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Only a month and a half ago, things were looking up for Jack Layton. The NDP leader had just led his party to one of its best electoral showings of all time, and a freak political storm was about to carry New Democrats into power as part of a coalition with the Liberals. And despite his party being the junior member of the partnership, Layton was essentially the public face of the government-in-waiting, picking up the slack when Stéphane Dion and his team proved unable to do the job.

But shortly thereafter, things fell apart. Parliament was prorogued, Michael Ignatieff became Liberal leader, and opinion polls showed that most Canadians rejected the proposed coalition as undemocratic.

Since then, Layton has stayed pretty much out of sight. To be fair, he simply doesn't need to be in the public eye at the moment as much as his rivals. Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty are busy managing public expectations over the upcoming budget, and Michael Ignatieff is introducing himself to Canadians and rebuilding his party's still-tarnished image.

But Layton's absence from the public eye is, as much as anything, an admission of defeat, a sign that the NDP considers the coalition to be essentially dead. It may also be an attempt to wipe the memory of the whole sordid affair from the minds of Canadians, though that conclusion is slightly more speculative.

So what now for Jack? For the time being, it looks like Layton's political fate is largely out of his hands. It's possible that rumours of the coalition's death have been exaggerated, but that seems unlikely. There is also the very slight possibility that, if both the Conservatives and Liberals fail miserably at righting the economy, voters might be willing to give the New Democrats a chance to right the sinking ship. But it would take a frighteningly spectacular collapse on the part of both the Tories and Grits to vault the NDP from fourth place to government in the space of a couple of years.

Barring an extraordinary reprieve from the political gods, it's likely that the fall of 2008 will be considered the pinnacle of Jack Layton's time as NDP leader—the moment he brought New Democrats to the very edge of the promised land. Whether he or his eventual successor will succeed in finally crossing over remains to be seen.

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