It only took a few minutes.

It was election night, 2011, and I had stepped out of the makeshift war room on the top floor of the InterContinental Hotel in downtown Toronto to make congratulatory calls to our newly elected mps in Atlantic Canada.

By the time I returned, our campaign team was verifying the names of Quebec ridings on flip-chart paper taped to the wall. “Are those the ridings we’ve won?” I asked.

“No. Those are the ridings we’ve lost. We can’t list all the ridings we’ve won—there are too many for us to keep up,” said a calm Nathan Rotman, the party’s director of organization, who was on the phone getting the results from our Quebec ground troops. The room was quiet, the staffers too busy going about their work to stop and celebrate history unfolding.

“Holy shit,” I whispered to myself. It was only then that it hit me that this thing was real.

It was the beginning of a historic night. In addition to the wave of seats in Quebec, the ndp had broken through right across the country, from Newfoundland to British Columbia. In the country’s largest city, we’d captured eight new seats. It was our best-ever showing in Toronto, and we’d won more seats than the Grits in a once-unshakable Liberal bastion.

In Quebec, we’d captured more than 40 per cent of the vote and won fifty-nine seats. We’d won the seats of former prime ministers Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Louis St. Laurent, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. We’d beaten Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe in Laurier–Sainte-Marie, the riding he had held for more than twenty years, by fifty-four hundred votes.

In the end, 4.6 million Canadians had voted for the New Democratic Party of Canada. We’d won 103 seats from every corner of the country to comprise the largest Official Opposition formed by any party since 1980. Even without the 1.3 million votes from Quebec, the 2011 election would have been the best election result in the party’s fifty-year history.

It was an outcome that very few outside Jack Layton’s inner circle had believed was possible, and one that even fewer had predicted. So how had it happened? Was it an accident? Were Jack and the ndp merely benefactors of lacklustre performances by the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois? Or was it something more?

To understand the Orange Wave that swept Canada on May 2, 2011, you have to go back to March 2002, when a small group convened at the Toronto home of Jack Layton and his wife, Olivia Chow. Together, we set out to get Jack elected leader of the ndp with a plan to professionalize the party’s operations, transform its culture and expand its support to make the ndp a viable alternative to form the country’s government.

Given the state of the party back when Jack was running for leader, it was an audacious goal, if not a downright absurd one. In the November 2000 election, the party had dropped from twenty-one seats to thirteen. We hadn’t even cracked 10 per cent of the popular vote. When all the ballots were tallied, at the ripe old age of forty, the ndp was in a death spiral. Saving it would require changing the party from the inside. Beyond those boundaries, we would have to dislodge decades-old voting patterns and do nothing short of realigning federal politics. That included cracking Quebec, a province where the ndp, despite some Herculean efforts over the decades, had remained virtually invisible.

It would be intense, gruelling work, with many highs and many more lows. I signed on at the very beginning to be a part of what would become an inspiring and heartbreaking story that would forever reshape modern Canadian politics.