Building the Orange Wave

The Inside Story Behind the Historic Rise of Jack Layton and the NDP

Brad Lavigne

• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781771620178
• eBook ISBN:
  9781771620185
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Brad Lavigne was not just the campaign manager of the New Democratic Party’s 2011 breakthrough campaign that took Jack Layton from last place to Official Opposition. He was also a key architect of Layton’s overnight success that was ten years in the making. In Building the Orange Wave, Lavigne recounts the dramatic story of how Layton and his inner circle developed and executed a plan that turned a struggling political party into a major contender for government, defying the odds and the critics every step of the way. The ultimate insider’s account of one of the greatest political accomplishments in modern Canadian history, Building the Orange Wave takes readers behind the scenes, letting them eavesdrop on strategy sessions, crisis-management meetings, private chats with political opponents, and internal battles, revealing new details of some of the most important political events of the last decade.

The only item on the agenda was very sensitive, so Jack had booked a table in the private room on the second floor of the Hey Lucy Café. The casual restaurant on King Street was not far from city hall, where Jack and Olivia both served as city councillors.

It was March 2002, and Toronto’s progressive power couple had convened a meeting with some of their key political advisors. They were about to make a life-altering decision, and they wanted to talk through the feasibility—and the wisdom—of their tentative plan. The couple, married since 1988, had been wrestling with whether Olivia should run for mayor of Toronto or Jack should take a run at the leadership of the federal ndp. They had been discussing the two scenarios privately for months.

By then, it was clear that ndp leader Alexa McDonough’s resignation was imminent, after the devastating federal election campaign in the fall of 2000. The mood in the party was gloomy. The 1997 results—McDonough expanded the ndp caucus from nine mps to twenty-one with significant breakthroughs in Atlantic Canada—had given the party a false sense of hope that it was moving in the right direction. But the results of the November 27, 2000, election were a brutal reality check. The party was once again in decline, with little hope for growth.

No matter where they lived or to which wing of the party they belonged, ndp members shared one common sentiment: we can’t keep going on as we have been. McDonough knew this, but she wanted her timing to be right. She also wanted to push through a major constitutional change inside the party before executing an exit strategy: to bring in a one-member, one-vote system to elect her successor.

McDonough handled the file deftly. She worked with party executives and local activists in the run-up to the party’s convention in the fall of 2001 to secure support to revolutionize the way ndp leaders were elected. The new voting system meant every ndp member would now be able to cast a ballot for party leader, giving all members, not just the delegates at the convention, a direct say in who should lead the ndp.

The convention, though, had also turned out to be about something more fundamental: the future of the party itself. A group known as the New Politics Initiative (npi), with the backing of ndp mps Svend Robinson and Libby Davies, proposed to scrap the party altogether in favour of a more left-wing social movement entity. The idea was radical, and when 40 per cent of those at the convention backed the motion, many members were surprised.

Although some at convention felt this was a catalyst for a conversation about the direction the party needed to go, others believed this could be the beginning of the end of the ndp. But no one knew what was going to happen next.

Clearly, the party needed a new leader with popular appeal. McDonough had accomplished what she set out to do at the convention with the passage of the one-member, one-vote system, but with the closeness of the npi vote, she decided to let a little more time pass before announcing her exit.

Jack Layton, a delegate at the convention, had left the meeting with the sense that the two factions could be brought together. Ultimately, he felt the goals of the npi crowd and their opponents were not all that different. Neither camp was advocating for the status quo. Everyone wanted change. Jack, a confident optimist, thought he could revitalize and unite the party. The pending leadership race, as he saw it, was a make-or-break opportunity to get the party onto a fundamentally different path. The most important decision ever facing the party had arrived. Who, if anyone, would be up to the challenge of saving the party from oblivion? Jack thought he was.

This weighed heavily on the minds of Jack and Olivia at Hey Lucy that night in March 2002. Joined by close advisors Bob Gallagher, a long-time friend of the couple who first met Jack during the fight for gay rights in the 1980s, and Franz Hartmann, who had worked with Jack at city hall for the previous four years, the group decided to draw up a list of pros and cons for each option for Jack and Olivia.

The couple always made decisions together in a systematic way, and this would be their biggest decision yet. They first had to decide whether the federal ndp was the best vehicle to bring about the kind of change they had spent their lives working for. Would jumping to the federal scene be worth the risk? Their priorities at city hall fell under federal jurisdiction. Jack’s two greatest passions were housing and the environment. Olivia cared deeply about child care. They knew solutions to these issues could only be realized with leadership at the federal level. From his time on the executive committee at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, Jack understood this well. He had successfully pushed Finance Minister Paul Martin into partnership to secure federal funds for local infrastructure projects through the Green Municipal Fund.

The people around the table agreed that Jack winning the leadership contest would be one thing; getting elected to the House of Commons would be another. Even getting the federal ndp leader elected in Toronto was far from a certainty. At the time, the Liberals held all forty-two seats in the city and the surrounding suburbs.

Would it be practical for the ndp to have a leader who might not even be able to win a seat? Jack had already run as a candidate for the federal ndp—twice—and lost both times.

On the other side of the equation, Jack and Olivia had accomplished some great things on the municipal front, even during Mel Lastman’s tenure as mayor. The flashy mayor, who was set to leave civic politics when his term ended in 2003, may have been conservative-minded, but Jack and Olivia had found ways to work with him and get things done, gaining governing experience for both of them. Jack’s list of accomplishments included the wind turbine at Exhibition Place, the Out of the Cold housing project and the green bin composting program.

Jack running for mayor was a non-starter. He had run a decade earlier, prior to amalgamation of the Metro Toronto municipalities, and lost badly. Olivia as a candidate had fewer negatives, and, as the more practical of the two, had a reputation as a sound fiscal manager through her membership on Lastman’s budget committee. She would play better with the more conservative voters outside the downtown core who made up an increasingly important segment of the Toronto municipal electorate.

The advisors around the table acknowledged the obvious: Jack running for federal leader had a road rife with obstacles, whereas Olivia running for mayor of Toronto had a clearer path forward. But the group also thought they could make significant movement on their core issues with stronger voices in Ottawa fighting for them.

Besides, Jack had been getting emails and phone calls from across Canada, encouraging him to throw his hat into the ring. “I even received one from a city councillor in Victoria,” he said that night.

The group left Hey Lucy with the decision made and an action plan to follow. Jack would hit the road to assess how deep the support for his candidacy was on the ground. Olivia and her chief of staff, Bob Gallagher, would start building the campaign infrastructure for Jack’s federal leadership run.

In the fall of 2000, I was living in Victoria, serving as chief of staff to Paul Ramsey, ndp minister of finance in the B.C. government. I’d been born and raised in B.C.’s Lower Mainland, and I’d jumped at the chance to return to my home province in the fall of 1998 to work for the ndp government. After becoming an ndp supporter and active in the student movement at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., I had left in the fall of 1992 to continue my studies at Concordia University. I helped establish the Quebec branch of the Canadian Federation of Students during my time in Montreal, then went on to serve as head of the national student group in Ottawa from 1996 to 1998.

By the early fall of 2000, Heather Fraser, the federal ndp director of organization in Ottawa, was facing the prospect of staffing campaign headquarters in mere weeks amid rumours of a possible snap election. Heather reached out to me and other ndp government staffers and activists across the country to work on the election at campaign headquarters in Ottawa.

My boss, Paul Ramsey, agreed that it would be good experience for me to see what a federal campaign looked like up close. I took a short leave of absence and headed back to Ottawa. I arrived just days before the campaign was to begin, and the picture wasn’t pretty. At the time, the ndp did not have a full-time electoral machine functioning between elections, so it was caught off guard in its preparations. It didn’t help that the campaign’s tour coordinator had quit in the weeks leading up to the campaign launch, leaving campaign director Dennis Young to scramble to both put together a leader’s tour and get names on ballots. “We were not ready,” Fraser recalls.

The federal party had little money and no internal capacity to produce national communications materials or to assist the local riding campaigns. All of that work was delegated to an advertising firm, Bleublancrouge, which only had time to focus on tv ads. By the time the central campaign managed to ship out cds with leaflets on them, it was too late in the game for the local campaigns to use them.

That meant there was no message discipline. Essentially, local ridings were running by-elections, because headquarters had nothing to offer them. “It was a shit show,” recalls Fraser, who kept a tally on how many local campaign managers hung up on her during the campaign. One campaign manager from Nova Scotia slammed the phone down eleven times.

By the last week of the campaign, the only remaining question was how many members of the ndp caucus would be left standing on election night. The results told the story: the party lost more than a third of its caucus and more than 340,000 votes, winning j...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword by Olivia Chow
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Deciding to Go Federal
• Chapter Two: Running the Outsider
• Chapter Three: Stumbling Out of the Gates
• Chapter Four: A Kick to the Groin
• Chapter Five: Two Seats Short
• Chapter Six: The Mulligan
• Chapter Seven: Courting Quebec
• Chapter Eight: Applying for the Job
• Chapter Nine: Building for the Breakthrough
• Chapter Ten: The Next Tier
• Chapter Eleven: Pulling the Trigger
• Chapter Twelve: Defying History
• Chapter Thirteen: 113 Days
• Chapter Fourteen: The Layton Legacy
• Acknowledgements