A tribute To Canada's Top Advocate for The Poor and Un-Housed " Jack Layton

This morning I woke to the local radio station announcing that Jack had passed on. I thought Jack who? No it can’t be our Jack Layton. So sudden was his passing, so sadden to hear that this man who gave so much hope to this country and to people like myself has gone for every. I after realizing this was true that Jack Layton had passed away of cancer I shed a few tears and thought that all hope was gone; depth of my emotion was staggering, unexpected, and surprising as I continued to cry off and on through out this day.The loss of a man who I have no personal connection to, and have only very briefly met; excepted at election time just astounded me.
Today we are all grieving the loss of a very good man. But if we don’t pick up the pieces where Jack left off, very soon, my generation may have cause to grieve the loss of much more: the voice of reason that spoke for so many of us.
“Jack Layton was the best Prime Minister we never had”.
I was comforted to know that the official opposition party, led by Mr. Layton was speaking for me, and more than that, was speaking for the people. I guess this is one time that one reporter was actually right. It happened in the early part of the last election when a reporter had said publicly that Jack would never be prime minister. They were right...but he did give the other parties a good run for leadership.
Jack always amazed me when he referred to me by my right name. He made feel that I was worthy of him to remember me. There was time that he remember my fight for the voter idea requirement (Bill C-31); he asked me how the fight was going and then encouraged me to keep on fight this battle and reminded me that it was not just one issue for one person but it was for the entire country and for the generations to come. He reminded me that the poor needed us to advocate for them until they could do this for themselves and the un-housed were still canadians and there for shared the same rights as the rest of us.
I remember the last time that I spoke to Jack in person was last May when he came to Victoria for Randall Garrison campaign. We spoke very briefly about the apprehension of First Nations children and what was happening to the children their families and the fast tract for them to end up on the journey to homelessness. We realized that we had to turn the tap off to creating homelessness. We also realized that the government had to stop take the children of First Nations. Jack wrote a book about Homelessness and delivered a lot of practical solutions on how to resolve it. His passion was with his family and his people
Jack, you might not be here to fight our fight for us. But your legacy lives on as does your vision, because your vision is our vision and the vision of so many. Your words and actions has created a conscious generation that has crossed multiple groups of classes that were usual divided by races, genders, ages, political and values.
Your absence means we can no longer sit in the back seat and enjoy the ride while you do all the work. It means we have to get on the wheels that are caring us in the direction that will give us hope for a bigger better brighter future and keep the wheels going. Thanks for starting this one, Jack. It’s time for us to use our “power to change this country and the world”one peddle at a time.

Sincerely, Rose