By Tristin Hopper

For almost four years, each day in Todd Hardy’s life could have been his last.

“It might be 12 years, it might be 12 months, or it might be two days, ” as he told the Yukon News last February. We’ve all known that Hardy was very ill, but then we’d see him writing a letter to the editor, or showing up to work at the legislature. He never made a big deal of his illness, and after a while, neither did Whitehorse. He had evaded death so many times that maybe we had begun to subconsciously assume he could do it forever. But last Wednesday, Hardy died the way we all hope to: Surrounded by generations of friends and family in a house we built ourselves.

It was almost four years ago today that Hardy began feeling unusually tired and short of breath. He wrote it off as a cold, but days later, the then-NDP leader collapsed at his Whitehorse home – wracked the late stages of leukemia. By day’s end, Hardy was in a Vancouver hospital being injected with near-lethal doses of chemotherapy. Despite a few rounds of organ failure, he survived – and within weeks he was running an election campaign from his hospital bed.

As a politician, Hardy had the idealism of a college student. He would show up to civil protests armed with quotes from Mahatma Gandhi. He wore a pirate-style earring. He came out against Chinese investment in Northern tungsten mines because the metal might be used to make bullets for the Chinese army. In 2002, he chose “Party Hardy” as his campaign slogan.

Perhaps it was a naïve approach to a cynical, cut-throat legislature. But Hardy’s dyed-in-the-wool socialism was never an act. Off-hours, he was hammering together houses for Habitat for Humanity. He coached hockey, he taught karate and he maintained an unusually personal relationship with his constituents.

He was a good man, and the Yukon will miss him.