Well, it’s up to you and me now. Jack Layton approached politics differently and he impressed me from the first day I met him in 1991 when he was running against that cynical racist misanthrope mayor June Rowlands, the worst mayor in the history of the city of Toronto whose name doesn’t rhyme with Abhorred. People say he actively answered letters and emails right up until he went in for treatment for the big C, treated corrupt politicians and bigshot journalists with the same respect and civility he reserved for regular people like you and me.

While they were city councillors he and his wife Olivia Chow subletted rooms in their house to U of T students and would often join them in long conversations until the morning light about what the world was, what it should be, and how we can get from here to there. He never lost that connection with the young people of Canada, and during this year’s triumphant election Jack might have been the most youthful oldest candidate we’ve ever had in Canadian politics. I’m sick to my stomach that we have lost such a vital and virile soul at the tender age of 61, but his example lives on, he has laid down the ground rules for how to engage politics with positive determination in the face of callous opportunism, and Jack actually got results. On a personal note when I was laid off from a job at Sony Music during the height of the recession it took me a long time to find new job, and if Jack hadn’t pushed for an EI extension as part of the recession budget, my kids and I would have run out of money before I found a new job. Who knows what sort of safety net would have been there if Jack Layton hadn't been in Ottawa fighting to extend those benefits, and I have to wonder how many other people he has helped.

If this year’s NDP triumph is any indication, history is proving him right. Regardless of party affiliation, let’s pick up where he left off and keep making positive changes to politics in Canada. The old way of looking at things (nationalist vs separatist, outsider vs insider, topdown vs grassroots) is so deeply rooted in the last century of politics that the weeds remain well into this one, but Jack had a different approach: business as usual vs. keep looking up. While Harper and the boys were busy scaring seniors with the ghost of René Lévesque, Jack Layton embraced former PQ members and future Canadians equally, because the whole point of representative democracy is that we have to represent the people who need representing with representatives who represent all stripes of people, not just insiders with law degrees and the right bloodlines. Watching the NDP crush the separatist (but progressive) BQ and the old-guard (and old-money regressive) Liberals and Conservatives with a slate of cocktail waitresses too young to be appointed to the senate has to be sweet vindication. After so many years of Us vs Them, watching the separatists clean the mat with that bad pizza oven salesman Brian Mulrouney and his Québec lieutenant Lucien Bouchard, that scrappy constitutional clarityist Jean Chrétien and his wunderkid Stéphane Dion, even back to Trudeau and René Lévesque and the signing of the charter, who would have thought that it would have been Jack Layton and his progressive minded trustache who would wipe the BQ off the map? Certainly not me. But he did. He was the first 21st century leader of the 21st century.

Thanks Jack for setting such a great example of how a real leader ought to behave, and I look forward to seeing the fruits of your lifetime of labour ripen for many years to come. My heart goes out to his wife and family, his community and his constituents. These might seem like dark days in our neck of the woods, the mayor’s brother is a holy terror, the prime minister is a neoconservative economist, and the province looks poised to give up power to the old blue bloods, but I know there will be other good politicians again one day, and one day some of the good ones will get to be in charge again. But there will never be another Jack.