Memo to members of the chattering classes: none of the registered national political parties is the Jack Layton Party.
He is leader of something called the New Democratic Party and while Layton took it to unprecedented heights in the May 2 election — almost 30 percent of the vote, 103 seats and official opposition status — the party has been around for half a century.
It survived the retirement of founding leader and icon T.C. Douglas and the five that followed.
In the days following Layton’s shocking and sad announcement last week that he is again battling cancer and will temporarily step aside as party leader, there was an explosion of hand-wringing that the future of the party as a national force depends on his personal popularity and his leadership.
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In the slow news dog days of summer, it quickly became the narrative.
Interestingly, Layton has never given any indication that he buys into the Jack Party line. He talks about ideas, organization and team.
As a lifelong politician and student of politics, the 61-year-old no doubt remembers the drama in his native Quebec when Parti Québécois founder and two-term premier René Levesque stepped down in October 1985.
Reporters who had covered him for a generation were aghast.
How will the party survive without the leadership of its creator?
Levesque offered his trademark shrug and quoted former French president Charles de Gaulle when he stepped down to some of the same questions: “The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensible men.”
Politics is about ideas. Leaders are the vehicles for selling the ideas and figuring out the tactics needed to gain power to implement the ideas. However, other than in a dictatorship, they do not personify the party. Others stand in the wings, waiting for their chance.
It is true the Orange Surge that produced a jaw-dropping 59 Quebec seats May 2 was driven in large part by the province’s embrace of Layton.
It also is true that voters there will expect results and that comes from local officials, MPs and organizers working over the next four years to deliver the goods. Leadership is just part of the mix.
It is equally true that his success is largely Quebec-based. Jackmania has not touched the Prairies. Of 56 seats, the NDP has three.
Layton is the first leader in NDP/ CCF history to contest four elections without winning a single Saskatchewan seat, the cradle of prairie socialism. Still, Layton showed July 25 that he wants to keep the job, health permitting.
With his decision to nominate rookie Hull-Aylmer MP Nycole Turmel as acting leader, he bypassed both experienced deputy leaders — Thomas Mulcair from Quebec and Libby Davies from British Columbia.
The decision almost certainly was Layton’s attempt to avoid giving one of his potential successors an unfair advantage, particularly Mulcair.
The former Quebec provincial Liberal environment minister, who until May 2 was the lone Quebec NDP MP, is widely seen as ambitious for the top job.
For years, Turmel led the Public Service Alliance of Canada and learned her political skills in the rough-and-tumble of union politics.
If Layton’s absence stretches longer than autumn, she will need those skills to keep simmering leadership rivalries at bay.
