Layton Talk

***/5

I saw the streamed version of Jack Layton’s “Your Turn” on The National this evening. I admit that I’m a Layton-lover, but I was actually kind of disappointed in his performance tonight.

In the first fifteen minutes, Layton couldn’t seem to stay focused on the viewers’ questions; sure, they were tough questions, but even a fool could see that Layton either consistently lost his thought process or was altogether trying to avoid giving straight answers. Peter Mansbridge was surprisingly cutting, sometimes to the point that it hurt to watch, and regularly interrupted Layton to get him back on track to answer the questions.

In general, I felt Layton was a little off his game. He was given many opportunities to shine, yet he was unable to take advantage of them. He did pretty well on the question to do with money for rural areas versus money for cities, he showed a lot of passion and enthusiasm in explaining how to present young people with positive opportunities in place of anti-social activities, but in many cases failed to relate his responses to the NDP platform and failed to offer good justification for the NDP platform.

The question that I really felt Layton bombed on had to do with gun control. An avid woods-person/hunter guy asked Layton how he thinks the federal gun registry prevents gun crime. Layton explained how he feels there is a place for the gun registry if correctly implemented, which I also believe, but he failed to call up the distinction between gun registration and gun law enforcement, a distinction that the NDP has made quite clear but that Layton did not accentuate until later on in the session. Layton simply said that the police regularly use the gun registry in their day-to-day activities and implied that therefore it must be useful. That’s the kind of response that breaks a job interview.

Because I’ve been thinking a lot about health care in Canada recently, specifically about how a two-tier system may or may not be a solution to the problems that we face, I paid particular attention to a question that was intended to explore why the NDP is so adamant about protecting a single-payer, public health care system. In response, Layton took a moral stance against privatized health care, which really didn’t give me anything to go on. To give him credit, every other pro-public-health-care politician probably would have responded in the same fashion. It is true that the private vs. public health care debate is mind-numbingly complex once you get past right vs. left, so maybe that’s the only way to phrase a response to the lay-person.

In closing, it wasn’t a particularly good night for you, Jack, but you’re still my favoured political leader. I’m even thinking about buying one of your books. Plus, you and Olivia look so cute riding on that two-seater bicycle together that I can’t help but vote for your party.