In the 2006 election, Mr. Layton won 29 seats and 17.5 per cent of the vote, the party’s best result in both seats and votes since the Broadbent years. Support in Quebec increased to 7.5 per cent and Mr. Layton won 13 seats in the West, again the best result since the 1980s. But if there was one electoral weakness in Jack Layton’s armour, it was here. Though he would win 15 seats and 28.3 per cent of the vote in the four western provinces in 2011, that was still fewer seats than Mr. Broadbent had ever won in the region and behind Mr. Douglas’s 1968 election in a smaller House of Commons. Nevertheless, Mr. Layton increased his party’s seat total in the region in each of his four elections.
In 2008, Jack Layton kept his party on the rise, winning 37 seats and 18.2 per cent of the vote. It was the party’s second-best result in its history, and groundbreaking in that the NDP won seats in Newfoundland (which had occurred only once in a general election in the short-lived minority Parliament of 1979) and Quebec (which had also occurred only once in a 1990 by-election). Support increased to 12.2 per cent in Quebec and the NDP won 17 seats in Ontario, the greatest haul in its history at the time.
The 2011 election was Jack Layton’s crowning achievement, with all-time best results in Atlantic Canada (in vote share), Ontario, and Quebec, and a competitive performance in the Conservative-dominated West. Canada’s most populous province elected 22 NDP MPs, eclipsing the 13 elected under Mr. Broadbent in 1984 and the nine under Mr. Douglas in 1965, and gave the party 25.6 per cent of the vote, well ahead of the party’s previous best (21.8 per cent) in 1980.
But it was in Quebec that Jack Layton’s breakthrough was most astonishing. Decimating the Bloc Québécois, which had won a majority of seats in the province in every election it contested, was in and of itself remarkable and a feat that neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives had ever come close to achieving. The NDP won 59 seats, the most since Brian Mulroney’s 63 seats in 1988, in a province that had never elected a New Democratic MP in a general election before the arrival of Jack Layton. With 42.9 per cent of the vote, Mr. Layton towered over the bests of Tommy Douglas (12 per cent in 1965) and Ed Broadbent (14.4 per cent in 1988). Even the Bloc only won more of Quebec’s vote twice, in 1993 (in the heated post-Meech, pre-referendum days) and 2004 (when the sponsorship scandal was breaking).
The 103 seats won in the 2011 election was 11 times larger than Ms. McLaughlin took in 1993, almost five times the size of either Ms. McDonough’s or Mr. Douglas’s best results, three times greater than Mr. Lewis’s 1972 result, and more than twice as large as the best Ed Broadbent had done.
The sad passing of Jack Layton leaves the future of the NDP in question. But whether Mr. Layton is remembered as the NDP’s most successful leader or the man who started the party on the path to government, his place in the pantheon of the NDP’s – and even the country’s – greatest political leaders in history is secure.
Éric Grenier writes about politics and polls at ThreeHundredEight.com
