Jones called for someone to help with the youth of the church. They carried that sense of purpose with them to Hudson, where they moved in Jack had been born in Montreal in , followed by a sister and two brothers. Far from ostentatious, the Layton residence is a tasteful piece of mid-century modern, a sort of flattened A-frame up from the lake on Birch Hill Road, where the comfortable houses are set back beneath tall trees.
The town was booming then as a bedroom community for prosperous Montreal Anglos, drawn by the combination of small-town quiet and an easy rail commute to office jobs in the city. In Quebec, that meant the Quiet Revolution reforms that ended Catholic Church dominance and lifted a new French-speaking political and business class.
Robert Layton himself emerged as a key provincial Liberal party official. As Jack Layton explains, his father had grown frustrated, as he climbed the ranks in a Montreal engineering consulting firm, at how private electricity companies were gouging businesses.
The Lesage government was fundamentally changing the power structure, not merely making incremental change. It was a formative experience. Robert and Doris Layton ran the Sunday school. At 14, Jack was one of only three boys attending its Bible study group. His father asked how he might improve attendance. A local doctor gave a talk on sex. There were movie nights and group discussions. Soon the room was packed. Still, there was that undercurrent of social stratification that led to the yacht club dance episode.
He was a swimming star, student council president, avid participant in youth parliaments. He went out with one of the prettiest girls around. His leadership qualities were too obvious not to arouse a bit of resentment. Completing the picture are family Sunday dinners. They lived part of the year in an apartment built specially for them onto the Layton home. But not right away. Promising sons and daughters of Hudson were expected to go off to McGill University, and he did just that.
They both swam competitively and made the university water polo team. Jack drove a beat-up Sunbeam and joined the Sigma Chi fraternity. He soon plunged headlong into the vortex of sixties protest politics that roiled McGill, much like many other North American campuses at the time, but with the added dimension of language tension. Layton was excited and also taken aback by the intensity of it all. Layton seemed like a young man in a hurry.
Barely 20, he married Sally Halford, his high school girlfriend. Layton threw his considerable energy into supporting FRAP. Then came the October Crisis of Was he ever attracted by the sovereignist argument? He calls for a law to make French the language of work in federally regulated industries in Quebec, just as it is in sectors controlled by the province.
On the prospect of any future referendum on separation, he defends the NDP policy that a bare majority—50 per cent plus just one vote—would be enough to break up the country. But he was a commanding classroom performer.
This was no ivory-tower intellectual. Taylor ran unsuccessfully four times for the federal NDP in the s, losing to Trudeau in the riding of Mount Royal in the campaign. And Layton was not just another student.
In , Taylor published The Pattern of Politics , now a minor book in his canon, but to Layton a touchstone. In it, Taylor took aim at the politics of consensus. He advocated conflict between sharply contrasting ideas.
For Layton, the lasting lesson was that an outright clash between competing political visions is a desirable thing. Then what will emerge from those different positions are the real solutions. Kennedy, who supposedly embodied a consensus about reform.
Taylor touted the NDP as the vehicle for a collision of ideas in Canadian politics. Some argued left-wingers could do more, and more quickly, by trying to gain influence as Liberals. Taylor disagreed. Looked at in this way, it is very much a question whether what is billed as the short road to reform is not really the long way round.
The federal NDP leader, former Saskatchewan premier and patron saint of public health insurance gave a speech in the House denouncing the War Measures Act as an excessive assault on civil liberties. He signed up as an NDP member. When Layton completed his B. Jack was a fighter and he will be missed in Canadian politics. He leaves a powerful legacy of a commitment to social justice in his work in Toronto as a city councillor and as a national leader.
Canadians flocked to Twitter to offer their condolences. I never agreed with your politics, but I wholeheartedly admired your passion and courage to fight for what you believed. MikeCrisolago With Jack Layton's passing let us not mourn what we lost, but thanks to his life and work celebrate all we've gained.
RIP Jack Layton. RIP, Jack Layton. We love you. His passion and humanity were an example to us all. In a letter written just a few days before his death, Layton shared a final message with Canadians. Hope is better than fear.
Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. Is it possible that it sapped his anger and negative side, and facilitated enhanced?
And perhaps gave him the complete freedom to live and campaign in a way that was true to that more generous and cheerful outlook, without compromising his beliefs?
It would mean of course that Jack was fibbing about why he needed that cane now one of the most famous props in Canadian campaign history. This type of observation comes with years of practice of talking and treating sick people. The family may never reveal the actual cause because we tend to have different feelings for people who die from lung cancer because they have usually been smokers.
Every year hundreds of thousands of people wear pink and ride, walk and run for breast cancer. Thousands more wear blue and ride, walk and run for prostate cancer. When did you ever see a person in a black t-shirt trying to raise money for lung cancer?
And yet it is the most lethal of all the cancers that affect us. What happened to Jack Layton was actually very rare. But too often I have seen very healthy men aggressively treated for prostate cancer and the quality of their life just goes down the drain. Their sex life is over and they suffer from hot flashes and night sweats because of the drugs that caused their castration.
These same drugs cause a large proportion of these men to suffer heart attacks and how much life do you have left after suffering a severe heart attack or stroke? I can honestly tell you that if I was diagnosed with prostate cancer and did not feel any symptoms, I would absolutely not have any treatment.
Should Newborns Come With a Manual ».
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