As Jack Layton battles prostate cancer he will continue to have his strong hand on the rudder of the New Democratic Party of Canada.

I’ve traveled the country with Layton, his stamina and personal endurance lives up to the legend and far outpaced my own. His daily workout regiment is not a product of spin - it’s a real and important part of his life.

Layton is a strong athlete. And a strong political strategist. He realized early on that opposition without proposition is useless and that to keep up his brutal pace - he had to be strict about what he ate, how he exercised and having his medical team regularly check him over.

As a strategist he knows New Democrats are strongest as a team when presenting reasonable, costed and measured changes to public policy.

Make no mistake, Layton has been the New Democrats’ single strongest asset for the past seven years. He may, on the rare occasion, step into controversy, but overall the party could not have found a stronger steward. The bilingual leader spends real time working; mastering his French, stressing always that he wants to learn how regular people would speak the language. It’s perhaps why he sounds more forthright in French some days. But it also speaks to how much attention to detail he has as a leader.

Rightly, many in Ottawa have been recently pointing to just how often Layton has been proven right in the long run. The war in Afghanistan, pensions for Canadian workers and the need to reform the auto industry stick out as three major issues where Layton’s pragmatic and affordable solutions were out ahead of the other political parties.

Layton is first out of the gate with solutions to issues.

Renegotiating an entire federal budget as he did in 2006 was no small feat. The way Layton and his finance critic Thomas Mulcair, have been able to push around the Finance Minister is unprecedented: on everything from ATM fees to bank fairness, the NDP calls for solutions have at least been responded to by the government. More than the Liberals can say.

Layton has taken the New Democrats from a side show in the House of Commons to the single largest influencer of public policy in Canada. Conservatives make the policy, Opposition Liberals oppose it and all the while Layton’s New Democrats tinker, change and massage bills to fit a social democratic ideal - or as close as it’s going to get.

As leader of one of the traditionally most unruly groups of Parliamentarians, Layton also performs extremely admirably. Deftly balancing the rural and urban split, the left and right divide and regional disparities. He leans on party elders to help chart his course; knowing it’s harder for the party to disagree with many of its’ luminaries at once.

The groundbreaking work with Greenpeace, the Canadian Autoworkers and New Democrats could have saved thousands of jobs in Southern Ontario. His first book could easily form the back bone for a proper public policy initiative to end homelessness and his second book highlights local solutions for climate change.

Some in official Ottawa may speculate that Layton’s illness may accelerate the pace of leadership preparations in the various camps eyeing the top job. They are right; but don’t expect a Liberal-leadership-race-style bloodbath of crossfire and spin in the media. Social democrats just don’t politic that way. We have too much respect for the people we elect to play those games.

The leader of our party has turned the New Democrats into a political force. And nothing - not even a bout with cancer - is going to dissuade Layton from his ultimate goal of seeing New Democrats govern the country.