Jack’s doctors couldn’t say for sure how long the recovery period would be after his surgery on March 4. A few days before the procedure in Toronto, Anne McGrath phoned me with an update. I’d brought campaign tour coordinator Ira Dubinsky into my office to join us on the call. Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty would be tabling the federal budget before the end of the month, and that meant we could be heading out on the campaign trail soon.

“Will Jack be able to walk up the stairs to get on the plane?” I asked.

“We don’t know yet,” McGrath answered.

“Do we need to plan for a lift to get him into the plane?” asked Ira.

“Don’t know,” McGrath said. “But with each week that passes, he will get better. So if the election doesn’t start for a few more weeks, he may not even be on the campaign trail with crutches. The one thing you need to understand, though, is that if he goes too hard, he could hurt it again and then he’s back to square one.”

“Shit. We need a backup plan,” I said. After spending two years mapping out a campaign game plan fronted by our best asset—Jack—we now had to work out the logistics of him being on crutches or worse. We also knew that we would be the ones to decide the timing of an election. The Liberals and the Bloc had both been signalling to the media that they would be voting against Flaherty’s budget, regardless of what was in it.

We figured the Liberals were leaving the timing of the election to us because they had misinterpreted the results of three by-elections held just a few months earlier.

Pundits often elevate by-elections into something they are not, taking local results and reframing them as a national trend. By-elections are fundamentally different from a general election, however. They present an opportunity for people to base their votes on something other than who should lead the country. Sometimes, by-elections can be instruments to send a message. Sometimes, the results reflect simply the strength of a local candidate.

Three very different seats had been up for grabs in November 2010. The rural Manitoba seat of Dauphin–Swan River–Marquette became vacant when the Conservative mp Inky Mark stepped down. The Vaughan riding, north of Toronto, was being contested after Liberal mp Maurizio Bevilacqua resigned to run for mayor. Winnipeg North, an ndp stronghold, was vacant after long-time ndp mp Judy Wasylycia-Leis decided to run for mayor of Winnipeg.

The Tories had easily held the seat in rural Manitoba, though the ndp vote went up ten points. Our second-place finish was well ahead of a distant Liberal Party candidate. In Vaughan, the Tories picked up the long-held Liberal seat by running former Toronto chief of police Julian Fantino. The ndp vote completely collapsed.

Of the 40,000 votes cast in the riding that night, our candidate garnered just 673, or 1.7 per cent of the vote. The outcome was disappointing. Vaughan had never been a winning riding for us, but in the last three federal elections, under Jack’s leadership, we had captured close to 10 per cent of the vote there.

But that wasn’t the worst news we had to break to Jack that night in November.

The ndp and its predecessor, the ccf, had held the Winnipeg North riding for sixty of the last eighty-five years. In Kevin Chief we had a strong candidate with an inspirational personal story, but Chief lost by eight hundred votes to a popular local mla. Kevin Lamoureux, only one of two Liberals in the Manitoba legislature, had spent the previous two decades as a constituency man. (Chief, a young aboriginal community leader, would go on to become a cabinet minister in Manitoba premier Greg Selinger’s ndp government.)

The loss in Winnipeg North was devastating. But after a comprehensive debrief about the race, including a poll-by-poll breakdown on voter turnout and voting patterns, we concluded local forces had driven the results. This was about a long-time mla who had motivated his provincial constituents to vote for him and about our own inability to motivate white working-class voters and traditional ethnic supporters in the riding.

In other words, this was no Liberal resurgence in Western Canada. It was certainly not the sudden emergence of “Iggymania” or a rejection of Jack. But that’s how the Liberals appeared to see things. Our loss in Winnipeg North was proof that we were vulnerable to the Liberals even in our “safe” seats in the West, they concluded. If they could just drive two-way race polarization between themselves and the Conservatives in the next election, they figured our vote would move to them, allowing the Liberals to pick up seats. This view not only helped Ignatieff’s team shape their strategy for the next campaign; it meant the Liberals wanted to go to the polls quickly.

During the run-up to the budget in early 2011, Jack stepped into the space vacated by the Liberals and the Bloc. He returned to the frame that had worked well for us in the past: the ndp wanted to make Parliament work to get things done for Canadian families. That meant he was going to tell Harper what we wanted in the budget, wait to see what was in it, and then decide whether the ndp would support it.

All eyes were now on Jack. We seized the opportunity to telegraph our values and priorities to the public. Allowing voters to compare our values to Harper’s priorities, we figured, would give us a running start on the story we wanted to tell if there was a spring campaign. But we had to ensure the media understood that Jack’s decision would be based on the merits of the budget alone, not on whether we were ready for an election campaign. This message would also strengthen Jack’s hand in his budget discussions with the prime minister.

In January, I wrote a memo about our campaign readiness and leaked it to the media. Addressed to Jack but intended for reporters, the memo detailed how many candidates we had nominated, and it confirmed the booking of our tour plane and our $21-million budget to fight the campaign. Our team was “prepared to wage an aggressive federal election campaign at any time,” stated the internal memo, reported in the press.

This set things up nicely for Jack’s meeting with Harper on February 18. The two had spoken on the phone on December 17 about Jack’s proposal to strengthen the Canada Pension Plan. The call had ended with a plan for the two men to meet in the new year to discuss that and “any other budget asks we may have,” Anne McGrath wrote to senior staff in a brief about the conversation.

The two leaders and their chiefs of staff, McGrath and Nigel Wright, met at 4 pm in the Prime Minister’s Office at Langevin Block. Jack, experiencing pain in his hip, was having a hard time moving around and getting in and out of cars, so we had arranged to use a minivan to drive him to the meeting just a few blocks from his Ottawa apartment. Helpful pmo staff had arranged for Jack’s assistant, Eiman Zarrug, to drive the van through the gates at the side of the building to minimize walking.

The four sat on the leather couch and armchairs, rather than at a meeting table, to make sure Jack was as comfortable as possible. Things began cordially. Harper inquired about Jack’s hip and mentioned that he “avoids all activities that may lead to injury. Saw how difficult it was for [Peter] McKay to lead the party on crutches when they negotiated the merger of the parties,” McGrath later told senior staff in an email to debrief us about the meeting.

Jack laid out for Harper what the ndp wanted to see in the budget: the removal of the gst from home heating bills, a restoration of the ecoenergy Retrofit program, an increase to the Guaranteed Income Supplement for seniors, changes to the Canada Pension Plan and a plan to increase access to family doctors. Our asks were clear and affordable, and they reinforced our values. “He was very clear, no notes, hit every point, well matched with the pm,” McGrath wrote. “pm believes that our home heating proposal would be about $2.3 billion per year. One half of that in direct costs and the other half in compensation to the provinces. Reason for provincial compensation is that removing it affects the base. Jack challenged him on the provincial compensation and gave examples of seniors turning off their heat.”

Harper also estimated that our senior provisions would cost $3 billion. On the Canada Pension Plan, Harper “indicated an openness to cpp improvements but that he won’t do that now since there is strong pushback to what amounts to a payroll tax increase. Says he’s not slamming the door, though it is undoable in the current climate,” McGrath wrote.

Jack “pressed the point about the value of improving retirement security through the public plan. Highlighted low admin costs, belief there would be public support. Harper said he’s not arguing against cpp expansion but made it clear he’s not going to put that in this budget.”

There was also some discussion about demographics and “funny stories about dads,” McGrath wrote. “Harper’s dad would map out routes and times to get to a game and they’d arrive almost an hour and a half early. Then he’d analyze the trip and muse that if they’d missed a connection they’d be late. Layton’s dad would cut it close to the wire and had unusual techniques (such as getting Jack to open his door to get traffic to stop so they could move into another lane) to get through Montreal traffic.”

At the end of the meeting, McGrath wrote, Harper “said that he is not seeking an election. Said, ‘you will make your decision.’ With respect to our proposals, he said they will make some effort. Jack said that we will look at the budget as a whole. Will also look for any surprises that wedge us, items we can’t support. Both Wright and Harper noted that what was presented was consistent with what we’ve been saying publicly.”

Over the next few weeks, Jack repeated our main message over and over again in the public: if these items are in the budget, we’ll vote for it. If they’re not, the ndp caucus will vote against it, triggering an election. It was now up to Harper to decide whether Parliament was going to live for another day.

Now, though, with Jack’s hip fracture, we had a huge obstacle to overcome.

Jack had begun feeling pain early in the new year after getting some good news about his prostate cancer from his doctors before the Christmas holidays. On December 16, he received an update from one of his physicians telling him that his psa had declined further to near non-detectable levels. “Thanks, Doc!” Jack wrote back. “Glad the bloodwork shows a good result, again. I’m feeling very well indeed. I have gained weight. I’m going to have to watch the calories a bit! My tailor is going to be busy if I keep this up,” Jack wrote, explaining that he was working out five or six times a week.

But the pain he experienced in January prevented him from flying to Ottawa from Toronto to deliver a speech at the party’s federal council meeting. “We didn’t realize it was the hip,” Olivia recalls. “We knew something was wrong, but it took a while to find the fracture and we thought it may heal itself. But it just got worse.”

Two weeks after his meeting with Harper about the upcoming budget, Jack underwent hip surgery without complications. He was clear on one thing during this period. “My health will not be a consideration. We are going to assess what’s in the budget and decide whether it’s worth supporting on its merits. Period,” he told me.

Nonetheless, we faced a skeptical press. Columnist L. Ian MacDonald captured the sentiment: “Being Irish, Flaherty knows blarney when he sees it... Flaherty knows perfectly well the ndp doesn’t want an election in which it stands to lose up to a dozen seats, and in which its leader would be put through a punishing grind while still in recovery from prostate cancer.”

Budget day, on March 22, fell just eighteen days after Jack’s hip surgery, and he still needed a crutch to get around. Jack wasn’t nervous about a possible election, even though he was working through a lot of pain. “Jack doesn’t work that way. Jack makes decisions based on principle. If the budget is bad, he’ll vote against the budget. He’ll run a campaign if he needs to. He’s not scared of anything; he’s willing to take that risk,” said Olivia of Jack’s state of mind at the time.

That same sentiment was what had got Jack to Parliament Hill on March 9, five days after his surgery, to cast his vote for a generic drug bill that would make it easier to distribute patented medicines, including those used to treat aids, to the world’s poorest countries. The private member’s bill, sponsored by Ottawa Centre mp Paul Dewar and pushed by the ndp since 2009, had passed the House of Commons, despite opposition from a few Liberals and many Conservatives.

“He insisted that we go and vote on the drug bill,” remembers Olivia. “We struggled to get Jack in the van. We drove for hours so that he could hobble in for the vote. We won the vote, and the goddamned senators—the unelected Senate—didn’t deal with it before the election—so it’s killed.”

The sight of Jack hobbling around on Parliament Hill with a crutch fuelled speculation. On the night before the budget was to be released, Evan Solomon, the host of cbc’s Power & Politics, emailed Jack. “There is of course lots of talk and speculation these days and that is par for the course for politics. I get it. And we will talk politics and budgets tomorrow and I look forward to it. But: there is also lots of loose talk about you, your health and stepping down. 

“Jack: I don’t deal in rumours and health issues and personal family issues for me trump all else. So off the record: you doing ok? Is it way out of line to have folks deal in this type of speculation? I don’t want to go over any lines here at a fraught period but I do appreciate how sensitive all this is. And I don’t want to traffic in hurtful gossip either,” Solomon wrote.

The next morning, before setting off for the budget lock-up, Jack replied to Solomon. “Thanks for asking, Evan. Hip improving ahead of schedule. I got married with a cane so I can do my job with one too. No truth to the speculation. Health will play no role in our decision on the budget,” he wrote. (In 1988, Jack broke his leg in a bicycle accident just before his wedding to Olivia.)

At 2 pm, Jack; Tom Mulcair, our finance critic; and Chris Charlton, the ndp deputy critic, headed into the lock-up for opposition parties in the Promenade Building on Sparks Street, two blocks from Parliament Hill. This way, the opposition parties had a few hours to see what was in the budget before Flaherty released it to the public at 4 pm.

The Department of Finance had set up separate rooms for each of the opposition parties, so Jack, Mulcair and Charlton had the luxury of privacy to talk things through with senior caucus staff. Departmental officials were available to answer questions, and they guided our team to the sections of the budget that would contain the provisions Jack requested.

There was no mention of relief for the high costs of home heating. There was no money to revive the popular ecoenergy Retrofit initiative into a permanent program. The budget included a statement about how the government would study the future of the public pension plan, but the line felt empty, and it certainly didn’t commit to improving the Canada Pension Plan. The government also said in the budget that it would increase the Guaranteed Income Supplement for half of all seniors who were living in poverty, but such a move fell short of what Jack was seeking.

Mulcair and Charlton huddled, and there was no ambiguity for either of them: there wasn’t enough in the budget for us to support it, and they told Jack so.

Jack, under tremendous pressure, listened to them intently. He also peppered ndp staff with questions on the technical points in the budget. He made his decision in a few minutes. He spoke seriously, but he was also relieved that the decision had been as clear as it was. “Okay, here we go,” Jack said as he walked out of the lock-up. He now had to tell Canadians about his decision, knowing it meant we were heading to the polls.

McGrath, who was in the lock-up with Jack, had to get him back to Parliament Hill without word leaking out. They called for an elevator in the Promenade Building, and when the doors opened, there were a few Liberal staffers already inside. “So?” one of them asked. “Let’s wait for the next elevator,” McGrath said to Jack.

The media were awaiting Jack’s verdict in the foyer of the House of Commons. A press conference was scheduled to start after Flaherty’s budget speech inside the chambers. The foyer was packed with reporters, who encircled the wooden podium that had been set up for Jack. His prepared remarks, written quickly during the lock-up and printed on plain white paper, had been left for him by senior staff and were turned upside down.

The assembled media tried to read Jack’s body language as he approached the podium using his crutch, but he had his poker face on. They knew the budget didn’t meet our party’s demands, but many in the press gallery were convinced that Jack would find a way to avoid an election to give himself more time to recuperate and the ndp a chance to climb in the polls. Jack set them straight.

The prime minister “had an opportunity to address the needs of hard-working, middle-class Canadians and families, and he missed that opportunity. He just doesn’t get it,” Jack told reporters. “New Democrats will not support the budget as presented.”

One of the reporters had a last question for him. “How is your health? Will you be well enough to go on a five- or six-week election campaign? I mean, it’s a gruelling business, as you know.”

“Better by the day,” Jack replied.

Two days later, Jack arrived at Ottawa Hospital at 7:30 am to have the stitches from his hip surgery removed. Two days after that, on March 26, the election campaign began.

In early March, Kathleen Monk and I had made the rounds of the news bureaus in Ottawa to walk them through our game plan and try to convince them to cover our election tour. This was always a challenge: to break through the horse-race coverage of the blue team versus the red team that squeezed the ndp out of the game. Unless reporters travelled with our tour, breaking this pattern would be even harder.

On March 9, we’d met with the cbc’s parliamentary bureau at the broadcaster’s Ottawa headquarters on Sparks Street to lay out why the cbc needed to pay attention to the ndp campaign. Monk walked through the logistics of the tour, highlighting the fact that I had cut our rates for accompanying media as an incentive for cash-strapped media outlets to join us.

As I laid out our strategy, I was direct about what our research showed. I took the group through a region-by-region analysis of where we were targeting new seats and which demographic groups we would be aggressively pursuing. I walked the group through Jack’s strong leadership numbers and how we expected to use those to our advantage, including in Quebec, where we were the second choice of Bloc voters, who were growing weary of their party.

At the end of our presentation, veteran cbc reporter Terry Milewski folded his arms, leaned back in his chair, looked straight at me and said, “Well, that’s all very well and good, Brad, but it sounds like a lot of bullshit. Every time an election rolls around, the parties come in with their numbers and try and convince us that something magical is going to happen.”

Milewski was challenging me to provide further evidence for the scenario I had just laid out. The cbc would eventually sign on to cover the whole tour, but not all media outlets thought it was worth their time or money, including Postmedia News and the Globe and Mail. In fact, fewer outlets agreed at the outset to cover the entire 2011 tour compared with the 2008 campaign. Because certain outlets wouldn’t be with us for each of the five weeks of the campaign, we would see the number of reporters on the ndp tour increase with our rising fortunes. At the beginning of week four, for example, we were down to twelve reporters on the tour with us, but the number would jump to twenty-one for the last week of the campaign.

Our campaign script for this election was carved up into three periods. In the first period of the game, we would answer the question, “What is this campaign about?” We would make the case for why Stephen Harper had to go. We needed to be bold and interesting so that we wouldn’t be written out of the early campaign stories. During weeks two to four, we would provide the meat to reinforce our message: daily announcements, the platform launch and the televised leaders’ debates. In this second period, we would contrast ourselves with the Liberals and the Bloc, and outline why they weren’t the solution. The third period would be our endgame—our closing arguments in the last days of the campaign. In the final sprint, we would seek to motivate our voters and show momentum with energetic rallies and whistle stops. Here, Jack would be the focus.

Drew Anderson and I had worked for months on Jack’s opening statement. As lead writer, Drew spent a lot of time talking things through with Jack. “Drew, I want more personal stories in my speeches, I want to connect. I need them in there, because I draw off them to get into the zone about what we’re doing,” Jack told him.

Since Jack had grown up in a middle-class family, Drew made sure to include other people’s stories that would give Jack an energy boost as he delivered his opening volley. We knew he could nail the speech. Our biggest concern was whether he would be able to stand comfortably for the duration.

Jack worked through the pain and delivered his speech beautifully at our campaign kickoff on Saturday, March 26. With supporters behind him in a ballroom at the Château Laurier, he stood at a podium adorned with the words “Canadian Leadership/Travaillons Ensemble.” For those in English Canada, the message emphasized our ballot question: leadership. It was also a subtle reminder that Ignatieff had been out of the country for most of the last thirty years, a fact ingrained in people’s minds after the Conservative “Just Visiting” and “He didn’t come back for you” ads. In Quebec, our tag was intended as an antidote to the Bloc, a party that wasn’t interested in working in any constructive way in the House of Commons. We were inviting progressives and anti-Conservative voters in Quebec to join with those outside the province to defeat Harper.

Jack took aim at Harper in his speech, emphasizing that the Conservative leader had become what he had once professed to despise. This segued nicely into our main message, which lumped our opponents together: “Ottawa is broken and it’s time to fix it,” said Jack, with his daughter, Sarah, and granddaughter, twenty-one-month-old Beatrice, in attendance. “He promised he’d finally clean up Liberal-style scandals. Instead, he’s just created new scandals of his own. After five years, Stephen Harper has failed to fix what’s wrong in Ottawa. In fact, he’s made it worse.”

The campaign tour was designed to hammer home this point for the next three days—and to show that it was New Democrats who could defeat Conservative candidates in many regions of the country. For many political pundits, the idea of Tory-ndp races, especially in the West, was a foreign concept, despite the data we had to back us.

To inoculate ourselves against the expected Liberal frame (the election was a choice between Ignatieff and Harper), we started our tour in Edmonton, where ndp candidate Linda Duncan had won the Edmonton–Strathcona riding in 2008. Duncan held the only non-Conservative seat in Alberta, and the ndp had come in second in the majority of the other seats in the province. Jack was in Edmonton on day one of the 2011 campaign to emphasize this point. The ndp tour then travelled to Surrey, Regina, Brantford and Kitchener, visiting Conservative ridings we were targeting. In many, we had come a strong second in 2008.

Whenever we travelled by plane, the tour staff made sure to get Jack onto the tarmac before anyone else. That gave him extra time to climb stairs free from the watchful eyes of reporters or their cameras. We didn’t want stories about his health to get in the way of our narrative.

But Jack’s limited mobility in the opening week of the campaign hampered our ability to pull off the kinds of events we had developed for him. Our plan had been to put Jack in situations where he thrived: town halls and energetic rallies surrounded by supporters. Harper and Ignatieff, both more wooden and less personable, weren’t comfortable in these settings, so we wanted to set up this contrast to showcase Jack’s leadership strengths. We were confident Harper would stick to a tour plan that played to his different strengths but figured if Ignatieff tried to emulate Jack, we would be drawing him out of his comfort zone and into ours, setting up a nice comparison for the voters. Unfortunately, Jack’s hip didn’t allow us to do this at the outset.

During the opening days of the campaign, we employed what is known as the “rolling barrage” tactic, named after the strategy the Canadian Armed Forces employed at Vimy Ridge during World War i. Since the leader’s tour had been developed well in advance of the writ drop, we were able to reinforce the message of Jack’s stump speech with local radio ads and leaflet drops to households on the day he arrived in each new city. Our message was always the same: New Democrats were the ones who beat Conservatives here. Even if they weren’t paying much attention to the campaign, chances are people would hear or read that if they were part of the 65 per cent of the non-Conservative vote, they should vote ndp to defeat the Conservative incumbent. We pressed play on our message, rewound and pressed play again.

Ignatieff had pressed play on his own message before the campaign began with his “red door” and “blue door” analogy, a reference to the colours of the Liberal and Conservative parties. “You go through the blue door and you get jets, you get jails, you get corporate tax cuts and you get miserable knockoffs of the real article. But you go through the red door and you get compassion, you get fiscal responsibility and you get a government relentlessly focussed on the real priorities of Canadian families,” Ignatieff told reporters. “There are only two choices.”

The opening days of federal campaigns were always a challenge for us. The other parties ignored us to marginalize us, and the press usually followed suit after filing one pro-forma story about the kickoff of our campaign. We had to work like hell to get written into the cut and thrust of the daily cycle. This time around, Jack had just had hip surgery. Even though his energy level was on par with that of Harper and Ignatieff, we were already fighting a perception of a slow start.

It didn’t help when Harper told reporters on day five, “We could also have a debate between Mr. Ignatieff and myself, since after all, the real choice in this election is between a Conservative government or an Ignatieff-led government that all of these other opposition parties will support.”

Ryan Dolby, our candidate in Elgin–Middlesex–London, dropped a bomb on us on the same day, March 30. The day had started off well. In the morning, Jack had held a great event in Oshawa to announce a key plank of the ndp’s job creation plan: cut the small business tax rate and return the corporate tax rate to 2008 levels. “As prime minister, I wouldn’t use your hard-earned tax dollars to reward companies that ship jobs to the States or overseas,” Jack said, speaking from the premises of Kitchen Studio, a custom cabinetmaker. “I’ll target investment to create jobs right here at home. I’ll reward the job creators.”

The Globe and Mail covered the story online, pointing out that the “New Democrats have run well in this working-class community... so it is easy to understand why the party is targeting this riding.” But the same reporter was baffled by our destination later that day. “What is more difficult to comprehend is the visit that Mr. Layton will make to Bramalea–Gore–Malton, west of Toronto, on Wednesday afternoon, where the Conservatives were in a tight race with Liberal incumbent Gurbax Singh Malhi in the last election and the New Democrats ran a distant third.” In fact, we were running a star candidate in the riding, local community activist and lawyer Jagmeet Singh. Singh would come within 539 votes of defeating Conservative Bal Gosal in the 2011 election and get nearly 4,000 more votes than the Liberal candidate. (He went on to win the first ndp seat in the Peel region in the provincial election later that year.)

The plan was for Jack to visit the mda Robotics plant in Singh’s riding in Brampton before a scheduled rally for the candidate later in the afternoon. I was on the phone when Nathan Rotman came into my office and laid down a handwritten note that read “Ryan Dolby is about to quit, throw support to Libs.”

I cut short my call. “Does Jack know about this?” I asked Rotman.

“We just got the heads-up now,” he replied.

“Shit. Jack’s about to start at mda.”

I called Anne McGrath right away. She and Jack were travelling in an rcmp car, so she put me on speakerphone. They had just arrived at mda, so we didn’t have a lot of time to go over the messaging. The press would know about the defection soon.

Jack never panicked in these situations, but it was a blow. According to McGrath, his face said it all when he got the news: disappointed and a bit discouraged. “There was a sense that things were beyond our control, and there was a possibility that... we would be stuck back into that old [Liberal] frame,” recalls McGrath. “It was bad. It was really bad.”

The fact that Ryan Dolby was a member of the caw, and Jack was about to enter a facility full of caw members, made the timing even worse. caw past president Buzz Hargrove had backed the Liberals in English Canada in previous campaigns, part of his flawed strategy to block the Conservatives, and Hargrove’s successor, Ken Lewenza, would also be on hand at mda that day.

We’d learn later that the whole thing was a set-up. Dolby had been talking to the Liberals for weeks, and they had hatched the plan before the campaign even started. Now, though, we had to develop a fast plan of attack. We decided to run towards the issue, not away from it. “Let’s get into Dolby’s riding as soon as possible. Show them we’re not going anywhere,” I told tour director Ira Dubinsky. “Find the biggest hotel ballroom you can for a rally. Let’s get right in their faces. Red door, blue door, my ass.”

After Jack’s scrum at the mda facility, I called to pitch our strategy to him and McGrath: “We want you to go to London and have a rally.”

Jack loved the idea. “Let’s do it,” he said.

By that evening, we had another ndp candidate in place, local riding president Fred Sinclair. Four days later, we organized a large “London 4 Layton” rally in the riding. “We weren’t afraid to fight,” recalls Nathan Rotman.

Our strategy was risky. We didn’t know whether there were more turncoats out there. The day Dolby quit had been brutal. “Jack Layton has been saying that his party, and not the Liberals, has what it takes to beat the Conservatives. But just five days into the campaign, at least one of his own candidates did not buy the message,” the Globe reported. But the newspaper was back in London on Monday for the rally. “Layton Gambles in Rally in Defector’s Riding—and Wins,” the headline said. On election night, Fred Sinclair would come in second behind the Conservatives in the riding, getting 12,436 votes, or 25 per cent of the vote. The Liberal candidate backed by Dolby came in a distant third, with just 6,800 ballots cast for him.

We were disappointed at the end of the first week of the campaign. The media had reported that our crowds were a little thin, we had lost a candidate, and the leader’s tour didn’t have the energy of past campaigns. We had to go slow at the beginning, to give Jack time to get stronger, but things were flat.

On Sunday morning, after seven days of campaigning, I called Brian Topp for a pep talk. “Should we be worried we’re not doing as well in the polls?” I asked.

“Worried?” Topp replied. “Usually, we are a lot lower at this stage in the campaign.”

We had a game plan that was well researched, and we were sticking to it. I took heart from a line I remembered from Audacity to Win, the book by David Plouffe that chronicled Barack Obama’s surprising victory over Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination and then the presidency. Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, quotes Mark McKinnon, George W. Bush’s chief campaign ad man: “I’d rather have one flawed strategy than seven different strategies.”

It wasn’t time to panic, but it was time to up our game and insert colour events to boost our campaign script and reinforce Jack’s strengths. I called the tour and communications team into the boardroom at campaign headquarters. “With Jack on the mend, we’ve got to juice up our tour hits. I want Jack serving coffee at Tim Hortons. I want him pouring beer at pubs. I want to see Jack doing this kind of stuff incorporated into the rest of the tour,” I told the team.

That evening, on Sunday, April 3, 1 million Quebecers tuned in to the popular Quebec television talk show Tout le monde en parle (everyone’s talking about it) on Radio-Canada to see a relaxed and very likeable Jack. The influential show, hosted and co-produced by Guy Lepage, had approached us before the campaign to invite Jack to come on the show. They’d offered us a few dates, and we took the earliest one available. Jack had taped the segment on the previous Thursday while he was in Montreal to announce that Cree leader Romeo Saganash was running for us in the northern Quebec riding of Abitibi–Baie-James–Nunavik–Eeyou. Jack had been wooing Saganash for a few years, and he was a star candidate for us.

Quebecers liked what they saw on their television screens: the ndp leader was becoming le bon Jack. Over the next two evenings, on April 4 and 5, pollster Angus Reid was in the field. The results, published on April 7, confirmed what we already knew from our own internal research. We were running a strong second behind the Bloc in Quebec, leaping ahead of the other federalist parties.

Jack was exercising every day on the campaign trail; we even had a physiotherapy table set up in his hotel rooms. His sister, Nancy Layton, a retired physical education teacher, was travelling with the tour and served as his trainer. Jack had traded his crutch for a cane, but we needed more from him. It was time for me to give him a little kick in the pants.

“He was definitely lacklustre, and the media were really on his case about the health stuff,” recalls Anne McGrath, who put me on speakerphone to talk to Jack during a campaign break at a Winnipeg tv station.

“It’s a $20-million campaign,” I reminded him. “Everyone is putting their heart and soul into this. Everyone is counting on you. It’s time to get off the bench. This is what we’ve been working for. The project won’t get fulfilled unless you turn it on.” It was good for Jack to hear. Physically, McGrath recalls, you could see him getting energized. He sat up straighter, and his eyes got wider.

Jack picked up the pace during week two, and he made some strategic announcements about the hst and home heating costs, shipbuilding and the Navy, veterans and crime in key ridings in British Columbia, Manitoba and northern Ontario. These issues were intentionally against type. But I woke on the morning of Sunday, April 10, to another depressing poll, just as we were set to release our platform. We were a few points down from the previous Sunday, now standing at 13 per cent in the Nanos tracking poll.

Jack had directed me to ensure our platform was released before the debates, slotted for April 12 and 13. For parties like ours with a diverse constituency, the platform can be a nightmare. It could sabotage your campaign, and it seldom helped. We needed this one to actually help us.

Our idea for the 2011 campaign was to write a platform that was modest and focussed. We wanted to head off the expected knock against us as the party that wanted to do too much, too fast. So instead of announcing large multi-billion-dollar new programs, we would concentrate on smaller, more immediate things. We captured our approach in the title: “Practical First Steps.”

Brian Topp had agreed to stick-handle the platform, and he worked with Peter Puxley, director of the newly created policy branch in Jack’s office on Parliament Hill, to ensure the document worked its way through the appropriate channels in caucus. The idea was to narrowcast our commitment to reach our target voters and not give our opponents much to shoot at. We’d watched the Conservatives pull off this approach in earlier campaigns, and we thought it could work for us.

Copying the Conservatives didn’t mean aligning with them. In fact, we set out to highlight items in our platform that would reinforce our differences. Since Harper’s campaign would have the ability to set the agenda in the daily media cycles, we had to anticipate what his campaign issues would be and make sure we had something meaningful to say about the issue. If the Conservatives were talking about jobs, we needed to talk about jobs. If they were talking about seniors, so did we. That way, media and the voters could hold up the two competing visions and compare them.

“What’s our response to a Conservative corporate tax cut?” I’d put to our talented policy team in a bear-pit session during platform development.

“A corporate tax increase?” answered one.

“No,” I responded. “Our response to a corporate tax cut is a small business tax cut.”

“What’s our response to the Conservatives’ purchase of multi-billion-dollar f-35 fighter jets for the air force?” I asked them.

“Cancelling the contract and opening it up to tender?” someone suggested.

“Wrong. Our response is to invest in replacing our aging naval fleet,” I said. “Their military priority is planes; ours is ships,” I said.

We had to be more than the party that would undo what the Conservatives were going to propose. Reversing bad Conservative policy was important, but the bigger questions about our platform had to be: “Who do we speak for? Who do we represent? Who will we help compared with the people they would help?”

The Conservatives wanted to help the profitable multinational corporations; we wanted to help the mom-and-pop shops. The Conservatives believed job creation came about through giving tax cuts to big companies with no proviso against shipping jobs overseas; we wanted to create jobs by helping those who were hiring in their communities and weren’t outsourcing. They stood for the big guys. We stood for the little guys.

I directed our policy branch to use the numbers from the Department of Finance as a starting point for our fiscal framework. We wanted to debate priorities, not our fiscal assumptions. We also used the Conservatives’ timeline for balancing the budgets.

It helped that both the Liberals and the Conservatives released their platforms earlier than we did. The Conservatives had signalled that they would be running on the budget that they had tabled in the dying days of Parliament. We looked for commonalities between the Liberal and Conservative platforms to see how we could further distinguish our offer to voters. Then it hit us: both parties had back-end loaded many of their commitments into the third or fourth year of their mandate. People needing pension relief would have to wait, while corporate tax cuts would kick in right away. We seized on this, firming up a marketing strategy for the platform launch to highlight five priorities that Jack would act on in the first hundred days. It meshed well with our plan to use the platform launch to reinforce our strength in the campaign: Jack was someone you could trust to get things done.

We wanted to make sure the visuals coming out of the platform launch would be Jack delivering a rousing speech before cheering supporters, held after the briefing to the media in a ballroom next door at the Hilton Hotel on Richmond Street in Toronto. It would be left to me, Drew Anderson and Peter Puxley to lead the technical briefing and field the inevitable questions from reporters about the ndp’s low standing in the latest public opinion poll. Before the town hall–style event, we’d played a short animated video. We’d produced it at the end of the first week.

The tone of the video was more defensive than Jack’s optimistic delivery of the platform at the town hall, but the underlying message for both was informed by the “Seven Habits of the Working Class” set out by American author Henry Olsen. Olsen had interviewed Patrick Muttart, a strategist on Harper’s team at the time, as part of a study into the characteristics of working-class voters. Olsen, drawing on Muttart’s insights, identified these as: hope for the future, fear of the present, pride in their lives, anger at being disrespected, belief in public order, patriotism and fear of rapid change.

Drew Anderson had posted this list next to his computer to remind him what was on Harper’s mind, and we used it to craft Jack’s key lines at the platform launch. Surrounded by supporters, Jack delivered a speech about the values that informed our platform and insisted that voters had a choice. “People will try and tell you that you have no choice but to vote for more of the same. But you do have a choice,” he said. At the end of his remarks, Jack signed the platform document. The picture said it all: “You can trust me. I’m putting my good name to these commitments.”

We knew Jack did well on character, and that was the field on which we’d compete. We weren’t running away from the commitments in our platform—far from it. But people weren’t going to decide their votes based on a line-by-line analysis of each party’s platform. They were going to vote for someone they trusted.

We got straight-up coverage of our platform launch, and our internal polling ticked up a day later. It would never dip again. The external polls started showing the same trend: Jack rose above Ignatieff in the Nanos Leadership Index and stayed there. The first debate was in forty-eight hours. Was it just possible that we could turn this election around?