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Gilles Duceppe
Leader, Bloc Québécois
Gilles Duceppe was the first politician ever elected to the House of
Commons on a sovereigntist platform. He won a 1990 byelection
in the Montreal riding of Laurier-Sainte Marie, running as an Independent.
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Duceppe in Montreal, May 2004 (CP photo) |
An informal group of former Tory and Liberal MPs enraged by
the defeat of the Meech Lake accord became an official party a few months
later under Duceppe's mentor, Lucien Bouchard. And the Bloc Québécois
was born.
After Bouchard resigned in late 1995 to become leader of the Parti Québécois
and premier of Quebec, Michel Gauthier spent a year as leader, struggling
to control an unruly caucus. When Gauthier resigned, Duceppe won 52.8
per cent of the party's support at a leadership convention in March 1997.
That length of service as party leader gives him a six-year head start
on the other three federal party chiefs testing their mettle in this campaign.
The 58-year-old son of revered Quebec actor Jean Duceppe and Hélène
Rowley, Duceppe has said he developed an early distaste for anglophones, even though his maternal grandfather, John James Rowley, was British
by birth.
Duceppe's English-speaking Grade 6 teacher slapped him for complaining when the
French students had to stand in the aisles on a school bus, and he slapped
her back. "If you're talking about social justice, that event marked
me," he told the Ottawa Citizen years later.
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| Theatre company founder Jean Duceppe and his four children. Gilles is the eldest, sitting at the left. |
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Politics surrounded him growing up. His father worked on Montreal Mayor
Jean Drapeau's 1954 campaign and was one of the federal NDP's
founding members in 1961.
Duceppe became a separatist at the age of 20 in Canada's centennial
year, inspired by René Lévesque's founding of the Mouvement
souveraineté-association in late 1967. Later he spent three years
in the Marxist-Leninist Communist Workers' Party; he has since called
that membership a mistake, based on a youthful search for absolute answers.
The official parliamentary website lists his occupation as "labour organizer,"
but he also was the general manager of the Université de Montréal
newspaper Quartier Latin while he was a student there and worked the night
shift as a medical orderly for five years in the 1970s.
Duceppe married Yolande Brunelle in 1978. They have two children,
Amelie and Alexis.
In his role as BQ leader, Duceppe is known for his eloquent speeches that take the future independence
of Quebec as a given, and for his well-aimed attacks against the government
in question period.
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| A young Gilles sits under a portrait of his father, actor Jean Duceppe. |
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Rejecting the idea that a sovereign Quebec would face economic barriers
when trying to do business with the rest of Canada, Duceppe once said:
"Tell Western farmers they will have to eat all their beef or watch
the carcasses rot, instead of selling them to Quebec. Go to Oshawa and
explain to workers in the automobile industry that they will have to go
on unemployment insurance out of patriotism, because Canada cannot sell
any more cars to those poor Quebecers."
Duceppe loves the media spotlight, tightly controls his caucus, and
can deliver a blistering tongue-lashing with the help of
his piercing blue eyes, say those who have been on the receiving
end.
As Quebecers' interest in pushing ahead with sovereignty waned in the late 1990s, Duceppe led his party to successively smaller showings in the House of Commons. Though it had earned 54 of 295 seats and official opposition status under former leader Lucien Bouchard in 1993, the party took only 44 of 301 seats in the 1997 election. Duceppe was widely mocked then for wearing an odd looking hairnet while campaigning at a cheese factory. The party's standings sank in 2000, with Bloc members elected in just 38 ridings. However it rebounded in the 2004 election, when the party took 54 of the 75 Quebec seats.
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Gilles Duceppe played both football and basketball during his high school days. |
"Somebody always emerges to take a leadership when it's vacant, but it's hard to imagine much of a battle to replace Duceppe if he just gave up the struggle and went home," said a Montreal Gazette editorial February 2003, pointing out that five MPs had left the Bloc caucus since the 2000 election. "We wish he'd do just that, and take the rest of the Bloc MPs with him."
But that didn't seem likely.
In the spring of 2005, because of his popularity, Duceppe was pressured to leave the federal party in order to lead the provincial Parti Québécois after the departure of Bernard Landry. But Duceppe felt he would be more useful in Ottawa, given that another election was likely to happen within the year.
Polls suggest the party and Duceppe have enjoyed increased support since the sponsorship scandal. Just prior to the election call, some polls put the Bloc at over 50 per cent support in Quebec. In October 2005, Duceppe won almost 97 per cent of the vote in a confidence motion at the party convention.
RELATED READING:
Question d'Identite, by Gilles Duceppe, published in 2000 by Lanctot
Editeur.
The Bloc, by Manon Cornellier, published in 1995 by James Lorimer & Company.
Fighting for Canada, by Diane Francis, published in 1996 by Key Porter. |
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