Gilles Duceppe, elegant separatist

CBC News

Gilles Duceppe in Montreal, May 2004 (Canadian Press)

Gilles Duceppe was the first politician ever directly elected to the House of Commons on a sovereigntist platform. He won a 1990 byelection in the Montreal riding of Laurier-Sainte-Marie, running officially as an Independent but really under the banner of the fledgling Bloc Québécois, which had just been formed but not formally registered.

That byelection followed the collapse of the Meech Lake accord and the formation of the Bloc by an informal group of former Tory and Liberal MPs under the leadership of the charismatic Lucien Bouchard.

Duceppe, who had spent much of his adult life casting about for a party that reflected his left-wing idealism, had finally found a political home.

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 took over after winning 52.8 per cent support at a leadership convention in March 1997.

This makes him the longest-serving party leader in the House of Commons, with four election campaigns as leader under his belt.

The 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.

Theatre company founder Jean Duceppe and his four children. Gilles is the eldest, sitting at the left.

A political life

Politics surrounded Duceppe when he was 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, but 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 Montreal newspaper Quartier Latin while he was a student there and he worked the night shift as a medical orderly for five years in the 1970s.

Duceppe married Yolande Brunelle in 1978. They have two children, Amélie and Alexis.

In his role as Bloc leader, Duceppe is known for eloquent speeches that take the future independence of Quebec as a given, and for his well-aimed attacks on the government in question period.

A young Duceppe sits under a portrait of his father, actor Jean Duceppe.

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."

Comfortably in charge

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. The Bloc earned 54 of 295 seats and official opposition status under former leader Lucien Bouchard in 1993, but the party took only 44 of 301 seats in the 1997 election. Duceppe was widely mocked during that campaign for wearing an odd-looking hairnet while at a cheese factory. The party's standings sank further in 2000, with Bloc members elected in just 38 ridings.

However, largely because of the Liberal sponsorship scandal, the Bloc rebounded in the 2004 election, when the party took 54 of the 75 Quebec seats, and it mostly held those gains in 2006, when it won 51 of the Quebec seats.

This was seen, though, as something of a letdown in Bloc circles. The party had been hoping to break through the 50 per cent support barrier but a surprising surge by the Stephen Harper Conservatives in the late going reduced the Bloc to 43 per cent popular support.

Gilles Duceppe played both football and basketball during his high school days.

These consolidations have made Duceppe largely unassailable within his party and some analysts have suggested he could do well again if Quebecers decide to hedge their bets by keeping their nationalist option open in Ottawa.

In spring 2005, 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 in the offing.

With Stephen Harper in the prime minister's chair, Duceppe has pressed the federal government repeatedly to end the so-called fiscal imbalance and give more money to the provinces, Quebec in particular.

His persistence has probably almost single-handedly kept the issue on the front burner. But he was outfoxed by the prime minister when he sought to have Quebec recognized as a nation by the House of Commons and Harper one-upped him by amending the resolution so that the Quebecois as a people would be recognized instead, something most MPs went along with as well.

Very brief foray into provincial politics

On May 11 2007, Duceppe stunned the Bloc and Quebec by announcing his intention to run for the provincial Parti Québécois leadership.

The plan was short-lived. The very next day, Duceppe withdrew his candidacy from the race and proclaimed his support for former Québéc cabinet minister Pauline Marois.

Duceppe said said he changed his mind after weighing the considerable support already behind Marois in "the Parti Québécois, Bloc Québécois and the general public."