GILLES DUCEPPE
Biography from Toronto Star

Former hospital orderly, former Communist and labor organizer. First ever elected MP for the separatist BQ.

And now - after winning the Bloc leadership with 52.8 per cent - leader of Her Majesty's loyal Opposition.

Largely unknown outside Quebec - except perhaps by fans of Canada AM's political panel, where he has frequently appeared - Duceppe is among the most popular federal politicians inside that province.

Duceppe is no Lucien Bouchard. He doesn't have the charisma or the spell-binding oratory.

But he has been by far one of the Bloc's most effective MPs, an intense man with searing blue eyes who can often drill the government in the daily Commons question period better than any other.

CALLED THOUGHTFUL

Liberal strategist Michael Robinson, a companion on the Canada AM panel, says Duceppe is thoughtful, engaging, has a good sense of humor, and is not cheap or mean-spirited.

"I quite like him, on a personal level," says Robinson.

On the political level, however, the 49-year-old Duceppe can be as tough as nails:

• In the Commons, he subtly but deliberately plays the race card, portraying the English-speaking rest of the country against French-speaking Quebec.
• He was once ejected from the House for calling Deputy Prime Minister Sheila Copps a liar.
• He contemptuously rejects warnings that there wouldn't be free trade between an independent Quebec and what would be left of Canada.

"Tell western farmers they will have to eat all their beef or watch the carcasses rot, instead of selling them to Quebec, (or) 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," he once said.

Even some members of the Bloc consider him overbearing.

Duceppe probably could have been leader a year ago. After Bouchard left to become premier, he quickly emerged as the likely front runner among potential contenders.

But then he backed off when it appeared his candidacy might split the party.

In her 1995 book, The Bloc, author Manon Cornellier says Duceppe exercised unprecedented control over Bloc MPs as Bouchard's hand-picked party whip.

"At one point it went as far as surveillance of letters sent (by MPs) to party members," she wrote.

Swearing like a sailor, Duceppe also regularly reprimanded members who missed committee meetings or committed some other transgression, and irritated others by monopolizing contact with the press.

"He loves being at the microphone," one MP told Cornellier. "Even now he controls things completely."

Two years later, Duceppe may have mellowed somewhat. He was backed by more than 20 of the other 51 Bloc MPs and by the presidents of more than half of its 75 riding associations.

His rise has not been without controversy, however.

In 1994, he was briefly the centre of attention over a parliamentary mailing to his constituents in which he urged them to vote for a party for which his wife was a candidate in local school board elections.

And this year, he came under attack for his role in helping Bouchard's staff exploit House of Commons rules so that they could both collect their new salaries with him in Quebec city and get federal severance pay after being "fired" from their jobs here.

The son of the late and highly acclaimed actor Jean Duceppe, the new leader's roots in the separatist movement go back 30 years.

He hasn't done so lately, but in a 1991 interview with the Ottawa Citizen, Duceppe attributed his conversion to separatism to mean-spirited and colonial-minded anglophones.

Duceppe told the Citizen that when he and his friends went to hockey games in Montreal in the '60s, they would sing "O Canada" while the kids from English-speaking schools waved the Union Jack and sang "God Save the Queen."

Worse, when he tried to board a bus for students going to an English-speaking school one bitterly cold day, he and his friends were only allowed to stand in the aisles. When he complained, the story goes, an anglophone teacher slapped him.

"If you're talking about social justice, that event marked me," he told the Citizen.

Even so, Duceppe only became a separatist when René Lévesque did - in centennial year, 1967. And even then his attention quickly shifted to the labor movement and eventually to communism.

With the influence of the church sharply declining in those years, "we looked for another set of values, one that was all-enveloping, like the church," he told the Montreal Gazette.

For a lot of us it was communism. It was a rational explanation that had answers to all the questions. Like in the church, the answers were all there, written down. It gives you a sense of security."

Looking back now, he says his three-year membership in the Communist Workers party was a mistake brought on by a search for fundamental change.

PROPOSES UNION

Duceppe returned to separatism after the 1982 overhaul of the Constitution by Ottawa and the other nine provinces over the objections of Quebec.

But his plunge into federal politics only came in 1990 after the collapse of the Meech Lake accord, which was aimed at patching up the split of 1982.

Less than two months after Meech failed - helped in no small measure by Jean Chrétien, who by then was Liberal leader - Duceppe and the newly born Bloc led by Bouchard snatched a Liberal stronghold in east-end Montreal with a stunning 66 per cent of the vote.

The Bloc has never looked back.

From a rag-tag group of former Tories and Liberals under Bouchard in 1990, it has grown to a party of more than 100,000 members, helped defeat the Charlottetown accord in a 1992 referendum, swept 54 of the province's 75 federal seats in 1993, helped win the provincial election of 1994, and came within a whisker of winning the referendum on sovereignty in 1995.

Now, polls suggest, it is poised to sweep Quebec again in the federal election expected this year.

What sort of leader will he be?

History suggests he will be very much in the Bouchard mold.

Like Bouchard, he says the Bloc should act as a truly national opposition where necessary, speaking out on behalf of the poor or other Canadians regardless of where they live.

Like Bouchard - and unlike former premier Jacques Parizeau - he proposes a European-style union between an independent Quebec and what would be left of Canada.