Jack Layton and the Death of Cynicism

Politics is an ugly game, but Jack Layton was always able to find the beauty in it.

For people in this country of a certain age, Jack Layton was the closest thing to a constant in a decade of political upheaval, his grin and easygoing candour as likely to grace the evening news as finger-waving and point-talking from his opponents. It's worth remembering that the NDP leader had only been a fixture in federal politics for eight years, taking over the reins of a downtrodden party from the wayward leadership of Alexa McDonough in 2003.

Eight years is a lifetime in Ottawa. Eight years ago, Paul Martin led a majority Liberal government; a much darker-haired Stephen Harper had just merged the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance parties; Canadian involvement in Afghanistan was ramping up, while a whole new war in Iraq was just getting under way. Politically, those eight years didn't give us much to be proud of. Adscam, Afghanistan, acrimony between hacks both red and blue, economic collapse ... under that guise, it's little wonder that so-called Eighties Babies, Millenials, or whatever the hell you want to call the unlucky souls who came of age between 9/11 and Bin Laden's death, are so often characterized as disinterested and unengaged.

And yet, through that all, there was Jack Layton. I'm not about to revise my personal history at all – when I first became aware of the Man with the Mustache, I couldn't have been more than 16 or 17, my political leanings limited to the belief that the drinking age should be lowered and that the Chretien-era Liberals really were a bunch of scumbags. It'd be nice to say Layton jolted me out of my political adolescence, that his folksy banter and sensible socialism lit a fire under my ass to get into political science and journalism, but he didn't. At first, to me and assuredly many of my peers, here was just another oldish white guy who at times seemed more like a used-car salesman than a statesman, another boomer pinko who bore a resemblance to Lenin that Maclean's magazine was more than happy to reinforce on their cover. He led the fourth-largest party in a Parliament with only four parties, and was drowned out by laughter when he spoke of – and heck, even seemed to believe in – some day residing in 24 Sussex.

He never made it. But along the way, he got close, much closer than anyone – anyone – would have believed in 2003. I'm not sure when the millions of other Canadians who voted for his party on May 2 began to gradually realize that Layton might not just be another politico, but a man who held principles and found ways to stick to them despite endless jeers and worse from supposedly more astute minds. For me, at least, it came somewhere around the time when the mainstream press, the Liberals, and Tories were calling Layton “Taliban Jack” for his suggestion of sitting down with the Afghan insurgents to try to hash out a peace deal, in 2006. That was at least three years before U.S. and Canadian military officials realized that maybe that bald guy was on to something by engaging enemies with more than just bullets.

He wore me down a little more when Stephen Harper explicitly thanked Layton for his help in drafting the residential schools apology (a rare political moment of the last decade in which we all can unabashedly take pride). And then again when he came out in favour of net neutrality in 2008, years before most people could even tell you what it was. And then last year, Layton masterfully played his small hand to actually win concessions from a government hardly known for them – bucketloads of cash for EI benefits at a time when thousands of his constituents desperately needed it. At that moment, all of his paeans to finding common ground with the other parties and getting results for Canadians rang true.

Layton accomplished all of that without cynicism, rancour, or keys to 24 Sussex. He embraced the politics of the positive, proving that hard work and his homespun “proposition, not opposition” slogan could indeed find a home in the most cynical of Parliaments, that being pragmatic bore better results than being dogmatic. This year, he was finally rewarded for his work with more seats than his party had ever seen before, completing the party's transformation from a gaggle of unionists and anti-war types into a party made up of students, bartenders, career politicians, former sovereigntists, lawyers, Quebecers, Ontarians, British Columbians, Manitobans ... Canadians, truly, of all stripes.

Among the public (well, the younger reaches of it, at least), Layton was the Real Deal, the lone guy willing to say what he believed, find a way to achieve it, then do just that, even when doing so didn't attract cameras or headlines. Over those eight years, he won over countless converts and warmed the hearts of his rivals. No other politician of this era comes close to having left a legacy as inspiring as Layton, a legacy with countless more bridges built than burned. One can now only dream of what he might have yielded had cancer not robbed the country of another eight years of Jack Layton.

– Mike Barber, News Editor