The innovator, the leader, and the Mom

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Cramming Steve Jobs and Jack Layton into the same sentence may seem like a bit of a stretch but the IT wizard and the political leader have much in common. They were both workaholics who died of cancer, Jobs at 56 and Layton at 61, amidst a torrent of public acclaim and grief. Their leadership styles were very different – Jobs was abrasive, demanding and an unyielding perfectionist, while Layton was relentlessly optimistic, cheerful and enthusiastic – but they yielded similar results. Both men became so indelibly identified with their separate brands that their deaths have created a leadership vacuum inside their organizations and in the minds of consumers (with Jobs) and voters (with Layton).

Jobs, who was born in San Francisco on Feb. 24, 1955, was adopted as an infant. He dropped out of college, went on a pilgrimage to India and, on his return, hooked up with a high school buddy, Stephen Wozniak. In the mid-1970s, the duo developed the Apple I in the garage of the Jobs family home financed by the sale of Jobs's minibus and Wozniak's calculator. A visionary entrepreneur, Jobs understood that the personal computer was the next big thing. He was also a design perfectionist who once demanded that the Macintosh be not merely great, but "insanely great." He was fired by Apple in 1985 after a boardroom scuffle.

Later he would declare that it was "the best thing" that had ever happened to him. In the mid-1990s, Jobs was brought back to Apple, forged an alliance with former foe, Microsoft Corp., and engineered an ingenious advertising campaign that urged consumers to "think different" and buy Macintoshes. He went on an innovation rampage as the century turned, introducing iTunes, iPods and iPhones, among other products. In 2003 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer but delayed surgery for nine months while he experimented with alternative medical therapies. In early 2009 he had a liver transplant, which extended his life but didn't cure his cancer.

Always secretive about his health, he posted a farewell letter on Aug. 24, on the website of the company he had co-founded in 1976. "I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know.  Unfortunately, that day has come."

Jobs died in hospital on Oct. 5.

Jack Layton also achieved his greatest success while fatally ill. He was born on July 18, 1950, in Montreal into a political family. His father, Robert Layton, was a Red Tory and a cabinet minister in Brian Mulroney's first government. By high school, Layton was already determined on a career in public office, although his political persuasion was decidedly left of centre. After earning a PhD in political science, Layton was elected in 1982 as a social reformer on Toronto City Council, where he embraced campaigns against homelessness and violence against women and for rights for AIDS patients. He won an upstart campaign for leader of the federal New Democratic Party in 2003 with the support of retiring leader Ed Broadbent.

After leading the party into the 2004, 2006 and 2008 elections, Layton really came into his own in the 2011 election, which had been sparked by a no-confidence motion against the minority government of Conservative Leader Steven Harper. Using a cane after surgery for a mysterious hip fracture, Layton campaigned relentlessly. His easy manner and rapport with crowds, combined with his feisty performance in the English- and French-language debates – he spoke French like a Montrealer, which appealed to Quebeckers over Harper's functional but stilted French and Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff's Parisian accent – appealed to younger voters, especially in Quebec. As did the way he waved his cane, like a crusader stamping out corruption and waste. When the ballots were counted on May 2, Harper had his long-sought majority, the Liberals were trounced, and the NDP had won enough seats –103 – to form the Official Opposition.

Le bon Jack's victory was personal, which made it all the more shocking when a gaunt and raspy-voiced Layton called a press conference in the middle of the summer to announce that he was taking a temporary leave to fight an unspecified cancer, unrelated, he said, to his 2010 diagnosis of prostate cancer. The country was still reeling when he died, four weeks later, on Aug. 22, at his home in Toronto. The tragic arc of Layton's exquisite political triumph, being shattered by the cruel fate of his untimely death, affected Canadians deeply. So did his farewell letter, which unlike Jobs's terse statement, exhorted them to "be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we'll change the world."

Compared with Jack Layton and Steve Jobs, Betty Fox didn't set out to change the world. She was an ordinary woman who confronted a parent's worse fear – the death of a child – and became an international symbol of ferocious motherhood. For 30 years she was the public face of the annual Terry Fox run in honour of her son, the one-legged kid who ran halfway across the country and straight into people's hearts before dying of metastasized osteogenic sarcoma on June 28, 1981, at 22.

Born in Boissevain, Man., on Nov. 15, 1937, Betty Lou Wark grew up in Melita, a farming community south of Winnipeg, but moved to the provincial capital as a teenager. That's where she met and married Rolland "Rolly" Fox. They had three sons – Fred, Terry and Darrell – and a daughter Judith. Because Rolly Fox hated Manitoba winters, they settled in the more temperate Port Coquitlam in British Columbia.

Terry was only 18, a committed athlete and an undergraduate at Simon Fraser University when he was diagnosed with cancer in March, 1977. He had barely finished 16 months of surgery, chemotherapy and rehabilitation when he began training for the run of his life. His mother tried to dissuade him, hoping to keep him healthy under her protective eye, but he, perhaps fearing his life would be shortened by cancer, was determined to dip his prosthesis into the Atlantic Ocean in Newfoundland and run with his awkward hop skip and another hop back across the country. The rigours of the road were nothing compared to the suffering and fear he had witnessed on the cancer ward.

Stubborn and blunt spoken, Betty Fox preserved the integrity of the annual run for cancer research and ensured it remained non-competitive, open to all and devoid of commercial endorsements. She also raised a whack of money: Since the first run on Sept. 13, 1981, less than three months after Terry died, the annual run has raised more than $500-million. The anniversaries never got easier, but no matter how hard it was to relive her son's heart-breaking journey in promoting the run each year, she always agreed to interview requests, visits to hospices and corporations, and meetings with run organizers. "I believe in what Terry started. If I didn't believe that research was working, no way would I be here so many years later," she said.

At the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver Olympics in February, 2010, she donned a white suit to help carry in the Canadian flag to represent her son's place in the hearts of Canadians. Two weeks later she and her husband Rolly walked across B.C. Place Stadium in Vancouver carrying the Paralympic torch to ignite the flame that officially opened those Games. "Carrying the flame in meant so much to both of us because we were carrying it for Terry, not for us or our family, but for our son," she told reporters later.

She died on died June 17 of complications from diabetes and arthritis at age 73. Her memorial service was held in the same church in Port Coquitlam where her son's life had been celebrated almost precisely 30 years earlier.

Other Notable Losses

Roger Abbott, satirist and actor

Pierrette Alarie opera singer

Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic, Catholic religious leader

Edgar Benson, Liberal cabinet minister

Allan Blakeney, Premier of Saskatchewan

Derek Boogaard, hockey player

Leonard Brooks, war artist

Jean Casselman Wadds, politician and diplomat

Tom Daly, pioneering NFB filmmaker

Barney Danson, Progresive Conservative cabinet minister

Keith Davey, Liberal political organizer

Olive Dickason, First Nations historian

Peter Falk, television actor

Archduke Felix of Austria, the last of the Hapsburgs

Geraldine Ferraro, first female Democratic vice-presidential nominee,

Helen Forrester, writer

Joe Frazier, World Heavyweight and Olympic champion boxer

Pierre Gauvreau, painter

Christopher Hitchens, writer and public intellectual

Tom Kent, public policy guru

Jack Kevorkian, doctor and euthanasia advocate

Robert Kroetsch, writer

Sidney Lumet, film director

Wallace McCain, French fry king and entrepreneur

Brad McCrimmon, hockey coach

Danielle Mitterand, human rights campaigner and former first lady of France

Fraser Mustard, researcher and early childhood education advocate

John Neville, actor and theatre director

Imre Nagy, Olympic fencer

Socrates, World Cup Soccer champion

Lois Smith, NBC prima ballerina

Gordon Tootoosis, actor

John A. Tory, businessman

Ken Russell, film director

Maria Schneider, actress

James Travers, journalist

Marcel Trudel, historian of New France

Larry Zolf, journalist and broadcaster

Susannah York, actress

Elwy Yost, film buff and broadcaster