You don’t really know someone unless you’ve known him when he’s down.
That’s a problem for anyone wanting to write about Jack Layton.
Even during his media conference announcing hard news in his battle with cancer, he personified upbeat. Compassion and love for his life force – damn whatever disease – has erupted across the country.
I must confess that in my 30 years of working with and being a friend of Jack (I did the campaign literature for his first run in politics in 1982, when he scored an upset victory and got a seat on Toronto city council), I’ve never known him to be down.
He could certainly have been in 1991, when he was soundly defeated in his bid to become mayor and found himself without an occupation or a sanctioned platform.
I worked closely with him back then and watched him bounce back without missing a beat, with the same vigour and undaunted lust for life he showed this week when he announced that he needs private time to focus on his medical treatment.
If he wasn’t depressed about his personal situation in the early 90s, the economy might easily have gotten to him.
It’s commonly forgotten that the economic downturn of the early 1990s was the game-changer of recent times. That recession, which has never really ended, brought an end to the good industrial jobs that gave many unionized working people a middle-class lifestyle that buoyed a prosperous economy.
Future archaeologists will identify all the housing developments built across Toronto in the last 20 years on the remains of industrial plants irrevocably closed in those years.
Likewise down for the count were the economic foundations of adequately financed governments, backed by voters who had no problem with government making some of the good things in life available to the disadvantaged.
After finding his place on the positive side of these negative pressures, Jack became the open, creative public figure people feel for today.
At the time, I worked as a campaigner for Greenpeace, trying to figure out how renewable energy could create more and better jobs than those in nuclear and coal plants – and that intention was about all I knew. Moonlighting for NOW, I’d written about Jack’s mayoralty campaign and the extraordinary attention it paid to dynamic new development strategies – what would now be seen as creative/knowledge/green economics.
Layton and I got together at 8 one morning, before his first meeting of the day, and then again at 10 pm, after his last public meeting, while he and partner Olivia Chow hosted an open house for whoever else dropped by to flesh out a new green economics that emphasized job creation and public savings.
We teamed up with Gary Gallon, the ever-ready bunny responsible for many of the green initiatives of the provincial Liberals, and got Greenpeace founder and guerrilla TV news reporter Bob Hunter to be our communications expert (alongside me) as we burst onto the scene with the Coalition for a Green Economic Recovery.
We foresaw 100,000 new green jobs financed by savings from conservation achieved by a new green-collar sector. Win-win-win policies, we said, for the economy, society and the environment.
On the basis of this, Jack, soon back at City Hall, led the newly amalgamated city’s Environmental Task Force of 1999, which set the standard for green economic policies achievable at the local level.
The thing that most stuck in his craw through this transition was a guy who asked if his name was But Jack. The newspapers, the man explained, are always saying, “So-and-so favours this, but Jack Layton opposes it.”
This was Jack’s moment on the bicycle path to Damascus. He vowed to dedicate himself thereafter to “proposition, not opposition.” And he has lived up to that demanding standard ever since.
When I think of him facing his future now, my thoughts turn to those open-house meetings late at night and how startled I was that after a more than full day of meeting people, Jack and Olivia took delight in meeting yet more. It was their idea of downtime.
Jack not only lives full-on. He draws his energy and stamina from others, which is why he leaves himself open – more vulnerable, surely, but with more energy transfer.
This is a person who ends a media conference announcing a personal health setback with these words: “We will work with Canadians to build the country of our hopes, of our dreams, of our optimism, of our values, of our love.”
I am so glad for Jack that he takes the good wishes of so many with him as he now gathers his strength. It is a fine tribute to him and to the people of this country.
Send Jack Layton a get-well message at ndp.ca/get-well-jack
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