On a bright Sunday morning in the fall of 2008, in the midst of the previous federal election campaign, I took the Red Rocket east along Bloor to Broadview station. From there I walked north to the Estonian Hall to watch Jack Layton give a speech supporting the launch of the NDP’s platform. In that event there was something both old and new, Janus-faced, an inflection point. The room was marked by three distinct elements. The old union bears whipping themselves into, if not exactly a frenzy, a half-way decent waddle, waving signs that read “Canadian Leadership” or some such campaign doggerel. There were very young people and boomers with a dreamy look about them, standing in clumps talking ardently about the campaign and the universal struggle for whatever it is idealists of a certain age fantasize. A smaller contingent were hacks like me, many of them covering their umpteenth version of this event or events awfully similar to it.
At least for me it was something new. Before the speech Thomas Mulcair and Brian Topp gave a quite good account as to the reasons the NDP could be trusted to manage the nation’s financial and economic affairs. This was the new NDP: Prairie pragmatism in the mold of Roy Romanow, ardently opposed to the sort of deficit financing that allows Goldman Sachs to dictate health care spending. Then there were a few standard-issue cynical questions — “Can Canadians reasonably believe that you’ve turned away from deficit financing?” — and then we were trooped into the hall, spilling coffee and crumbs along the way, to listen while Jack let her rip.
And he did.
He said he was running to be “your Prime Minister,” and a recent poll suggesting the NDP was running dead-even with Stphane Dion in Quebec fueled a huge jet engine roar. And then for some reason everybody in the room started pogoing and roaring and pogoing some more and Jack Layton stood before them, his smile like some kind of incandescent totem of hope and sheer joy. Jack’s head and that massive smile bobbed up and down, simultaneously following and leading the crowd in their rapture. In that moment everybody, and I mean everybody, in that room was smiling back.
And now he’s dead, having led that crowd and others like it awfully damn close to the promised land. But close isn’t there. The horror of the fates is to kill the man who could arguably one day have been Prime Minister; but who instead, in a heartbeat, replaces Bob Stanfield as the best Prime Minister we never had. Now the NDP is left to wrestle with the complicated business of reconciling its past and its future without the man who managed that trick in his sleep. For the moment we are left with only the dark reminder that destiny has us all by the scruff of the neck. Like Shakespeare said:
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.
Forty odd years ago, Martin Luther King gave a speech in Memphis that concluded:
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.
And I don’t mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!
And so I’m happy, tonight.
I’m not worried about anything.
I’m not fearing any man.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
In a similar vein, Jack Layton ran the good race and fought the good fight and no one can gainsay that today. Let those smiles that day in 2008 be his legacy and his tribute.
