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'When they say I am not enough tough," Pauline Marois says in her odd English syntax, "I am very tough but in a different way."

Her tone suggests that she is wagging an invisible finger in the air as warning to her opponents.

The first female leader of the Parti Québécois, who took the helm of the separatist party in June, 2007, acknowledges that her gender often encourages critics to suggest she is not combative enough.

"I know that," she allows as confirmation of the criticism, but with no display of defensiveness. She smiles tightly, as if the misguided presumptions of her foes give her more power.

"I have my leadership style. I am a woman who works in consensus. I am able to delegate responsibility but I am a woman of action."

Ms. Marois may be a new face to many Canadians, but she has a long and impressive political career that last week brought her some out-of-province accolades. She was honoured in Toronto at the 8th annual Child Care Worker & Early Childhood Educator Appreciation Day. The PQ Leader, who gained the leadership of her provincial party after two previous attempts, is perhaps best known inside and outside of Quebec for the exemplary childcare program she developed in 1997.

Under Lucien Bouchard's PQ government, she launched Quebec's $7-a-day universal child-care system and a generous parental leave program. Her plan took the universal federal family allowance and invested it in affordable child-care services within the province. She also gave working parents options by giving them tax breaks if they chose not to participate in the universal system and keep their children at home with a caregiver or in private daycare centres.

"The federal government should send money to the provinces, and the provinces should decide what they want to have as a network," she says, when asked about the need for successful child-care solutions across the country.

The benefits of her initiatives are evident 10 years later, she says, pointing to increased birth rates in the province, the reduction of child poverty and the rise in tax revenues from working parents that have paid for 40 per cent of the program. The number of places for children in public child-care centres has tripled to more than 200,000, she says.

"At the beginning it was so hard because we had a lot of demands. ... We were not able to offer enough places. We had a lot of criticism and my colleagues, members of my party in the National Assembly, said, 'Oh, we will be defeated over this policy at the next election.' But two years later, we win because of this policy," she says with delight.

Ms. Marois wears her leadership style - a mixture of defiance, confidence and breezy humour - as effortlessly as the fashionable woollen shawl flung over her tailored suit. She enters the Quebec government's offices in downtown Toronto flanked by two female assistants, one of whom, special counsellor Christiane Miville-Deschâsnes, sports a toothpick between her teeth as well as a short, silver bob and an all-black ensemble.

Ms. Marois appears to be changing the housekeeping rules of a party best known for some of its grumpy-old-male leaders.

In her autobiography, Québécoise, published last year, the 59-year-old mother of four describes how she became a separatist after former prime minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act at the height of the October Crisis in 1970. The former social activist and community organizer worked for Jacques Parizeau in the late 1970s, when he was finance minister in René Lévesque's PQ government. She was first elected in 1981 and has since held 15 ministerial titles in the province.

Recent grumblings that she is not militant enough for some fervent sovereigntists don't faze her. Since she became leader of the PQ, after André Boisclair resigned following the party's third-place finish in the National Assembly of Quebec, she has come under fire for softening the separatist platform by taking a referendum off the table.

At the recent francophone summit in Quebec City, rather than vehemently criticize French President Nicolas Sarkozy for comments widely viewed as a pitch for Canadian unity, she glossed over them. Former PQ leader and her archrival, Bernard Landry, took up the battle cry, demanding a clarification from Mr. Sarkozy as Quebec nationalists have long expected support from France in their quest for sovereignty.

Her gentle approach has been cited as the reason a number of high-profile sovereigntists have defected from the PQ to smaller parties, such as Quebec solidaire and the Parti Indépendantiste.

But she bats away questions about her toughness with élan. "If you look at my past, in each situation when I have to take a decision I make my decision and I succeed," she points out. She will fight for the independence of her province, she says. "I want to create ... our new country, Québec."

Her decision to "put aside" the referendum issue is because "I want to stop discussion about the mechanism, which is the referendum, and I want to talk about the real issue, and the real issue is what will change sovereignty for Quebeckers." She has dismissed the importance of the drop in popular vote for the Bloc Quebecois in the recent federal election - from 42 per cent in 2006 to 38 per cent - and believes that the fight for sovereignty is "in good shape." But she wants to discuss "why it is modern today to do the sovereignty, why it is important to have more powers for Quebeckers."

At a PQ presidents' conference on the weekend in Quebec City, Ms. Marois laid out her commitment to sovereignty, stating that, if elected, her government would adopt a law on Quebec citizenship, re-enforce the language laws of Bill 101 and become more active in the arts, culture and the environment.

Ms. Marois prides herself on her way of doing business. Her gender helps her as a leader, especially in family issues, she asserts. "[Women] are more preoccupied, more sensitive to, quality of life, to the conciliation between family and work. ... It is important for women to be at the decision level in politics, if you want to make a change."

If consensus is part of her female political style, then so is modesty. "I want to put my little talents to do that," she says of fighting for Quebec sovereignty.

Her ambitions have never reduced her involvement as a parent of three boys and a girl, now aged 29, 27, 25 and 23. "You always are a parent," she says. She is also quick to praise her husband, Claude Blanchet, a businessman and former head of Quebec's Société générale de financement du Québec.

"My husband and myself, we decided together to have children, so we decided to take care of them together," she says emphatically, adding that the children spent some time in child-care facilities but were mostly taken care of at home by a nanny. Her husband always pitched in, though. As she explains, with a laugh, "He makes very good sandwich."