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MONTREAL – Long before he was a politician knocking on doors for votes, Tom Mulcair came calling on Valerie Ford. She owned a knitting shop in the Montreal suburb of Pointe Claire and had run afoul of Quebec’s language police because of a bilingual sign saying “Wool/Laine.”

It was the early 1980s, less than a decade after the adoption of Quebec’s Bill 101 language law, and Mulcair was director of legal affairs for the anglophone rights organization Alliance Quebec. “He said if I wanted to fight it, Alliance Quebec and him would back me all the way,” Ford recalled in an interview this week.

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She went to court with other targeted merchants, leading to the landmark Supreme Court ruling Ford v. Quebec, which struck down the government’s ban on bilingual signs. She says she could never have done it without Mulcair’s unflagging support.

“He was good. He was honest, and he cared. So many others said you’re in trouble with the law, tough titty, just pay up and leave it. I didn’t want to,” the 77-year-old Ford said. “I guess I was defiant in those days.”