Keeping a stiff upper lip

NDP Leader Jack Layton says he likes his moustache and is not about shave it off to please some nameless faceless image consultant. It was suggested earlier on in the campaign that the lip hair had to go. Layton said that's not about to happen unless his wife and fellow federal politician Olivia Chow tells him to... Like so many men of his age (he's 58) he grew it back in the early 70s to look older and just got attached to it.

- Richard Brennan

Jumpin' Jack Flash

It's one of those typical Jack Layton election campaign days. Early start in Ottawa, didn't help when the bus driver slept in, can't blame him. Off to Montreal to listen to Jack explain how he won last night's debate.

Then winging it thousands of kilometres to Iqaluit where the riding is wide open since Liberal MP Nancy Karetak Lindell retired. After that it's wheels down in Halifax after midnight. Call it the not-so-happy Jack tour.

Truth to power, dude

Give George Stroumboulopoulos, host of CBC's The Hour, full marks for cutting to the chase.

Interviewing NDP Leader Jack Layton for tonight's show, "Stroumbo" had the travelling press pack in stitches.

He asked Layton if it was wise to keep saying he was going to be Prime Minister.

"Keep talking like this, people are going to think you smoke pot," said the host.

Later, Layton insisted he "didn't get into politics to be in opposition."

Not missing a beat, Stroumboulopoulos cracked: "Why did you join the NDP?"

The Hour airs at 11 pm on the CBC's main network.

Layton puts his money where his mouth is

NDP Leader Jack Layton hates red ink.

"I don’t like paying interest on debt. Why pay debt to bankers?" Layton told the Toronto Star's editorial board, where he defended his pledge not to run a deficit if elected Oct. 14.

Asked if he and wife Olivia Chow, the NDP incumbent in Trinity-Spadina, have a mortgage, he said: "No, I don't. We paid it off."

"Of course we had a mortgage – everybody has had to have a mortgage at some point," said Layton.

"We worked bloody hard to pay that thing off, believe me. We had our little celebration last year. I’m at that age now," said the 58-year-old.

Layton and Chow live in downtown Toronto in a rambling Victorian house with a solar-panel roof.

- Robert Benzie

Limousine Liberals, Champagne socialists or neither?

So much for Liberal criticism that NDP MP Olivia Chow is tooling around Toronto in a limousine.

Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis distributed photographic proof that Chow, wife of NDP Leader Jack Layton, was being driven around in a chauffeur driven-car.

“While Jack and the NDP state that they support the people of Main Street they get around like Wall Street tycoons,” says Karygiannis’s accompanying e-mail.

Alas, there is an explanation.

“The RCMP in the election requires the spouse to be in an RCMP car because they’re worried about safety. It’s not her choice. I’m being taken around by the RCMP,” said Layton today.

“Most people know Olivia and I normally ride around town on our bicycles. That’s how we travel,” he said.

“I would prefer that right now, but the RCMP suggests to me that while they would be happy to ride bicycles with me – and they do look good in spandex, I’m told – that in an election I’m running for Prime Minister a certain minimum set of practices have to be in place.”

Layton laughed and said it’s “ridiculous” for the Liberals to make the charge against his wife.

“I would suggest that they may have other things they should be focusing on.”

-Robert Benzie

 

NDP leader croons for the crowd

NDP Leader Jack Layton was singing the campaign blues last night. Literally.

Layton regaled his chartered night flight from Vancouver to Toronto with an apparently self-penned ditty called Campaign Blues.

Strumming along with his fellow guitar-playing travellers, the New Democrat also belted out Let It Be, Imagine, House of the Rising Sun, and a rousing Barrett's Privateers.

But perhaps the biggest laugh came when he performed Del Shannon's Runaway.
Impish reporters changed the chorus to "Stornoway, my Stor, Stor, Stor, Stor, Stornoway."

Layton shot a steely glare at the press wags over that improvisation.

Stornoway, of course, is the official residence of the leader of the opposition, currently occupied by Liberal Stephane Dion (though moving fans are standing by.)

New Democrats, who have never formed the official opposition, are reluctant to jinx things by talking about Stornoway.

Besides, they still want to believe their man can sing his way into 24 Sussex Drive.

-- Robert Benzie

She likes the greens - not the Greens

The NDP campaign tour is losing one of its most popular members for the next few days.
Nancy Layton, NDP Leader Jack Layton's younger sister, is leaving to defend her title as one of the best women golfers in Canada.
She is hopping off the campaign plane for a few days and headed home to Montreal to play in the Canadian Senior Women's Golf Association championship.
Nancy, who says she shoots "in the high 70s and low 80s," is the reigning Quebec seniors' champion.
She confides that her big brother - he's 58 and 16 months older than her - is a pretty good golfer himself.
"He has a very nice swing, but he doesn't get time to play."
Jack, of course, is busy taking on those other Greens.

The wrong kind of slogan?

Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a "strong leader."

Just ask NDP Leader Jack Layton. Nearly every day on the election campaign, Layton makes that proclamation.

But before conspiracy theorists pounce on this as evidence of the Tories and Dippers being cahoots, there's a catch.

Harper is "the wrong kind of strong." (Maybe that means he's strong like a stinky roquefort or perhaps like overproof Jamaican rum.)

Either way, Layton's daily assertion of Harper's fortitude provokes bafflement from the ink-stained geniuses hanging on his every utterance.

-Robert Benzie

Targeting the youth vote

At a town hall meeting today in Victoria, an 11-year-old boy named Ben asked NDP Leader Jack Layton if he was prepared to change laws to allow children to vote.

Clearly charmed by Ben bravely standing up before an audience of 400 people and a throng of journalists, Layton didn't miss a beat.

"We're a party that's in favour in lowering the voting age," he said.

"So far, we were only going down to 16, but we might revise that."

-Robert Benzie

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