Our country’s story has not been written only by election winners

By From the editors - Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Hudson/CP

Followers of Jack Layton could be forgiven for being angry. As a country we usually wait to lionize federal New Democratic leaders until after they have left active politics. Layton, alone among their number, was able to command public esteem and large numbers of votes at the same time. The Liberals challenged him to an election fight, confident that he would falter like his predecessors; they were sure that the hype would deflate and that the people’s attention would wander, as it always had before. Like some 19th-century schoolmaster, Layton took up his cane and taught them a lesson.

The national political stage was left with two opposing figures—one not quite as easy to like as the other—in an otherwise bare landscape. And then, just like that, Jack was gone.

The timing could not have been more cruel; the frank cosmic injustice with which the rivals of the Prime Minister have been swept away, as if Providence had a soft spot for him, strains the limits of belief. In his last years, Layton came to personify the spirit of downtown Toronto—those arpents of elite-trodden pavement which, for better or worse, are a beacon of “progressive” instinct and multicultural practice for the whole Dominion. Inner Toronto has had to watch much of its political pre-eminence recede in recent years, and it now faces the greatest morale catastrophe of all. There will be disillusionment, and there will be rage.

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The long goodbye to Jack Layton

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, September 5, 2011 at 11:35 AM - 10 Comments

Jenna Marie Wakani/Maclean's

When, a decade or so ago, his activism in support of same-sex marriage triggered death threats, Rev. Brent Hawkes would call his friend Jack Layton, the Toronto city councillor who, along with his wife and colleague Olivia Chow, had done so much to champion gay rights, and gave him the specifics. The bullies said they’d turn up at this or that event, and promised violence. Layton was always determined to show up. When Hawkes, wearing a bulletproof vest, officiated at the 2001 double wedding ceremony that eventually led to the legalization of gay marriage, Layton was there.

Now here they were again, Layton and Hawkes, on stage at Roy Thomson Hall. Layton was dead—“cruelly gone, at the pinnacle of his career,” as eulogist Stephen Lewis put it—his body within a flag-draped casket that over the last days, amid much pomp, had travelled to Parliament Hill, to Quebec, and to Toronto’s City Hall, where thousands came, waited to gaze upon him, many with tears in their eyes.

Before Hawkes was an audience composed of some of the most powerful people in Canada, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who, while in opposition, had been a leading antagonist in the fight for gay marriage. This was a state funeral—an extraordinary gesture normally reserved for past and present governors general, prime ministers and cabinet ministers, but one that Harper had offered Layton’s family. Hawkes did not exploit the moment—not to partisan ends, anyway. Rather, he dwelt on the way Layton’s life, at its best—despite his mistakes, his “normal imperfections,” to quote Lewis again—could be used as a model to live better. “If the Olympics can make us prouder Canadians, maybe Jack’s life can make us better Canadians,” Hawkes said, noting that Layton was always careful to ask after his husband, John. “It’s about remembering, about remembering to say, ‘Hi, Brent. How’s John doing?’ Hawkes paused, looking into the hall. “Hi, Prime Minister. How’s Laureen doing?”

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The goodbyes to Jack Layton, both public and private

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, September 5, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 1 Comment

Photographs by Mitchel Raphael

‘I’ll call you’

At this year’s Toronto Pride parade on July 3, Rev. Brent Hawkes’s Metropolitan Community Church contingent was several groups ahead of the NDP. His group got to the end of the route and then Hawkes waited to watch the rest of the parade. When Jack Layton, who was being pulled in a rickshaw, spotted him, he gave him the sign for “I’ll call you.” The two met soon afterwards. It turned out Layton wanted to plan for the possibility of his death and asked Hawkes to officiate at his funeral. The gay pastor, who helped lead the crusade for same-sex marriage in Canada, was humbled. “You can get the head of the United Church. You could get a bishop,” Hawkes told Layton. The NDP leader insisted he wanted Hawkes. It would be a strong political statement. Hawkes notes that his friend “wasn’t afraid to embrace the edges of our community.” Layton, after all, is the politician who once had towels printed up promoting one of his early municipal campaigns; they were handed out in gay bathhouses.

She sang it at their wedding

Jack Layton died on Aug. 22 at 4:45 a.m. At 6:30 a.m. that day, former Parachute Club singer Lorraine Segato got the call requesting she perform her famous ’80s song Rise Up at the funeral. It was the song she had sung at Layton and Olivia Chow’s wedding in 1988. “They were both really partying with us on Queen Street in the early eighties,” recalls Segato. In 2004 at the Juno Awards in Edmonton, Segato arranged for Layton to meet the performers backstage. “He partied with us until three in the morning.” A few weeks later, Layton would be in full election mode.

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The real Jack Layton

By John Geddes - Friday, September 2, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 19 Comments

Christopher Wahl

About a month after he led the NDP to its election breakthrough last May 2, Jack Layton was still at a loss to explain what had really happened on the campaign trail. The game-changing outcome was plain enough: his New Democrats had vaulted into second place for the first time ever, ahead of the Liberals. But what alchemy had occurred in the minds of so many Canadian voters, especially in Quebec, for Layton’s personal appeal to lift his party to government-in-waiting status?

Layton, a meticulous political pro who never went into an interview without a firm fix on what he wanted to say, for once seemed stymied by the question. “I’d go into the crowds and people would stop and have a word. There were a lot of personal words—I don’t know,” he said when Maclean’s asked him back in early June what had been different this time around. “There was certainly enthusiasm, but something deeper. I haven’t put my finger on the emotions, but there were more emotions there than in previous campaigns.”

More than even he might have realized. After his death last week following his swift second bout with cancer, those emotions found release as a national torrent of grief. And Layton had applied himself in his last days to channelling the outpouring to come. In an extraordinary merging of the deeply personal and frankly political, he worked with his advisers to ensure that his death drew attention to the convictions that drove him in life. Both the farewell letter they drafted and the funeral they planned aimed to inspire social democrats. Friends and family had often said that trying to draw a line between Layton’s public and private sides was difficult. In his passing, they became indistinguishable.

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Photo gallery: Jack Layton’s state funeral in Toronto

By macleans.ca - Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 10:15 PM - 0 Comments

A Canadian icon rediscovered

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, June 4, 2009 at 9:20 AM - 1 Comment

“It’s like entering a forest,” says architect Simon Scott, pausing outside the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, designed by architect Arthur Erickson, whose death last week, at 84, saddened design fans everywhere. Scott, who worked at Erickson’s firm while he designed the museum, steps through a row of Douglas fir and western red cedar into a dark entranceway. As you walk down a steep, black ramp—nowhere near wheelchair code—sunlight sneaks through skylights, “like light coming down through the trees,” he explains. Gradually, the room gets bigger, and brighter, until “you see this immense sky,” he says, pointing to 70-foot windows, the ocean just beyond it. A forest clearing was the intent—the Great Hall is filled with towering Haida totem poles, painted in red, green and black.

Widely considered Erickson’s master work, the museum was completed in 1976. Three years later, in a 27-page New Yorker profile, eminent U.S. architect Philip Johnson declared Erickson “by far the greatest architect in Canada, and maybe the greatest on this continent.” Flooded with blue-ribbon corporate and institutional clients, and with two universities (Simon Fraser and Lethbridge) as well as Vancouver’s downtown courthouse complex under his belt, Erickson would nevertheless soon see his sterling reputation tumble—partly a reaction to shifting styles, partly his own doing.

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