Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party and the official opposition in Canada's parliament, has died at age 61.
Canada, a nation whose politics has in recent years reached new lows in divisive discourse, is united today in sadness as we mourn the loss of a man who dedicated his life to fighting for fairness and good. A man who in his later life brought civility to public discourse and whom, even his political opponents would agree, fought fiercely and fairly to make society better.
I will not attempt to recount his many accomplishments here. The internet is overflowing with well-deserved glowing obituaries to the man who did everything from ban smoking in elevators to raising the left-of-centre NDP to major political prominence. Instead, a few words on who this man I never met was, and what he came to mean to the country that today remembers him fondly, and with great sadness.
Jack Layton challenged us to make Canada a better country. Not in typical expressions of military might or diplomatic heft. Rather, Jack challenged us to be better to each other - to treat each other with civility, to get involved in our communities, to show compassion for those less fortunate than ourselves.
The incredible effects of Jack's emphasis on civil political dialog played out in Quebec during the 2011 federal election. For the first time since the 1980s, Quebeckers threw their support behind a federalist party at the expense of the separatist Bloc Quebecios. This may have been, as the prevailing narrative suggests, the death knell for the Bloc.
While I don't discount the charm of Jack's personality and his fluency in French in bringing Quebeckers under his spell, I think Jack's dramatic departure from the standard federalist refrains played a major role in convincing the people of the province to support a national party. The Anglophone approach to seperatism and seperatists has been - and still is - almost universally vitriolic. Supporters of the Bloc, or anybody with any affiliation to Quebecois nationalist movements are evil traitors. Jack Layton eschewed this sort of speech, and instead took the unique approach of acknowledging that if the people of Quebec democratically chose that they wanted to seperate from Canada, that they probably had a right to do so. By treating the nation's Francophones with respect rather than derision, Layton won their trust, and it was that trust that brought a great number of them over to a federalist party.
When Jack first took the helm of the NDP, I was thrilled that this federal politics neophyte who had done so much for my city at the municipal level had emerged in the political arena in which so many people felt he naturally belonged. But despite my high hopes, my early impressions were not great. Jack came off as a used car salesman. His words seemed overly practiced but not polished, and that silly moustache - which seemed so quaint when he was a municipal councilor - only added to the appearance that he was selling something.
Over time though, Jack became more polished, and Canada fell under his spell. He didn't stop being a salesman, mind you. Because that's something that Jack understood perhaps better than any left-of-centre politician in Canadian history. Even when you are fighting for good things, you can't stop selling. You can't stop negotiating, compromising, and accepting small victories when the big win is out of reach - only to use those small victories as stepping stones to the ultimate goal. Jack was a salesman alright, and by the 2011 election he had become perhaps the greatest salesman in the country. And while we are naturally cynical about the fact that all politicians are selling something, we could take comfort in the fact that Jack was selling something good.
We have lost so much from his passing, but we gained so much from his life. Jack Layton will be dearly missed.
If you wish to read Jack's inspiring last public words, click here.
