Building the Orange Wave
The Inside Story Behind the Historic Rise of Jack Layton and the NDP
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
Brad Lavigne was not just the campaign manager of the New Democratic Party’s 2011 breakthrough campaign that took Jack Layton from last place to Official Opposition. He was also a key architect of Layton’s overnight success that was ten years in the making. In Building the Orange Wave, Lavigne recounts the dramatic story of how Layton and his inner circle developed and executed a plan that turned a struggling political party into a major contender for government, defying the odds and the critics every step of the way. The ultimate insider’s account of one of the greatest political accomplishments in modern Canadian history, Building the Orange Wave takes readers behind the scenes, letting them eavesdrop on strategy sessions, crisis-management meetings, private chats with political opponents, and internal battles, revealing new details of some of the most important political events of the last decade.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Not so long ago, Canada's New Democratic Party (NDP) was polling at single digit levels; its rise from this nadir to official Opposition marks a historic change few would have predicted in the 1990s or even the 2000s. Lavigne, the party's 2011 campaign director, offers an insider's view of this remarkable transformation and of the role played in it by the late Jack Layton, who succumbed to cancer a mere 113 days after his great victory. With an introduction by Layton's wife, Olivia Chow, the work provides a compressed history of Layton's NDP from leadership victory, initial missteps, to Opposition, with enough history to contextualize Layton's accomplishments. Each election cycle is discussed, and while it is true that the Liberals sabotaged themselves, it was Layton's vision that allowed the NDP to exploit the opportunity of the Liberal decline. The work is a well-organized history, concise and straightforward. Its one major flaw is its brevity; under three hundred pages, it fast-forwards though a decade of history. The reader will be entranced but may wish for a more in-depth study.
