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Why did Prime Minister Stephen Harper offer Jack Layton a state funeral?

You have to give Stephen Harper credit, how he tapped into a public mood few people in politics or the journalists covering them even had a sniff of before those long lineups that straggled across Parliament Hill while Jack Layton lay in state in front of the green carpets of the House of Commons.

The state funeral for Layton was a surprise, which Harper kept secret at the tightly scripted and unusual news briefing he held the day Layton died.

He could have announced it then, that Monday afternoon just after lunch hour, since he himself had offered it to Layton's family earlier that morning, and the family accepted it.

The discussions were done through people from Harper's office who were talking to people in Layton's office.

Harper's communications director, Dimitri Soudas, who now has most of the Parliamentary Press Gallery fawning all over him after the head-butting of only a few years ago, told selected media about it that afternoon in a 'readout,' as he calls these alerts, distributed through the PMO's email list-serve. The official government news release came out the next day.

Layton became the first regular MP, although he was a member of the Queen's Privy Council, to receive the honour, except for the unfortunate Thomas D'Arcy McGee, the outspoken Irish nationalist and a Father of Confederation who was assassinated walking home from Parliament in 1868.

Heritage Canada insisted on describing Layton as the first Official Opposition Leader who died in office to get a state funeral. That was a surprise to people watching the outcry only a few weeks before, when frenzied conservatives across the country were lathering over the fact that interim NDP leader Nycole Turmel, outed by political enemies some think Conservatives, as a former Bloc Quebecois member, was also, everyone thought, Opposition leader.

She was therefore in line to become prime minister if the Harper government fell, an impossibility quickly dismissed when others noted it is a majority government.

Perhaps the NDP had not got around to actually registering her as Opposition leader.

At any rate, by the time the state funeral came around after Layton's sudden passing, he was, at least as far as Heritage Canada was concerned, again Official Opposition leader.

Prior to last week, other than a string of the first dozen or so Canadian-born governors general, along with British-born governor general Lord Tweedsmuir, who died in office in Canada in 1940, the honour has gone only to prime ministers, beginning with John A. Macdonald, McGee and about 10 cabinet ministers who died in office. The last one of those was in 1980.

Heritage Canada pointed out no previous Official Opposition leader had died in office, implying the next one who does so will get a state funeral.

Pierre Trudeau, who brought Canada's Constitution home from the United Kingdom, rewrote it and put in a Charter of Rights and Freedom, got one.

There was a bit of dust stirred up over the fact Layton got one, notably by a prominent conservative columnist and Conservatives.

So you have to wonder, why did Harper do it?

For sure, Layton led the NDP, breaking several records as he did so, into Official Opposition status for the first time in its 50-year history. Every pundit in the country agrees the NDP would not have gotten those 59 Quebec seats without him.

And he seems to have been a genuinely nice guy, a history of politicking on behalf of the homeless, low-income Canadians, seniors, he even once wanted to ban automobiles from the streets of Toronto, which infuriated Buzz Hargrove, then boss of the Canadian Autoworkers Union.

It may have been among the things that eventually drove Hargrove to back Liberal PM Paul Martin in the 2006 campaign, not Layton, when Hargrove urged Quebecers to vote for the Bloc Quebecois instead of the Conservatives.

It emerged during last week that Harper and Layton got along with each other, behind the partisan facade of politics. Some even said they were friends.

One vitriolic Conservative, attacking a journalist who pointed out the political undercurrent of Harper's news briefing, along with the outright politics of Layton's death-bed letter to Canadians, wrote a nasty email to the journalist claiming Harper and his wife Laureen were friends with Layton and his wife, fellow Toronto NDP MP Olivia Chow.

So, maybe Harper really did, as a friend, want to recognize Layton's sympathetic character and accomplishments.

Or, if they indeed were friends, maybe Harper wanted to make up for one of the dirtiest tricks of the past election campaign.

In the dying days of the battle, as the NDP climbed in the polls, someone, suspected to be Conservative since the trick involved dusty old Toronto police files, and Julian Fantino is a former chief of the Toronto police, told Sun News, headed by Harper's former communications director Kory Teneycke, that detectives found Layton in a downtown massage parlour nearly two decades ago.

There were no charges laid against anyone, and the police left, after Layton told them he was getting a massage.

Related or not, in the last two or three days of the campaign, a lot of Liberals in Toronto switched to the Conservatives, apparently concerned Layton might actually become prime minister.

Or, since we also have to look ahead, maybe Harper suspected, maybe just as a kind of added extra benefit, that a state funeral for Layton would take the Liberal party and its leader, former Ontario New Democrat premier Bob Rae, further away from spotlight.

Perhaps, even if just incrementally, the incredible ascension of the NDP's Layton into near sainthood, with a lot of it rubbing off on his party, might help to put one more nail into another coffin, the one in which Harper apparently hopes to one day seal the Liberal party.

(Reuters Photo)