MONTREAL—What would have happened if the orange wave of the last federal election had not lost some of its impetus as it hit the western shore of the Outaouais River?

Last May 2, a variation of only few points in the vote outside Quebec could have brought the NDP within reach if not of a minority government in its own right, at least of a ruling coalition with the Liberals.

Given Jack Layton’s cooperative track record; given that he would have been freed from the constraint of dealing with the Bloc Québécois, does anyone doubt that he would have sought an arrangement with the Liberals to install an NDP-led government in power?

Under that scenario, a fragile neophyte government would have been beheaded without having even put its first budget or its first bill to bed. Within months of the election, the country would have been faced with a gaping leadership vacuum at the very top of a shaky federal pyramid.

That vacuum is not a product of the imagination.

Canadians have been staring at it day in and day out since Layton’s untimely death last August.

NDP elders such as former federal leader Ed Broadbent and former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow basically acknowledged its existence when they hastily pushed backroom strategist Brian Topp unto the leadership stage in the immediate aftermath of Layton’s funeral.

In a conversation earlier this fall, Brodbent assured me that he had given his extraordinarily quick blessing to Topp with his eyes wide open, in full knowledge of the probable make-up of the rest of the field.

If he and Romanow so quickly came to the conclusion that no sitting MP was an obvious choice to become leader of the official Opposition, one can only conclude that their assessment of the caucus aspirants to the succession would not have been different if the party had had to replace a prime minister.

While seven of its MPs are on the campaign trail, the NDP has struggled to perform its basic official Opposition duties this fall.

If the party had been in power, one can only wonder how it would have managed to hold its government together against the same uncertain backdrop.

Before, during and after the federal campaign the media collectively took a gloves-on approach to the issue of Layton’s health.

In hindsight, that approach was anything but exemplary journalism.

As Lucien Bouchard’s 1994 brush with flesh-eating disease demonstrated, a life-threatening health challenge need not be an obstacle to the resumption of a successful political career. But nor can it be treated as a strictly private affair.

In Layton’s case, there was initially no reason to believe that a full recovery from prostate cancer was out of the question.

But when his health visibly deteriorated in the lead-up to the last campaign, the NDP explanation was patently opaque. In spite of that, no one was really under the impression that Layton’s fractured hip was the result of an innocuous slip.

In the same circumstances, Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff would have been questioned more aggressively. The argument that voters had a right to know whether their next prime minister was healthy enough to lead the country for the foreseeable future would have easily won the day.

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If Layton’s health was not scrutinized with due journalistic diligence before and during the campaign, it was not so much out of respect for his privacy as because until almost the bitter end of the campaign, no one seriously believed he was a contender for the role of prime minister (or even for most of that time for that of leader of the official Opposition)

Some lessons are learned the hard way. One of the harder ones of the 2011 political year is that the media, when it looks the other way rather than pursue unpleasant, unpopular but yet relevant avenues are really not doing anyone a service, least of all the voters they have a duty to inform.