Stumped

NDP Leader Jack Layton is stumped about whether he’s ever delivered a stump speech while actually standing on a stump.

“This is like Rick Mercer asking me if I ever wore spandex riding my bike and I said no — and that was true!” Layton said today in Kamloops, B.C.

“I don’t remember if I’ve ever stood on a stump. My sister (Nancy) is here. She’ll probably remember whether I used to hold forth on a stump back in Hudson,” he said of his pastoral Quebec childhood.

“I honestly can’t remember, but I wouldn’t want to say it’s never happened because it might have.”

Still, Layton insisted — in a claim met with skepticism by bleary-eyed reporters travelling with him on his breakneck cross-Canada tour — that he never forgets where in the country he is during a stump speech.

“I don’t believe so.”

Journalists, on the other hand, are always asking one another — and Layton’s aides — where the hell they are.

-Robert Benzie