The following appendix contains events that are unchanged from OTL and may be quite boring for anyone with at least a cursory knowledge of Canadian politics. Feel free to skip it if you don't want or need the background.
Appendix 1 - The Early Political Career of Jack Layton -- 1982 to 2010 :
November 8, 1982 -- Municipal elections are held throughout the province of Ontario. University professor and left-wing activist Jack Layton upsets the incumbent, Progressive Conservative dentist Gordon Chong, to win second place take one of his ward's two seats on the Toronto City Council.
Full election results are available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_municipal_election,_1982
--
November 12, 1985 -- Changes to Metro Toronto's political system result in the creation of an amalgamated Metro Council alongside the Toronto City Council. Layton is easily re-elected to the Metro Council, defeating Pearl Loo by over 7000 votes.
Full election results are available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_municipal_election,_1985
--
November 14, 1988 -- Layton decides to run for city council rather than for Metro Council, switching places with his political ally Dale Martin. Once again, Layton has no difficulty dispatching his opponent, Lois MacMillan-Walker, by over 4000 votes.
Full election results are available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_municipal_election,_1988
--
November 12, 1991 -- Layton attempts a jump to the big chair and runs for Mayor of Toronto. Much to the future chagrin of Barenaked Ladies fans throughout North America, his NDP[1] affiliation ties him to Bob Rae's unpopular Ontario government, and he is easily defeated by the right-wing Liberal June Rowlands, whose campaign is bolstered by improving Liberal fortunes both in Ontario and throughout Canada.
Full election results are available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_municipal_election,_1991
--
1991 to 1993 -- Chastened by this crushing defeat, Layton returns to his academic career and also starts an environmental consulting business. In the public sphere, Layton's most important initiative during this period is his founding of the White Ribbon Campaign, a campaign of men who opposes violence against women.
--
October 25, 1993 -- Layton attempts a return to electoral politics, this time running in the 1993 federal election as the NDP candidate for the affluent Rosedale riding, one of the few areas of downtown Toronto where the NDP has never known success. The riding's unfavourable political environment, coupled with his running for a party hobbled by unpopular governments in both Ontario and British Columbia, ensures that Layton is crushed by the future Liberal cabinet minister Bill Graham and finishes a disappointing 4th place, barely winning 10% of the vote and suffering the humiliation of finishing behind the Reform Party candidate in a downtown Toronto riding. Seriously, that's pretty pathetic.
Full election results are available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Centre#Rosedale.2C_1933.E2.80.931996
--
November 14, 1994 --This time around, Layton attempts a return to municipal politics, where he enjoys much more success and easily wins the Metro Council's Don Valley ward with nearly 50% of the vote in a five-candidate race. Fellow New Democrat Barbara Hall also captures the Mayor's chair.
Full election results are available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_municipal_election,_1994
--
June 2, 1997 -- Without resigning his city council seat, Layton runs in the 1997 federal election, this time in the much more NDP-friendly Broadview-Greenwood riding, later to be renamed Toronto-Danforth. Unfortunately, he runs into the then-popular Liberal incumbent Dennis Mills and finishes a distant second, failing to overcome the incumbent's popularity and the NDP's still-tarnished reputation from its unsuccessful stint in Queens Park.
Full election results are available at -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto—Danforth
--
November 10, 1997 -- In the first municipal election following the amalgamation of the six cities of Metropolitan Toronto into one City of Toronto, Layton is easily elected to the new city council's Don Valley ward in a race that saw the three candidates affiliated with the NDP top the ten candidate ballot, with the top two being awarded the ward's two seats in the process. Unfortunately, left-wing candidates elsewhere in the new city are less successful, as the NDP-affiliated Barbara Hall, the outgoing mayor from pre-amalgamation Toronto, narrowly loses to the eccentric Progressive Conservative Mel Lastman, the outgoing mayor of pre-amalgamation North York.
Full election results are available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_municipal_election,_1997
---
November 13, 2000 -- Layton's last municipal run sees him easily elected in the ward of Broadview-Greenwood, where he wins well over 50% of the popular vote. Jack's final term on city council sees his national profile increase dramatically with his becoming the President of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in 2001.
Full election results are available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_municipal_election,_2000
--
July 22, 2002 -- Following Alexa McDonough's resignation as federal NDP leader on June 5, Layton announces his run for the NDP leadership. With his having gained a high national profile for his writing, his political career, his support of myriad progressive causes, and his stint as President of the Federation of the Canadian Municipalities, he is considered one of the race's major candidates. Jack's lack of federal or provincial parliamentary experience would be overcome by his strong campaign, which would quickly gain the endorsement of former leader Ed Broadbent, the federal party's most successful leader up to this point
[2], as well as strong support from the party's left[3], represented most notably by the backing of prominent Vancouver-area MPs Libby Davies and Svend Robinson, Canada's first openly gay MP.
--
January 25, 2003 -- Jack Layton captures a strong first-ballot victory at the 2003 NDP Leadership Convention, riding a wave of urban and left-wing support to trounce a field that includes the Christian socialist United Church Minister and Manitoba MP Bill Blaikie as well as the centrist and staunchly pro-Israel Saskatchewan MP Lorne Nystrom, among other lesser candidates. Layton would capture 53.5% of the convention vote[4]. Like his predecessor McDonough, Layton would lead the party from outside of Parliament and wait for the coming federal election to contest a riding.
Full results are available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Democratic_Party_leadership_election,_2003
--
June 28, 2004 --
2004 Canadian Election Overview
In his first campaign as leader of the NDP, Layton faces the immense challenges of both improving his party's poor showings in the previous three elections and securing his own seat in Parliament. These challenges are further compounded by his eschewing a run in a safe riding for a tough rematch close to home with the Toronto-Danforth Liberal incumbent Dennis Mills, whose social conservatism has become an increasingly poor fit for Canada's most diverse city. With the Sponsorship Scandal having taken the bloom off the Liberal rose (negating the popularity of Liberal leader and ex-finance minister Paul Martin, who many pundits predicted would win over 200 seats prior to scandal's revelation) and the memories of unsuccessful Ontario and British Columbia governments becoming ever more distant, Layton would best Mills by 5 points while the NDP would see its overall share increase by 7 points.
Unfortunately, due to the idiosyncrasies of Canada's outdated electoral system, this impressive growth in popular vote would only translate into a gain of 5 seats, with the NDP winning a mere 19 of Canada's 308 federal ridings despite acquiring nearly 16% of the popular vote. Furthermore, while the party's being shut out in Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, Alberta, and (especially) Quebec is hardly surprising, the New Democrats would also suffer the sting of being shut out in the House that Tommy Built, their former heartland of Saskatchewan.
Outside of the NDP's modest gains, the election is an overall success for the Canadian centre-left. While the Conservatives[5] and the Liberals would see their shares of the popular vote fall by 8% and 4% respectively, the Green Party, ecologist and socially liberal, would increase its share of the popular vote by over 3% (though with no seats to show for it) while the Quebec nationalist Bloc Quebecois, led by the ex-communist social liberal Gilles Duceppe and supported by much of Quebec's labour movement, would increase its share of the popular vote by nearly 2% and see its seat count grow by 21, matching its 1993 high by taking 54 of Quebec's 75 ridings.
Ultimately, the election would result in a Liberal-led minority government, the first minority government of any stripe since 1979, with the NDP offering it outside support. This arrangement, however, would be short lived. For the Gomery Commission, an investigation into the Sponsorship Scandal, would expose additional Liberal corruption and lead to the Conservative, NDP, and Bloc Quebecois uniting to bring down the Liberal government on a November 28, 2005 no-confidence vote, thus forcing an election for the following January.
Toronto-Danforth results --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto—Danforth
Overall election results --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_federal_election,_2004\
--
January 23, 2006 --
2006 Canadian Election Overview
With the exposed Liberal corruption disenchanting left-leaning voters, Layton and the NDP went into the 2006 election optimistic that they could make gains at the expense of the beleaguered Martin government. Unfortunately, though, while Layton would easily best his own Liberal challenger, Deborah Coyne (a constitutional lawyer best known for dating and having a child with former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau), and the NDP as a whole would gain 11 seats and increase its popular vote share by 2%, the collapse in Liberal support would primarily go to Stephen Harper's Conservative Party, which would gain 28 seats and eclipse the Liberals in seat count. Moreover, the NDP is again shut out in Saskatchewan and also fails to win any seats in any of the provinces that had eluded its grasp in 2004.
The Tories, for their part, would made an especially impressive breakthrough in Quebec and eclipse the Liberals as the province's second most popular party in spite of still finishing 3rd in seat count due to the strength of Liberal incumbents in Montreal and the Outaouais. Ironically, while a modest uptick in the NDP's Quebec support -- about 3% -- would bode well for the party's future prospects there, for the time being, it would lead to a disappointing result for the left as a whole, at least in one particular riding. The Quebec City riding of Louis-Hebert would see the left-wing Bloc Quebecois incumbent, journalist and anti-scab activist Roger Clavet, fall to Conservative challenger Luc Harvey by 280 votes, with an NDP challenger splitting the progressive vote by winning an impressive (for 2006 Quebec, at least) 5300 votes[6].
Ultimately, the Conservatives would form a minority government under new Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which they would sustain for over two years due primarily due to fact that nobody wanted another election. Subsequent Tory by-election wins at the expense of both the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois would bolster Harper's confidence in his chances at winning a majority government while an increasingly uncooperative opposition would frustrate Harper's ability to govern[7], though he would still follow in the footsteps of his Liberal predecessors and make a mess of the Senate[8]. Thus, by the summer of 2008 an election was inevitable. Interestingly, the Greens would get their first MP during this period as former Liberal Blair Wilson, after spending a year sitting as an independent, defects to the Green Party, though he would ultimately lose the next election quite handily and never actually sit as a Green due to Parliament's summer recess at the time of his floor-crossing[9]. Shortly after this fascinating turn of events, Harper would get the Governor General to dissolve Parliament on September 7, calling a fresh election for October 23, 2008. Before getting to this next election, though, we would be remiss if we did not circle back to 2007 and the Layton NDP's most seminal early victory
Toronto-Danforth results --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto—Danforth
Overall election results --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_federal_election,_2006
--
September 17, 2007 -- Outremont By-Election:
It goes without saying that in spite of Quebec's (IMHO overstated) reputation as a left-leaning province, both the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and its successor, the New Democratic Party, have never yet been able to achieve success in Quebec. Given that the CCF had emerged from the left-wing of Western Canadian populism and was therefore divorced from Quebec's political realities (unlike the central role that both the Liberals and the Conservatives had played in Quebec's political history up to this point), this lack of relevance in Quebec was entirely understandable.
Moreover, even when the CCF was succeeded by the NDP and becoming relevant outside of the West, there was no space for it in the Quebec political scene, this in spite of the leftwards shift that began following the death of long-time Union Nationale Premier Maurice Duplessis in 1959 and the subsequent Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ) victory in 1960, which saw Jean Lesage assume Quebec's premiership. On one hand, the left-leaning factions of the PLQ were ascendant during the Lesage years, which saw the government taking over the Roman Catholic Church's traditional role in the providing of health and educational services, a movement towards more progressive taxation and an extension of the welfare state, and the consolidation and nationalization of Quebec's privately held electricity providers under the umbrella of Hydro-Quebec. On the other hand, the traditional, insular social conservatism of Quebec Nationalism was giving way to a more social democratic, civic nationalist, and explicitly separatist political vision which found form in the factions which would go on to merge into the Parti Québécois, led by the charismatic René Lévesque, the ex-Liberal cabinet minister who oversaw the creation of Hydro-Québec, only to abandon his old party and defeat them in 1976[10]. Furthermore, far beyond the Parti Québécois was the revolutionary communist Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), a Fidel Castro-inspired Marxist national liberation group that enjoyed little popular support but that was not afraid to use violence and terrorism to further its agenda. These tactics allowed the FLQ to punch well above its weight and provoke a 1970 political crisis so severe that its resolution required (arguably) that Pierre Trudeau's federal government, at the request of its Quebec counterpart, impose martial law on Quebec, with only the 3rd place NDP dissenting from the vote to do so.
Given that the collapse of the Union Nationale left a void on the right and that the Quebec left was already monopolized by the aforementioned factions, it is difficult for one to be surprised that the right-populist Social Credit movement (Ralliement Créditiste du Quebec) was able to find fertile ground in Quebec long before the NDP ever could (though Quebec's Socred movement would only end up lasting a few years). For politics abhors a vacuum. That's not to say, however, that the NDP did not try.
The first attempt at a Quebec NDP (NPDQ), in the 1960s and 1970s, failed to gain any traction (likely for the reasons discussed above) and ultimately fell apart in 1979 with no meaningful accomplishments to its name. The second attempt, in the 1980s, gained a little more notoriety. While it too would fail to make any significant breakthroughs, it first gained infamy for endorsing future Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe in his successful 1990 federal by-election run in spite of there being an actual NDP candidate. The NPDQ then compounded its notoriety by running former FLQ terrorist Paul Rose (who had been convicted for the assassination of cabinet minister Pierre Laporte during the FLQ Crisis) in a provincial by-election, which ultimately led to its being disaffiliated by the NDP's other branches and to its abandoning the NPDQ name. Rechristened the Parti de la Democratie Socialiste, the party would soon merge into the post-communist Union des Forces Progressistes, which in turn, in 2006, would merge with the feminist Option Citoyenne to form the democratic socialist Québec Solidaire
[11], a party that would go to enjoy modest success as an alternative for left-wing nationalists disheartened by the Parti Quebecois' increasingly neoliberal direction. Also, left-leaning federalists increasingly frustrated by the rightwards shift of the PLQ under Bourssa, Johnson, and Charest found comfort in a party that, while being nominally separatist, was more acceptable due its emphasis on social inclusiveness and economic justice as well as its rejecting the chauvinism that infested the Parti Quebecois
[12].
In spite of all these failures, the NDP was not completely shut out of Quebec during this period. 1986 saw Progressive Conservative backbencher Robert Toupin defect to the NDP after a brief stint as independent. He would then proceed to abandon the NDP in 1987, alleging communist infiltration, and sit as an independent. Subsequently, he would run for re-election as an independent in 1988 and finish a distant 3rd, behind the Tory victor and his Liberal opponent, but ahead of the New Democrat. More significantly, in 1988, an American-born consumer rights advocate, one Phil Edmonston, ran as a New Democrat in the riding of Chambly, finishing a strong second behind Tory Richard Grisé. Grisé would later resign in a corruption scandal and force a February 1990 by-election, wherein Edmonston, again running under the NDP banner, would win in a landslide, defeating his Liberal opponent by 50 points and relegating the Tories to a humiliating 3rd place, one of the first Quebec cracks in the Mulroney coalition. Edmonston's staunch Quebec nationalism would alienate many of his copartisans and make his term in office a difficult one. Ultimately he would not run for re-election in 1993, an election which saw the NDP vote in Chambly collapse from almost 68% under Edmonston to less than 3% under his paper candidate successor
[13].
The NDP would spend another 14 years in Quebec's political wilderness, with their next great hope coming in the form of Tom Mulcair, a former PLQ cabinet minister who had resigned from Jean Charest's government over a proposed cabinet demotion stemming from a disagreement about a development project. After considering job offers in the private sector and offers to run from each of the three major federal parties, Mulcair chose to run as a New Democrat, rejecting the Conservatives due to his social liberalism and his disagreements with the Tories about environmental policy. The resigning of a Liberal incumbent in Montreal's Outremont riding, one Jean Lapierre gave Mulcair his opportunity to run in a riding that was close to home and that had prospects for the NDP, which had routinely won over 10% of the vote in the riding (a strong result given that its Quebec) and had once taken over 40% of the vote in a 1967 by-election. Mulcair's name recognition, coupled with a Liberal Party still reeling from the Sponsorship Scandal, a Conservative Party that had no idea how to win in Montreal (where they struggled even iduring Mulroney's heyday), and a Bloc Québécois unable to make inroads among the riding's strong Hasidic Jew and Anglophone communities, won the by-election by nearly 20 points and held the riding by 6 points in the next year's federal election
[14].
Mulcair's victory would be the NDP's first taste of sustainable success in Quebec...
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[1] - While Ontario election law does not allow for candidates in municipal elections to run under a partisan banner and candidates have always appeared on ballots without any corresponding party affiliation, Toronto New Democrats were still organized and nominated under the Metro New Democratic Party umbrella until 1994 and the political affiliation of municipal politicians in Toronto tends to be well-known, even to this day.
[2] - While some would make the case for Tommy Douglas based on his political success in Saskatchewan, his status as the NDP's first leader, and his being regarded as the Father of Medicare, it was Broadbent who in 1988 would lead the party to new heights both in popular vote and in seat count.
[3] - If we disregard the NDP Socialist Caucus, which unites unapologetic democratic socialists with the party's Trotskyist fringe. They backed obscure Vancouver activist Bev Meslo. In American terms it would be akin to the gap between Bernie Sanders on one hand and Vermont's Liberty Union Party on the other.
[4] - 75% of the vote consisted of convention attendees and was based on a one-member-one-vote system while the remaining 25% of the vote was weighted towards organised labour representatives from unions affiliated with the Canadian Labour Congress.
[5] - In spite of its decline in popularity, the new Conservative Party of Canada would actually gain 27 seats due to its being a 2003 merger between the more centrist Progressive Conservatives and the more right-wing Canadian Alliance and therefore more than making up for its shedding of centrist voters to the Liberals and the NDP with the gains permitted by the merger's ending the split of the right-leaning vote. Such is the stupidity of First Past the Post. Biased? Maybe. But this is my TL, and I'm a Canadian social democrat with an axe to grind rather than editor of a newspaper of record.
[6] - While the Duceppe-era Bloc as a whole was left of the Liberal Party, not everyone in the party was particularly left-leaning. This guy was though. Naturally, the main reason I draw attention to this seemingly minor incident is to further illustrate the absurdity of my country's electoral system.
[7] - As I strongly dislike Stephen Harper, I was tempted to use far less neutral wording here, but balked due to my not wanting to be TOO childish.
[8] - Yuck, the Canadian Senate. While it is possible to make rational (albeit disagreeable) arguments in favour of maintaining first-past-the-post, there are no reasoned arguments to be made in favour of having our Parliament's upper chamber appointed entirely by the sitting Prime Minister, with no meaningful oversight or input permitted from Parliament, the provinces, or the electorate.
[9] - Floor-crossers suck too. If you can't stay in the party under whose affiliation you were elected or sit as an independent, you should ensure that you are respecting the wishes of your constituents by resigning and standing in the resulting by-election.
[10] - The Parti Quebecois was initially a strong proponent of proportional representation, only to realize that the political map that had emerged following its 1976 electoral victory was very favourable to its winning future unearned victories at the expense of its opponents. Needless to say, with its strongest institutional proponent no longer on board, electoral reform would not up to this point gain traction in Quebec and the Parti Quebecois would go on to infamously lose the popular vote in the 1998 election and still be able to form a majority government.
[11] - The last Quebec election that will proceed as in OTL will be the 2008 election. Layton's not getting cancer will obviously have very interesting implications for Quebec Solidaire. I'm not yet sure how things will play out though, but with the PLQ having won a majority government in 2008, the next election would take place until 2012 or 2013, and by then both Quebec and Canada could be very different places than they are in OTL.
[12] - IMHO, after a move towards neoliberalism that began with the Beau-risque (the Lévesque PQ's abandoning a hard-separatist line and endorsing Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives in the 1984 federal election due to the latter's being amenable to Quebec's constitutional demands) and continued in earnest under leaders like Bouchard and Boisclair, the PQ became rather chauvinistic and reactionary under Pauline Marois' leadership. Obviously, the PQ will still take this turn ITTL with Marois' ascending to the leadership in 2007, three years before the POD results in any meaningful changes. Where it goes from there remains to be seen.
[13] - Interestingly, I had never heard of Robert Toupin until writing this entry. Nonetheless, I was quite familiar with Phil Edmonston.
[14] - It goes without saying that Mulcair's career will diverge sharply from its OTL trajectory after the 2008 election.