OTTAWA — The first thing Thomas Mulcair did after he was announced the winner of the New Democratic leadership race last month was pull his wife into an embrace and bury his face into her shoulder.

Catherine P. Mulcair, 56, has been someone the new leader of the Official Opposition has turned to first for nearly four decades and she is expected to remain a close confidante and adviser as her husband begins this new stage of his political career.

“Every step in my political career, we have done everything together,” Mulcair told the Star early last month.

Born Catherine Pinhas, she was raised in Paris, the daughter of Holocaust survivors of Turkish origin who descended from Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th century during the Inquisition.

She is a psychologist who works both in private practice and in long-term and palliative care at a community health centre in Verdun, Que. She is also an elected member of the board of directors at the Order of Psychologists of Quebec and the regional health board for southwest Montreal.

Catherine, who declined to be interviewed at this time, plans to continue working in Verdun after the couple moves into Stornoway, their residence in Ottawa. The couple will also keep their bungalow in Beaconsfield, a suburb west of Montreal, which they bought as a young married couple.

The couple met when they were both teenaged guests at her cousin’s wedding. She was visiting Canada from France.

“We fell madly in love with each other at first sight and that’s remained the way,” Thomas Mulcair, 57, told the Star last year.

They married two years later, when they were both 21. They have two sons and a granddaughter.

The oldest son, Matt, 33, is a sergeant in the Quebec provincial police and married to Jasmyne Côté, an elementary school teacher. Greg, 29, is an aerospace engineer who teaches physics and engineering technologies full time at John Abbott College on the Island of Montreal.

Catherine immigrated to Canada a few months after they met but has remained close to her native country, even running unsuccessfully for a spot on the 2009 ballot for the Assemblée des Francais de l’étranger, a political body representing French citizens abroad.

It is through his wife that Thomas Mulcair holds dual Canadian and French citizenship, a right extended to the spouses of French citizens. Their sons also have dual citizenship.

The family decided to get Mulcair a French passport about 20 years ago after he was separated from his family for half an hour at a Madrid airport because he did not have the same travel document.

It is also through her that the NDP leader has voted in past French elections, his deputy chief of staff Chantale Turgeon confirmed last week, and both chose to be registered on the French electoral lists.

Mulcair told reporters last Thursday he does not plan to vote in the upcoming French presidential elections now that he is Official Opposition leader, although he did not elaborate on this decision.

Catherine will be a new face to most people on Parliament Hill, but she has been present for the defining moments of her husband’s career.

She was the first person Mulcair called after Quebec Liberal Premier Jean Charest told him that he would be demoted from his post as provincial environment minister — which Mulcair says was because of his refusal to sign off on a plan to allow developers into a provincial park — and he made sure she was on board with his plan to resign before he informed Charest of his decision to leave cabinet.

She also joined Mulcair as he met the late Jack Layton and his fellow NDP MP and wife Olivia Chow (Trinity–Spadina) for dinner at a restaurant in Hudson, Que. to discuss his plans to bring Mulcair on as Quebec lieutenant and revive party fortunes in the province.

Lorne Nystrom, the former NDP MP from Saskatchewan who served as national co-chair of Mulcair’s leadership campaign, compared their relationship to that of former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien and his wife Aline, who he was known to turn to for advice.

“Her opinion really mattered, and with Tom, Catherine’s opinion matters very much,” said Nystrom, who said Catherine played a key role in the leadership campaign.

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“She has a very good read of people. She can figure out people very quickly,” said Nystrom, who thinks that quality stems from her background in psychology. “She’s very, very close to Tom, personally and politically, and played a very key role in the campaign in terms of advice and being very supportive ... She knew what was happening (and) had very many good opinions about tactics and strategy.”

NDP MP and former leadership candidate Robert Chisholm and his wife Paula Simon had breakfast with the couple ahead of the Jan. 29 leadership debate in Halifax, a meeting that eventually led Chisholm endorsing Mulcair. He said he used to tell his own wife about how he saw them walking hand in hand.

“They clearly have a pretty special connection and that is obvious when you see the two of them sitting together casually,” said Chisholm. “They’re just very comfortable with each other.”

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