“Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair.” These last public words of recently deceased Jack Layton, the leader of the Opposition in the Canadian parliament, touched off an emotional response in this usually buttoned-down country.
But Jack Layton led a political party, the New Democrats (NDP), which had strong Christian as well as social-democratic roots. The older Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) of 1932 was led many years by an ordained Methodist minister and social worker named J.D.S. Woodworth. When the CCF melded into the NDP in 1961 its first political leader was a former Baptist minister named Tommy Douglas, subsequently voted “the greatest Canadian.”
Of course, John Wesley’s Methodists set up the first free public health dispensary in England in the 1700s so the social justice concerns of Layton, Douglas and Woodworth has strong roots in a Christian culture that usually stays submerged in Canada, but occasionally shines through.