Five years after his passing is a good moment in time to reflect on what Canada gained from Jack Layton’s life, and lost with his death.

As a politician, Jack played the long game and played to win. He didn’t just solidify the NDP’s base — he worked constantly to grow it.

“We had the fifth anniversary of his passing on Monday,” said Brad Lavigne, the NDP’s campaign director in 2011. “And the celebrations reminded us that he’s still a tremendous force within the party.”

When he became leader of the New Democrats in 2003, they had only 14 MPs — barely beyond the minimum of 12 needed for recognized party standing in the House. At his passing eight years later, the NDP had just been elected the Official Opposition with 103 members — most remarkably, 59 of them from Quebec.

Layton died of cancer at age 61, less than four months after his historic breakthrough in the 2011 election, when he ran a campaign for the ages. He was the man with the cane, a figure of inspirational physical courage.

In Quebec, he became known as le bon jack, a good guy and a favourite son. At a campaign event in a Montreal sports bar during the hockey playoffs, Jack showed up wearing a Canadiens jersey. He might have moved from Montreal to Toronto decades earlier, but he was still a Habs fan. Voters in Quebec got that — you can change cities without changing teams.

Layton’s campaign team first sensed something extraordinary was going on in Quebec during his taped appearance on Radio-Canada’s hit show Tout le monde en parle, when he got a standing ovation from the studio audience … during the rehearsal.

More remarkable still, he blocked the Bloc, which was reduced from 49 seats in the 2008 election to just four MPs in 2011. This is one of the most significant aspects of Layton’s legacy, and of his service to Canada — he put the separatists out of business in Ottawa.

By the end of the 2011 election, Layton had the NDP polling in the mid-40s in Quebec. At lunch in Montreal during the final days of the campaign, former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis asked former prime minister Brian Mulroney what that would translate to in terms of seats.

“Fifty-nine,” Mulroney replied. “About 59 seats.”

Lewis excused himself, saying he had to share Mulroney’s prediction with Layton.

Flash forward to the 2015 election, in which the NDP was reduced to 44 seats, 16 from Quebec. From 31 per cent of the popular vote in 2011, the New Dems finished with less than 20 per cent in 2015 — after leading in the polls going into the election and during the first half of the marathon 78-day campaign.

As a student of our national game, Layton knew that the worst thing you can do with a lead is sit on it. As a student of our national game, Layton knew that the worst thing you can do with a lead is sit on it.

Throughout all the New Democrats’ bitter post-mortem conversations of the past year, one question keeps coming up again and again: What would Jack have done?

Well, as a student of our national game, Layton knew that the worst thing you can do with a lead is sit on it. He never would have allowed himself and the NDP to be outflanked on the left, as they were by Justin Trudeau and the Liberals with their promise to run stimulative deficits, in contrast to Tom Mulcair’s pledge of balanced budgets.

Layton also was a born campaigner who was energized by crowds. He practised the politics of joy. He put it best in his final message to Canadians, written just two days before his death: “Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”

The Orange Wave of 2011 was not an overnight occurrence, but a political development nearly a decade in the making. The long game.

In the 2004 election, Layton increased the NDP deputation in the House to 19 seats, winning 16 per cent of the popular vote. In 2006, the New Dems grew to 29 seats and 17.5 per cent of the vote. In 2008 the NDP won 37 seats and 18 per cent of the vote.

Those were three successive minority Parliaments in which Layton held the balance of power and managed to cut deals — first with Paul Martin’s Liberals, later with Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.

Through it all, the NDP worked through four campaigns out of owned — not rented — space at the corner of Bank and Laurier in downtown Ottawa. The story of the building, and how the NDP came to own it in late 2003, is one of Layton playing the long game.

“He got the idea from the communications and energy workers, who owned their own space,” recalls Lavigne. The Chrétien government had passed a campaign finance reform law banning corporate and union donations to parties that was to take effect in January 2004.

“Jack decided to get one last round of donations from the unions and buy the building,” Lavigne says. Layton raised $2.3 million from the unions and, ever since, the NDP has occupied the top floor, while tenants on the two floors below pay the mortgage. Not only that, as Lavigne notes, “the party has collateral at the bank.”

Thanks to Layton, Canada’s socialist party is the only one to own its own space; the others are tenants in downtown Ottawa. And now the NDP building is called the Jack Layton Building, having been named for him after his death.

His name is also on the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal on the Toronto waterfront, so named by Toronto city council in 2013 in honour of his many years of service as a council member before he went to Ottawa. At the entrance to the terminal, there’s a bronze statue of Layton sitting alone on the back seat of a bicycle built for two.

He could be waiting for his wife, Olivia Chow, to join him for a bike ride — or perhaps his beloved granddaughter, Beatrice, now seven years old.

Sitting in his Centre Block office one afternoon in 2010, Layton talked about his father and granddaughter. His father, Bob Layton, a former Progressive Conservative minister in the Mulroney government, also had cancer, a battle he eventually lost.

Layton referred to him as “Dad”, and you could hear the love in his voice. Asked about his granddaughter, his simply face lit up with joy.

Among his many qualities, one stood out: He was authentic. Five years on, Canada is a better place for having Jack Layton among us.

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The New Democrats had 14 MPs in 2003, not 12 as originally stated in this piece. iPolitics regrets the error.

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