Day of Sadness

(Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail)

August 25, 2011: NDP MP Olivia Chow and family members watch as the casket of her husband Jack Layton is loaded into a hearse on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

Perhaps if it were just one day, it might seem tolerable. But one day has stretched into another and yet another. With more such days on the way. The great keening public that brings us extended bouts of sincere mourning for public figures whom personal fortune and fate have destined for an unanticipated departure from the Land of the Living, now celebrates Jack Layton, deceased, as a genuine Canadian Hero.

The man is dead. He was a politician. No hero, he. But the urban legend of Jack Layton as a modern-day tilter-at-windmills for the common good, as a completely altruistic and authentic hero of our times is being written even as he lies in state. The proclamation of a state funeral for a life-long politician whose apogee achievement was to cannily take advantage of circumstances he did not create.

Leading Prime Minister Stephen Harper to read the way the wind is blowing and to do, as politicians do, indulge the electorate and thereby falter in his integrity to truth and reality. "This is a week to obviously honour his contributions and mourn his passing. This (NDP) is a party, it (sic) and its predecessor the CCF (that) had been waiting 80 years to achieve the status of Official Opposition and had never really come close and Mr. Layton managed to achieve that.

"So, I think that's obviously a tremendous achievement on his part, and I think it's obviously a tragedy and unfortunate that he's not able to survive to really enjoy that achievement, the way he should have." True, true. Life has a way of turning expectations into ashes, of turning one's aspirations toward the final departure and oblivion. Jack Layton exemplified that adage that "chance favours the prepared mind."

It was chance and coincidence, and the failure of a traditional political party and the timely near-destruction of another political party that offered the man his chance, and he was certainly prepared to pounce on it, being favoured by a peculiar response of the electorate toward someone who posed as their champion.

Jack Layton and Olivia Chow lived grandly on generous stipends and tax-paid entitlements. Theirs was no sacrifice on behalf of the common man, but an exercise in the joys of political life for those who like to be noticed and pampered by public esteem that they believe, and their supporters also, that they have earned and deserve.

No one deserves to die an early and painful death, but many do, and not being self-promoting public figures, they die unnoticed.

Breaking with tradition and protocol to extend the ultimate courtesy to a deceased politician of whom much is being made in the way of public grief and despair - at the loss of someone with "integrity" who saw himself doing nothing illegal by posting huge public expenditures far in excess of any other parliamentarian, seems rather absurd to the thinking, unhysterical, unsentimental mind.

That the brilliant posthumous award of a title is being earnestly considered to be endowed upon his name represents yet another absurdity. John Ralston Saul feels bestowing upon Jack Layton a "Right Honourable", reserved only for prime ministers, governors general and chief justices of the Supreme Court ordinarily, is justified as a way of "sending a message to history". Mr. Saul is entranced with sending messages to history.

Former Progressive Conservative prime minister Joe Clark avows that though "I'm not familiar with all the precedents, but I don't think there would be one that would hinder it", also believes that the current prime minister should consider conferring this honour upon the late, lamented Jack Layton: as in the Right Honourable Jack Layton; wonderful ring that has to it, hasn't it?

A Canadian expert on titular honours brings a breeze of needed relief into the heavily larded atmosphere with the information that the designation is unlikely: "the problem is you have to be alive". And Jack, decidedly, is not. Perhaps one should enquire of Joe Clark whether he might be willing to give his up, in favour of Jack's?

Not all is lost, however, as the CN Tower will be lighted with an orange glow to honour Jack Layton during his state lying-in, in Toronto. Another brilliant idea.

And in the 'timing is everything' category, the CBC has been embarrassed horribly by having aired an The Debaters segment taped before a live audience where the host of the show made a little heh-heh joke about the odds of Jack Layton's chances of becoming prime minister: "Don't worry Jack, even at a million to one, you still have a chance." Referential when he should have been reverential.

Thank the Ye Gods!