From: brewnoserii@gmail.com   
      
   What makes the federal party leaders tick? The Globe takes a close look at   
   each front-runner   
      
   A hotly contested federal election campaign is drawing to close. In the   
   leaders of the three front-running parties, Canadians will find equal amounts   
   of desire and ambition to head up the country's next government.   
      
   From Jeffrey Simpson's profile of Thomas Mulcair:   
      
   Thinking about transition to government had never been a priority for any   
   previous NDP leader, except perhaps as a theoretical exercise.  In election   
   campaigns, a polite fiction required party officials to repeat that the NDP   
   might win and that its    
   leader could become "the next prime minister of Canada," as those who   
   introduced the leader would shout.  Nobody believed it, not even the leaders.    
   Until Tom Mulcair actually tried to position his party to win.   
      
   On the eve of the current election, it appeared the New Democrats had a chance   
   to do just that.  Polls consistently showed them leading the Conservatives and   
   Liberals in a tight three-way contest.   The NDP had won in the most unlikely   
   place - Alberta -    
   why not across the country?  Anti-Harper sentiment was widespread, and Mr.   
   Mulcair was fashioning the NDP as the best agent for change, while trying to   
   reassure voters that the party had grown up, shaken off ideology, and was   
   ready to govern.  If the NDP    
   could not win an outright majority, then it might still take power through an   
   understanding with the Liberals.   
      
   The lure of power had allowed Mr. Mulcair - intelligent, driven, a pragmatist   
   and political centrist - to bring even the party's left-wingers onside with   
   his strategy of appealing to the middle class, stressing balanced budgets,   
   promising no personal    
   income-tax increases even on the better-off, and not going overboard on new   
   social-policy spending.   
      
   Those who knew him well in Quebec politics, where he had been a member of the   
   centrist Liberal Party, had never thought of him as a left-winger.   His boss   
   then was premier Jean Charest, with whom he worked harmoniously until he was   
   dropped from a senior    
   cabinet post - over principle or personality, depending on one's   
   perspective.   "We never had any sense there was a socialist bent in Tom," Mr.   
   Charest said in an interview.  "He was more viewed on the right side of   
   cabinet.     
   I would describe him as a fiscal conservative."   
      
   Now the NDP is slumping in national polls.  If the party falls back to third   
   place, from first at the start of the campaign, questions will surely be asked   
   about Mr. Mulcair's pragmatic positioning of the party.  How, critics will   
   ask, could the Liberals    
   with Justin Trudeau - the leader with the famous name, whom Mr. Mulcair   
   considers his intellectual inferior - overtake the NDP as the preferred   
   alternative to the Harper Conservatives?   
      
   While previous leader Jack Layton had taken the party from fourth to second   
   and been lionized, a slip to third would leave Mr. Mulcair with much to answer   
   for - although if there is one aspect of his personality everyone agrees upon,   
   it is that he    
   defends his corner, hard.   
      
   http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/article26738618.ece   
   BINARY/w940/web-mulcair1009-01.JPG   
      
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