• grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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    1 day ago

    Damn that’s sad. So is Jack Layton like our Bernie Sanders? You can’t get three Canadians together without them pining over how Jack could have fixed all this.

    • morbidcactus@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      Jack Layton was the NDP (New Democratic Party) leader from 2003-2011, in that period we had legit talks of a coalition government after the incumbent Tories lost confidence, parliament was prorogued and those flopped unfortunately. The NDP was the official opposition in 2011, which is a big part of his legacy, unfortunately he passed from cancer several months after the election, managed to pull that from being far behind the liberals entering the campaign, liberal party became a third party and Justin Trudeau became the elected leader of the liberals after that (semi interesting is Bob Rae was the interim leader, he was the NDP premier of Ontario in the 90s that still seems to haunt the provincial NDP somehow)

      NDP itself is a social democracy party, its roots are in the CCF (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation), very pro labour, it’s the party of Tommy Douglas who is widely credited as being the creator of Medicare in Canada as the premier of Saskatchewan. During Layton’s years, they were always very pro privacy and net neutrality amongst other positions that are still 100% applicable today. Mildly interesting, Justin’s father Pierre Elliott Trudeau was originally part of the CCF and NDP.