Over dinner in D.C., Layton talked Obama and youth engagement

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I keep thinking of a dinner I had with Jack Layton in Washington in 2009. We talked about youth and politics and the future of the NDP.

I don't disclose the contents of off-the-record conversations. But under the circumstances, I think Mr. Layton would have given the nod.

He was there to talk with members of the Democratic National Committee and others about Barack Obama's astonishing victory.

The night before, one of his staffers had gone through a good portion of my liquor cabinet, and Mr. Layton arrived with a bottle of scotch, by way of amends.

We talked for hours, because with Jack Layton, hours could go by without noticing, if the talk was about politics.

This was the spring of Barack Obama's presidency, and the winter of the great recession. Mr. Layton was still smarting from the attempted coalition with Stéphane Dion's Liberals that Stephen Harper had frustrated by having Parliament prorogued.

But as always he was overflowing with energy and optimism. And he was astonished by what had happened in the United States.

Canada had just gone through an election in which fewer people – and especially fewer young people – had voted than ever before.

But the opposite had happened in the United States. Millennials – those between the ages of 18 and 35 – had made up 17 per cent of the electorate. But they had cast 18 per cent of the vote. The young had over-voted.

We both agreed that this represented a seismic shift in democratic politics. In every country from Austria to Australia, a new dynamic was revealed.

Politicians could continue to govern the old way, by accommodating elites and cobbling together coalitions. A disaffected new generation had turned away from all this, refusing to be part of it.

But any party, in any country, could embrace the possibility of Barack Obama. They could put forward a new generation of leaders, with a new message of hope, using new platforms, especially social media, to reach voters who had neither hope nor faith.

This had happened in the United States. One day, one party would make it possible in Canada. It could easily be the NDP.

Mr. Layton was intrigued but unconvinced by my argument that the way to make this happen was to break the death-grip of party elites on Canadian politics by moving to a primary system of choosing leaders.

By adopting primaries, a candidate from outside the party establishment can win the leadership by recruiting millions of new voters, as Mr. Obama had done in 2008, and Bill Clinton in 1992, and Jimmy Carter in 1976. It may be happening to the Republican Party right now.

He was distinctly cool to my suggestion that the first party whose leader engineered such internal changes and then stepped aside to let the next generation take over would capture that new cohort of young voters.

He believed that an older leader using the old system could still mobilize the young. And the result May 2 suggests he had gone some way to proving his point.

But we shared the conviction that federal politics in Canada had grown dangerously distant from the people, and that a new generation of leadership would one day reengage them with a new message of hope for a better world.

Barack Obama's presidency has not been all that his supporters hoped, though he has achieved far more than his critics allege. And Jack Layton is gone.

But the NDP drew lessons from the American election; we saw them apply those lessons this spring. And Mr. Layton to the very last day championed and celebrated the possibilities of Canada's youth.

"As my time in political life draws to a close I want to share with you my belief in your power to change this country and this world," he wrote in his final letter. "…Your energy, your vision, your passion for justice are exactly what this country needs today."

The NDP might remember Mr. Layton's words, and Barack Obama's example, as it considers what to do next.