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Jack Layton, dead at 61, never lost focus on NDP’s future
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The Globe and Mail- Just days before he died, Jack Layton was sitting up, his mind was sharp and he was talking politics and the future with his long-time chief of staff Anne McGrath and party president Brian Topp.
The pair met with the NDP leader Saturday for four hours as a stream of family members came in and out of the house.
Early Monday morning, Mr. Layton died, succumbing to cancer. He was 61.
But it was her last conversation with her good friend and boss that Ms. McGrath recalled Monday. “We talked about the future,” she told The Globe.
She said “Jack had tasked us” with presenting different scenarios as to how the party should proceed if he didn’t come back in the fall – as he had vowed he would – how that fall session would go and, in “the event that he was going to pass, what would we do.”
They talked about a leadership convention – and it appears that is likely the route the party will follow.
Mr. Layton also penned a letter to Canadians on Saturday in which he outlines his vision for the country. And in it he speaks to Canadians and Quebeckers, asking them to take on his fight, according to NDP sources.
The letter, which runs two pages and bears his signature, was given to Ms. McGrath and distributed Monday.
Mr. Layton had always emphasized with Ms. McGrath that the party must go on. Even though he was optimistic he could beat the cancer, he wanted to have plans in place, she said.
“We can’t be drifting along,” Ms. McGrath said he had told her during many discussions. “He was very clear about that with me on Saturday.
She remembers, too, that when he received the second cancer diagnosis earlier this summer he said to her: “Anne, you have to promise me to keep going and keep building,” Ms. McGrath recalled.
Ms. McGrath says that when she left him Saturday she had a “sense” this was the last time she would ever see her boss and good friend.
Every week during the summer, she had travelled from Ottawa to Toronto to visit him but this time, he did not look well.
“I just didn’t think it would be so fast,” she said, recalling how devastated she was when she received a phone call Monday at midnight, telling her that he only had a few hours to live.
“I spent the summer fluctuating between hope and despair,” she said. “More days despair than hope.”
She will not reveal what he died from. He was diagnosed in late 2009 with prostate cancer. And he announced last month he had another form of cancer – but he would not say what it was.
Mr. Topp said his political boss and friend will be remembered as a rare politician who never gave in to cynical thinking.
In a world of increasingly poisonous attack politics, Mr. Topp hopes politicians remember that Mr. Layton’s positivity struck a chord with Canadians.
“He taught us some things that we must not forget,” Mr. Topp told The Globe. “He taught us that the alternative to the kind of angry politics that you see in so much of North America these days is its opposite.
“... That basic note of hopefulness and optimism was his antidote to angry and small politics and I think you can see in the remarkable result he got that people responded extraordinarily well. Because that’s what they’re looking for. Nobody can replace Jack Layton, but it falls to us to carry on his work.”
“He’s an extraordinarily hopeful and optimistic man and he still was,” Mr. Topp said. “He was talking about his treatment and hoping for the best but he was also thinking about what he had to say in these circumstances.”
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