CANADA REMEMBERING A PARTY LEADER Hon. Jack Layton
On 25 July 2011, Hon. Jack Layton, Leader of the New Democratic Party and Leader of the Official Opposition, stepped down temporarily from his position for health reasons. Mr Layton had been treated for prostate cancer earlier in the year and had also undergone hip surgery shortly before the 2 May 2011 general election. At the time, it had been announced that Mr Layton’s absence from politics would be for a short period and that he would be at the helm of his party when the House of Commons resumed its work following the 2011 summer recess. Mr Layton, however, died on 22 August. Born in Montreal, in the
province of Québec, and son of Robert Layton, a cabinet Minister during the
Conservative government of Rt Hon. Brian Mulroney, Jack Layton began his political career as a city councillor for the City of Toronto, Ontario, where he was an outspoken
advocate for social causes. In 1991, he unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Toronto. In 2003, he was elected as the Leader of the New Democratic Party on the first ballot. Under his charismatic leadership, an unprecedented number of candidates of the New Democratic Party were elected to the House of Commons. The party went from 13 seats in 2001 to 103 seats in 2011, with 59 of them elected in the province of Québec, a province where the New Democrats had traditionally been unsuccessful in the past. The 103 elected Members of the House of Commons made the New Democratic Party the Official Opposition and a possible government-in-waiting for Canada.
Shortly after Mr Layton’s passing, it was announced that the Canadian government had offered a state funeral to his family, an honour not usually devoted to Leaders of the
Opposition. On his death bed, Mr Layton wrote a letter to
(more than half of their Members were first elected in May 2011) until the leadership convention scheduled for 24 March 2012.
Mr Brian Topp
Canadians that concluded: “My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”
Rt Hon. Brian Mulroney
New Democratic Party leadership race Before stepping down “temporarily” as Leader of the New Democratic Party, Mr Layton had recommended that Ms Nycole Turmel, MP, step in as interim Leader, a choice later endorsed unanimously by the NDP caucus. Ms Turmel, a retired career trade unionist and President of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (the largest union in the Canadian public sector) from 2000 to 2006, was first elected to the House of Commons in 2011. Ms Turmel will lead the inexperienced New Democrats
Shortly after Mr Layton’s death, Mr Brian Topp, President of the New Democrats and former senior political advisor and campaign director for Jack Layton, announced that he would be a candidate in the leadership race. Mr Topp, who has never been elected to public office, has nonetheless received endorsement from the establishment of the party, notably from former Leader Hon. Ed Broadbent. The other major contender in this race is Mr Thomas Mulcair. A former Québec cabinet Minister and former Member of the Quebec National Assembly, Mr Mulcair was first elected to the House of Commons in a by-election in 2007. Mr Mulcair Achilles’ heel in this race is that the New Democratic Party was almost non-existent in Québec, his home province, before the general elections held in May 2011.
Despite their electoral success in that election (the party won 59 of 75 available seats in the province), the political party has few active supporters with membership cards in that province in comparison with other parts of the country. Québec is also the only province where the New Democratic Party is not present