile Quebec politician. It looked easy from the outside, but a lot of trust had to build through the process.
Mulcair had announced he was running in Outremont on June 21, and his campaign team was up and running by the end of that month. In contrast, the Liberals didn’t have a candidate until ten days before the writ was dropped, when Dion appointed Université de Montréal professor Jocelyn Coulon.
Nakitsas had pitched the concept of an early “shock and awe” strategy. A massive sign blitz on the night of July 27 meant voters woke up on day one to a riding painted orange with thousands of signs. Nobody had seen ndp signs before, and these had two familiar faces on them: Mulcair and Jack.
This sent a strong signal to voters and Quebec pundits that something new was on offer. Volunteers from all over the island of Montreal started flooding into our two campaign offices, on Avenue du Parc and on Côte-des-Neiges. During some phone-bank nights, we had so many volunteers that we didn’t have enough phones.
The campaign was also attracting notable support from some surprising quarters. A union activist from the powerful Confédération des syndicats nationaux (csn) (Confederation of National Trade Unions) showed up to volunteer. The fellow was a seasoned organizer, and one of Mulcair’s assistants, Steven Moran, chatted him up at the campaign office. “I was sent here,” the activist said. The Quebec labour movement, a long-time ally of the Bloc, was quietly signalling that it wanted a presence in our campaign.
The campaign was still struggling to get media attention, though, a challenge during any summer by-election. Bélanger was sent to Montreal to generate media attention to compensate for what we assumed was a bigger Liberal machine in the riding. He used Mulcair’s position as Quebec lieutenant to offer him up whenever reporters asked to interview Jack for a story. Jack stepped back from the media spotlight to give Mulcair as much exposure as possible.
Olivia Chow spent many days in the riding leading up to voting day. She focussed on the neighbourhoods in Côte-des-Neiges, where twenty-four different languages were spoken. She canvassed, and whenever she was in one of the two campaign offices, she worked the phones, calling every Chinese name on the voter’s list. She also accompanied Mulcair to the doorstep in heavily ethnic neighbourhoods. Voters in the riding weren’t used to that, but Mulcair was good at connecting with people. His visibility on the ground also reminded voters of a simple fact: the Liberals had been taking them for granted.
This message was reinforced by Jack’s strong presence in the riding. He wasn’t in the riding as often as Olivia, but he came close. The joke was that the two of them spent so much time in Outremont, they were almost eligible to vote there.
Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe certainly noticed Jack’s presence. Midway through the campaign, Duceppe showed up one day to declare to the media, “Thomas Mulcair is a federalist.”
Raymond Guardia, never one to take the Bloc lightly, wondered why Duceppe would feel the need to make such an obvious statement, harmless as it appeared, but that soon became clear. With three weeks left in the campaign, we were canvassing in an area of the riding that was a Bloc stronghold. The people opening their doors would identify themselves as traditional Bloc voters but said they wanted to get the Liberals out. When we asked “Can we count on your support?”, increasingly the answer was yes.
The Bloc vote was causing us to hemorrhage, and Duceppe was trying to stop the bleeding by calling on sovereigntists not to vote for a federalist candidate. That was a turning point in Guardia’s thinking: the Bloc, always dismissive of the ndp, had now realized we could be a threat to them in Quebec. In 2006, the Bloc had come in second in Outremont. If they fell behind this time, we would have gained momentum at their expense.
Guardia sensed it was time to switch gears. He pitched his idea to Mulcair over lunch at an African restaurant in the riding. “Tom, I want to reframe our campaign. No more policy, no more issues. The voters know where we stand. Let’s make it the Tom and Jack show,” he said.
“Let’s do it,” Mulcair replied. All policy content was henceforth stripped from the campaign, and our pitch became about the two of them, an accomplished Quebec politician and a very popular party leader. It was a perfect contrast to the Liberals' Coulon and Dion and a strong way to frame the close of our campaign.
The Liberals, meanwhile, were quiet. Mulcair and the team kept on identifying votes and blanketing the riding. The Liberal tsunami will come; never underestimate them, people said to each other. But it never did.
We sent a spy to the Liberal campaign office in the Van Horne shopping centre to collect intelligence and any available literature. “Excuse me, any leaflets on Monsieur Coulon?” our operative asked the sole worker in the office.
“Well, we don’t have any pamphlets for you at this time. Monsieur Coulon is in the back writing it now,” the worker replied.
With just a week to go before election day, Nakitsas and Guardia went to check out what was being billed as a big Liberal event at John Pratt Park. In attendance were a few journalists, seven mps and another twelve people. “That’s it? Where’s the tsunami?” Guardia thought. A few days later, when he spotted a group of Liberal staffers from Ottawa handing out literature on a street corner, he realized the tsunami was never coming. The photocopy of a Dion profile looked amateurish. “Oh my God, the Liberals and the ndp have traded places,” Guardia said to himself.
The voters also understood what it meant when La Presse, the influential Montreal broadsheet, published a poll three days before voting day. The poll showed the ndp ahead of the Liberals by six points, 35 per cent to 29 per cent. It wasn’t an insurmountable lead, but it indicated the ndp could win, and it sent a signal to all non-Liberal voters in the riding: to end the Liberal dynasty in Outremont, vote for the ndp. The poll numbers also gave every New Democrat and progressive voter in the riding permission to vote for the party they actually wanted to.
Throughout the campaign, whenever Jack came to Outremont, he would pull Guardia aside and ask, “How many marks?”
Guardia would report: “Our goal is eight thousand, and we’re getting there.”
Jack would look him the eye. “Make it nine thousand. I’m serious, nine.”
The evening of election day, Jack, Mulcair and I went up to the ndp’s Montreal office to watch the results come in with Guardia, Nakitsas and other senior campaign workers. Mulcair’s wife, Catherine, and their two sons joined us. The office was just a few doors away from the bar where our party was scheduled for later that night, Les Bobards on boulevard Saint-Laurent.
We knew from our election-day organizers that our marks were holding and turnout was brisk. Word on the street was the Conservative and Bloc voters were also turning up for Mulcair to make sure that someone other than the Liberals won.
Still, we were nervous when the numbers started coming in. The results were slow at first, but then the floodgate broke. As Guardia explained the data coming in from the zone houses throughout the riding to Mulcair, Tom’s eyes teared up. We could tell from how the votes were distributed in certain polls what the overall trend would be: Mulcair was going to win big. Nakitsas had thought Mulcair was going to win, but he admitted later the margin surprised the hell out of him. After all the counting was done, Mulcair received 11,374 votes, netting 48 per cent of the popular vote. The Liberals got 6,933 votes, or 29 per cent of the vote.
It took us a good thirty minutes after Radio-Canada had announced the results to get the celebration underway. We had cracked the last nut. We had clear policy. We had a personable leader Quebecers liked. And now, we had shown Quebec that the ndp could run a strong, credible candidate with the ability to win.
Some commentators chalked up our win to Dion’s failure. Granted, the Liberals had run a pathetic campaign fronted by a weak candidate. But there was a lot more going on. Outremont had set the wheels of our Quebec plan in motion, and we immediately accelerated the pace of our organizing in Quebec. We gave Mulcair the resources to tour the province with Jack, do outreach with stakeholders and find strong candidates for the next election. Jack appointed Mulcair as ndp deputy leader, along with Vancouver mp Libby Davies, and finance critic, signalling to Quebec that he would play a major role in the leadership of the caucus.
Jack was feeling great. The Liberals were on the ropes, and the ndp now had a foothold in Quebec. We just needed to keep the momentum going to win even more seats there. A breakthrough could be just around the corner, we thought.
We were wrong—very wrong.