Gilles Duceppe (French pronunciation: [ʒil dzysɛp]; born July 22, 1947) is a Canadian retired politician, proponent of the Quebec sovereignty movement and former leader of the Bloc Québécois.

In his youth, he advocated communism, and held membership in the Workers' Communist Party of Canada (WCP), a Maoist group.

[7][8] However, during this period (which lasted well into his thirties) he subscribed to militant Maoist ideology and was fired from his job as a hospital orderly for belligerent activities.

[9][8] Duceppe even went so far as to intentionally spoil his 1980 sovereignty-association referendum ballot arguing that Québécois should instead focus their efforts on staying united to fight capitalism.

In 1972 he launched his career in community and union settings, as moderator for the citizen's committee of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, then in 1977 as a representative for the Royal Victoria Hospital employees.

[8] In the 1997 general election, the Bloc lost official opposition status, slipping to third place in the House of Commons behind Preston Manning's Reform Party.

During the campaign, Duceppe visited a cheese factory where he was photographed wearing a hairnet resembling a shower cap, which was widely parodied on Canadian television.

[8] When Jean Chrétien stepped down as Prime Minister, to be succeeded by Paul Martin, the Bloc's fortunes improved markedly, particularly after the sponsorship scandal erupted.

[12] Duceppe's Bloc, along with the Stephen Harper's Conservatives and Jack Layton's NDP, worked together on November 28, 2005 to pass a motion of no confidence in the minority Liberal government of Prime Minister Paul Martin after findings in the Sponsorship Scandal.

[13] The Conservatives' gains in Quebec, as well as Ontario, gave the party enough seats to form a minority government with Harper as prime minister, replacing the Liberals' Paul Martin.

The Bloc demanded $5 billion for the province, including compensation for damages from the January 1998 North American ice storm and $175 million towards a new hockey arena to bring back the Quebec Nordiques, which the Conservatives dismissed outright.

[18][19][20] In the resultant 2011 federal election, the Bloc lost 43 of their 47 seats—including many seats they'd held since their 1993 breakthrough—cutting them down to a rump of four MPs and losing official party status.

The NDP, which entered the election with Outremont MP Tom Mulcair as their only elected representative in the province, had surged in the last weeks of the campaign at the expense of the Bloc due to NDP leader Jack Layton's charismatic personality and leftist nationalism policies, while Bloc "over the years defend[ed] Quebec's interests, but the sovereigntist agenda is no longer very relevant".

[22] In January 2012, Duceppe was accused of having used funds designated for his parliamentary office to pay the Bloc Québécois' general manager over a seven-year period.

In 2014, he denounced comments made by newly elected Bloc leader Mario Beaulieu in which he seemingly dismissed the Bloc under Duceppe as having followed a gradualist strategy for achieving sovereignty which Beaulieu characterised as defeatist and for invoking the phrase "nous vaincrons" (we will vanquish), which was a slogan employed by the paramilitary Front de libération du Québec.

[25] After two years of further decline in the polls and internal divisions, it was announced June 10, 2015 that Duceppe would be returning to lead the Bloc into the campaign while his successor, Mario Beaulieu would relinquish the leadership but remain party president.

[31] However, while leading his party to a win of 10 seats in the October 19, 2015 election, up from two, Duceppe was personally defeated in his riding and announced his resignation as leader several days later.