I first met Jack in the late 1980s, when as a city councillor he put his head together with a group of us AIDS activists to plan a response to the exploding number of AIDS cases in the city of Toronto. I have never met another politician before or since who took citizen engagement as seriously or who championed causes, of all sorts, even when they were a political liability, simply because he believed it the right thing to do. As he gained more prominence he never lost sight of his community roots; even after becoming Leader of the Opposition in May some of his first calls were to organize grassroots responses to a number of issues that hadn't been addressed in the last Parliament (such as streamlining the process for producing generic HIV drugs for developing countries).
When he took the helm of the NDP in 2003, the party's future was in doubt after languishing for 10 years with single digit popular support. Talk of merging with the Liberal Party died down as election after election party standings improved, until this past May when it won a whopping 103 seats, catapulting past a decimated Liberal Party who are now doing their own soul searching about a merger, this time as the junior partner. More significantly, by winning 59 of 75 seats in Quebec the NDP ended the 18 year hegemony of the separatist Bloc Quebecois in that province, consigning talk of Quebec separatism to oblivion for the foreseeable future for the first time in 35 years.
Part of his genius was his success in avoiding making enemies even among diehard political opponents. He was a master of compromise, as someone said if he could get 50% of what he wanted on an issue he would accept that with a smile on his face, content that he had advanced the cause and ready to take up the rest of the battle another day. It makes him one of a vanishing breed among politicians. The Canadian political landscape is decidedly poorer now that he is gone.
RIP Jack
