Remembering Jack Layton

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In a column for the National Post, I discuss how Jack Layton's look to the future led to his political triumph in Quebec.

I first met Jack Layton in the mid-1990s - I don't have a record of the date, but I'd guess about 1994 - at a pub in downtown Toronto.

Layton was already an important figure in city politics, but his eyes were fixed on a bigger prize. His handlers invited me to come meet the man who they explained would become the first NDP prime minister of Canada.

...

Layton built his party to prepare for a different future. Quebec might seem hopeless NDP territory to everyone else. Layton believed he could break through. The environment might seem a weird issue to emphasize through a global economic catastrophe. Layton believed the environment remained the issue of the future.

Though increasingly ill, Layton had the will and force and guts to put his body through the stress and exhaustion of national elections - and to survive to see his hopes vindicated and his plans succeed.

Layton never did become prime minister. Even granted better health, he likely never would have. Canadian politics don't lean that far left. And now he has bequeathed his successors a legacy at once hugely successful and desperately challenging: Can they hold what he gained?

Layton gained success precisely by discarding old ways. Lesser successors may draw a very different lesson: not to try new ways of their own, to adapt to new times ahead, but forever to follow Jack's ways, even as those ways in their turn become obsolete.

Click here to read the entire column.