Strength of Conviction Quotes

“Twenty-five years ago, a resolution was adopted unanimously by the House of Commons promising to eradicate child poverty. A quarter of a century later, one million children in our country are poor and go to bed hungry. I can’t accept that this is inevitable in a country as rich and as generous as ours.”
― Tom Mulcair, Strength of Conviction

“An NDP government will establish, in law, clear criteria for resource extraction and transportation based on the principles of sustainable development, which include internalizing all pollution costs and putting a price on carbon. In our day and age there is no longer any way around it. Any new energy project requires a thorough, credible environmental assessment process, based on criteria of sustainable development and social acceptability. We don’t have one in Canada, because the Conservatives have gutted all the relevant existing legislation and reduced the staff responsible for enforcing it.”
― Tom Mulcair, Strength of Conviction

“Now, twelve years after the 1995 referendum had brought the country to the brink of breakup, the voters in a francophone, nationalist riding dumped the Liberals and abandoned the Bloc, signalling their willingness to return to the Canadian conversation.”
― Tom Mulcair, Strength of Conviction

“the PQ had been returned to power despite having won fewer votes than the Liberals. “What is this system, Mr. Mulcair, where you win but the other party gets to form the government?” he asked. I did my best to explain the British parliamentary system, but Pater Vasilios was having none of it. “The British, they know NOTHING about democracy. The Greeks invented democracy. Change this system, Mr. Mulcair.” That lively exchange comes back to me every time I explain the NDP’s plan to bring in proportional representation.”
― Tom Mulcair, Strength of Conviction

“We are not engaged in a war against “one of the most dangerous enemies our world has ever faced,” as Stephen Harper recently claimed in reference to ISIL, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Talk such as that, especially on the part of a sitting prime minister, is unconscionable and an affront to all those who served in two world wars, including my uncles, who must be rolling over in their graves.”
― Tom Mulcair, Strength of Conviction

“In 1995, the result of the PQ-mandated second referendum on Québec independence was such a close call that in many other countries it might have degenerated into civil conflict. But that didn’t happen. Why not? Maybe because on all of those occasions we kept talking, since we know in our heart of hearts that what we’ve got is worth keeping.”
― Tom Mulcair, Strength of Conviction

“The open-mindedness we were taught, that willingness and desire to hear out the other side of an argument, is also fundamentally, profoundly a Canadian value.”
― Tom Mulcair, Strength of Conviction

“Learning what laws can do, for good or ill, to transform society was a revelation.”
― Tom Mulcair, Strength of Conviction

“It’s grossly unfair. It also discourages too many who want to pursue post-secondary studies from ever going to university. It’s tragic for them, and a huge loss to society and to this country as a whole. No one who has the marks and the will to further their education should ever be hindered from doing so because of high tuition and the prospect of a terrifying debt load for years and years afterward.”
― Tom Mulcair, Strength of Conviction

“We’re not just going to win this thing. We’re going to win it in a landslide!” Watching this exceptional group of young people — we called them “the twenty-sevens” because no more than a couple were over thirty — shouting, yelling, laughing, screaming, celebrating, talking about their victory, about what they had accomplished, I have to admit I got a little emotional. My eyes started to well up. I snuck out the back door, into the same alley where a few hours earlier I’d received the news that my political career was finished. Quite the contrary. An entirely new chapter was just beginning. In the end, the Liberals had been right to fear us for all those years, because not only did we win in Outremont by a margin of 4,441 votes over the Liberal candidate, but two-thirds of self-identified Bloc supporters voted for us. These were people who might have voted Yes in the last referendum because they wanted Québec to be respected in the Canadian federation, or else they were progressives for whom voting Conservative was not an option but who refused to vote for the scandal-ridden Liberals. Although very multicultural, Outremont is a majority francophone riding. French-speaking Québecers, including many passionate federalists, are rightly preoccupied with preserving their language, culture, and identity.”
― Tom Mulcair, Strength of Conviction

“It must have been the early 1970s, probably in the wake of the October Crisis, and this guy Ryan was telling that influential group of business leaders in Toronto that if they didn’t listen, if they didn’t get it, if they didn’t understand that they had to accommodate their French-speaking fellow citizens, Canada itself could be lost. Not mincing words, telling it like it is — that way of giving it to you straight, as I would later discover, was so typical of Claude Ryan.”
― Tom Mulcair, Strength of Conviction