[PHOTO] Mourning Jack Layton, 25 August 2011

Thursday afternoon at 3 o'clock I ventured down to Toronto City Hall to take a look at the impromptu memorial to former Toronto city councillor and (until his death) federal New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton. Earlier rain had washed away the chalk that covered the plaza, but the northeastern quadrant was again filled.



These women spent a while looking at the different chalked messages.







Note the prevalence of orange, the NDP colour, and the opened cans of Orange Crush pop including the one in front of the portrait in the foreground.

[URBAN NOTE] "Jack Layton: Downtown Canadian"

Writer Ivor Tossell pointed out an element to the mass Canada-wide mourning for Jack Layton that I hadn't noticed: for all the ongoing culture war between cities and suburbs, within Toronto and across the country, Jack Layton was a very strongly Toronto-identified man whose popularity doesn't seem to have been harmed one whit. There is a culture war going on, but somehow the appeal of Jack was such that it allowed him to cross that cultural barrier (and others, too).

Research is called for, clearly.

Where the two main roads of Hilton Beach, Ontario meet at an angle in front of the Hilton Beach General Store, there is a floral planter (maintained by the St. Joseph Island Horticultural Society) with a flagpole in the middle. The flag is at half-mast.

Hilton Beach is the smaller of two villages on this island, possessed of a general store, LCBO, a large, modern marina, and a couple of waterfront patios that cater to island cottagers who come in for a meal, and the big-city crowd that boats down for the day. The big city is Sault Ste. Marie. This is where we are.

The flag at the crossroads is at half-mast for Jack Layton. It’s hardly the only flag at half-mast up here. I’m not even counting the poor Legion Hall in town, whose flag barely gets a chance to reach the top these days. The Husky truck stop at the edge of Sault Ste. Marie – a truck stop! – the kind with the flag the size of a football field, has lowered theirs too.

I want to shake these people. I want to say: Do you have any idea who you’ve lowered this flag for? Do you know where he lived? Do you know how close that place was to the CN Tower? Have you lost all sense of parochial grievance? If so, what do you have left that qualifies you as Canadians?

The fact that Layton achieved a national breakthrough in life while coming from exactly the wrong place for electoral credibility is just as remarkable as the outpouring of national emotion after his death. It’s worth remembering that his success this spring came – perhaps not despite, but at least while being – exactly the kind of person who is not supposed to win elections in 2011.

Never mind the fact that the guy was from Toronto, that great receptacle of negative emotions. The guy was from downtown Toronto. The guy was a socialist from downtown Toronto. The guy was a socialist who lived in a brick house in downtown Toronto with his socialist wife and spent his time pursuing a day-to-day socialist agenda of eating Chinese food and installing solar panels and worrying about the homeless. He rode a bike, for crying out loud. A bike! He wanted other people to ride bikes. He put little places to park bikes on the sidewalks and run bike lanes down the roads. He was a fussy downtowner who fussed about downtown.

[FORUM] Is there still room for hope in Canadian politics?

Canadians haven't been feeling very hopeful about politics lately, about the possibility of new transformative visions, the chance of breaking from cynical and boring patterns to do something new. That's the likely explanation for the surprisingly profound national reaction to the death of Jack Layton, culminating in the emotionally powerful state funeral held in downtown Toronto earlier today. As Michael Posner wrote in the Globe and Mail, Layton's trajectory was that of classical tragedy, the story of a man who challenged the establishment and won, but had little time to enjoy it.

Reconstructed for the stage, the Layton saga might begin with his coronation as New Democratic Party leader in 2003. Initially, he is not been expected to win: rough around the edges, it is said, and a little too combative, the legacy of his confrontational years on Toronto City Council. He parlays his first ballot victory into steady increases in electoral support, almost tripling (by 2008) the party’s seats in the House of Commons.

But what is heroism without adversity? In 2010, the first alarm – a diagnosis of prostate cancer. He would beat it, he vowed, as his father did. And for a time, it seemed that he had. Then, in 2011, another ominous intimation – a left hip fracture and subsequent surgery, more evidence that life is what happens when you make other plans.

He exploits it – could you blame him? – brandishing the cane, a weapon as much as a crutch. Denying the active rebellion in his blood, he hobbles across the country, keeping the campaign’s punishing pace like a marathon runner. A hero of the old kind, defined by greatness. Plucky Jack. Committed Jack. Smart, courageous and, most of all, authentic Jack.

There is no drama worthy of the name without surprise. Again, Mr. Layton delivers. To his message of change – more correctly, the possibility of change – Quebeckers respond most enthusiastically. On election night, the NDP captures an unthinkable 59 of 75 seats, decimating the Bloc Quebecois, presumed voice of the province’s federal interests. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff had counselled Canadians to “rise up.” And they had – only not for him. Mr. Harper wins his long-coveted majority. Upon Mr. Layton, engineer of an historic rewiring of the country’s political circuitry, something else is conferred – honour.

Against all odds, Mr. Layton scales – cane in hand – his enormous summit. Just as the dramatic formula demands, Fate intervenes, not benign. This is peripateia, the abrupt reversal of fortune.

Six weeks after the election, in late June, pain returns, accompanied by stiffness, sweating, weight loss, the body’s determined insurrection. Tests confirm the family’s worst fears, metastasis to one or more vital organs. Aeschylus said “man must suffer to be wise.” Mr. Layton was nothing if not wise.

He now enters the ultimate war zone. Compared with this, politics is child’s play. And, after disclosure of the news, we all become reluctant spectators, horrified, because we know how the drama must end. We aren’t given the details. They were irrelevant. He wastes before our eyes.

Posner's quite right. There was speculation early on that the stress of the electoral campaign had contributed to the rapid spread of Layton's cancer, and that he either took the risk thinking his cause important or that he derived such morale benefits from the campaign that it held his cancer in check.

One argument heard repeatedly in the media is that the loss of Layton means a loss of hope in Canadian politics, that Layton can no longer make good on his desire to make things better and that there will be no one else.

Some have even gone so far to compare his death to that of Diana, Princess of Wales, whose sudden death in a car accident in 1997 sent shock waves around the world that reverberated for months.

Within the confines of Canada, Layton elicited a similar set of emotions, said Jill Scott, a professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., who specializes in the social dynamics of mourning.

"She stood for a warm-hearted generosity, and a kind of naive faith in the goodness of humanity," Scott said.

"In hindsight, we can say Jack Layton stands for a fairer, more equal Canada, for the ideals of standing up for the little guy, the oppressed, the marginalized, the homeless. Those are the things that we'll remember."

[. . .]

Layton was an island of idealism in a sea of cynicism, said Scott.

"With Jack Layton, we may also be mourning the loss of an era, the passing of a generation where politics mattered, where there was a certain kind of optimism," she said.

The loss of hope can't be taken for granted. (I speak, in the following paragraph, entirely of the NDP, largely because as the new strong challenger it seems best to bet on it as a regenerating factor.) Jack Layton's public post-mortem letter was a powerful document that, as I wrote earlier, may have provided a critical amount of cohesion to the party, enough to keep it united behind the classical tragic hero Jack before the leadership campaign. The funeral itself was orchestrated to reinforce that message of hope.

As much as ever, crowds followed the late NDP leader’s message of hope and optimism, both figuratively and literally. Groups of mourners ran alongside the hearse carrying his casket as it moved through downtown Toronto, led by a brigade of pipers and flag-bearers.

They came in droves, many dressed in orange, and cheered him as he went. Some wore “Thank You Jack” t-shirts, and others carried treasured objects Mr. Layton had given them years earlier.

[. . .]

Those in attendance at the funeral routinely rose to their feet for a series of standing ovations. And the ceremony was full of music – one of Mr. Layton’s passions – starting with a movement of G.F. Handel’s Messiah through a sparing but moving rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” sung by Steven Page. Singer Lorraine Segato’s performance of “Rise Up” had spectators dancing outside in David Pecaut Square.

Stephen Lewis, who gave the first of three passionate eulogies, noted the way Mr. Layton died – “so suddenly gone, cruelly gone, at the pinnacle of his career.”

“Jack simply radiated an honesty,” Mr. Lewis said, something “we’ve been thirsting for.”

The service also paid tribute to Mr. Layton’s trademark stubbornness in pursuing his favourite causes, from homelessness and environmentalism to gay rights and HIV/AIDS campaigns. His son, Toronto city councillor Mike Layton, recalled his father’s refusal to turn back on disastrous father-son biking and sailing trips.

“This is how my father lived his whole life. ... He’d pour everything into achieving a goal,” the younger Mr. Layton said. “‘You can wait until you have perfect conditions,’ he said, ‘or you can make the best of what you’ve got now.”

Several of Mr. Layton’s political allies and opponents noted the spirit of the occasion had allowed old foes to stand together.

[. . .] Mr. Layton also wanted desperately to help bring about an inclusive movement that would make Canada a more generous place, Dr. Hawkes said. Differing opinions would be welcome, but people would work with respect, with optimism in the face of defeats, and assuming the good intent in each other.

“If the Olympics can make us prouder Canadians maybe Jack’s life can make us better Canadians,” Dr. Hawkes said, before emerging from behind the lectern and pointing his finger at the thousands of mourners facing him.

“May we rise to the occasion, because the torch is now passed. The job of making the world a better place is up to us,” Dr. Hawkes concluded.

What do you think? Is there still hope for transformative change, hope for hope even, in Canada? Or is there not? Or was all this just empty rhetoric, with transformative change never really being on the menu?

Discuss.