Why I'm supporting Avi Lewis

My thoughts on the NDP leadership race

The world is in a precarious state, and Canada’s social democratic party is in a historically precarious position.

Amid spiralling inequality and a worsening climate crisis, the Trump administration grows more bellicose and authoritarian by the day. On the domestic front, the Carney Liberals continue to bend the knee to Washington and are making good on their election promise to “nation build” by pursuing a right wing agenda of austerity, deregulation, and corporate welfare. Throughout Europe, the far right continues its assault on multiracial democracy while feckless centrist governments like Keir Starmer’s flail about in its shadow.

It’s with this context in mind that anyone who plans to vote in March should be approaching the New Democratic Party’s leadership race. Reduced to just 7 seats in last April’s federal election — largely thanks to the defection of large swathes of its base to the Liberals — the NDP faces a choice of potentially existential proportions. 2025 represents the party’s electoral nadir, but it also caps a decade of sectional decline since the gut punch of 2015. Clearly, a serious reckoning with established strategies, patterns, and habits is in order.

But the present circumstances also offer the NDP a golden opportunity for regeneration and renewal. Despite talk of a US-style two-party realignment, Canada’s political landscape is still very much in flux, and the stark rightward turn of the Carney Liberals has opened up new space for a bold left wing alternative. Both morally and strategically, I think our moment demands nothing less.

As I argued in my recent essay for the Perspectives Journal:

It’s clear the NDP cannot effectively recover if its renewal is treated solely as a rebranding exercise. Breaking the logjam of two-party politics will require more than just effective leadership and good messaging. Fundamentally, it calls for a creative populist strategy as well: rooted in both the engaged participation of a mass membership and the kind of bold, left-wing program that is impossible for the Liberals to appropriate or co-opt…In important ways, there has not been a stronger case for breaking with the political and economic status quo since the CCF was founded in the early 1930s. Renewing and rebuilding its successor clearly demands no less than the same spirit of radical ambition.

A new leader cannot single-handedly reverse the party’s tattered fortunes. But leadership that grasps both the scale of the crises we face and the scale of what will actually be required to confront them can do much to set the NDP on the right course. In my view, only one candidate offers the kind of ambitious, principled leadership the party so badly needs.

Needless to say, all five candidates have approached the race differently and brought different ideas to the table — many of them valuable — and the House of Commons would be well served if the four who do not currently have seats won them there in the next election. But Avi Lewis will be getting my enthusiastic vote in March, not only because he has the most expansive and well-articulated policies but because he has a real vision of organizing and movement-building to back them up.

From the beginning of his campaign, through policies like his potentially revolutionary plan for publicly-owned grocery stores, Lewis has made a full-throated case for the public sector. Here, and in similar proposals (like those listed below), he has spoken eloquently about the need for non-market and community-led alternatives to the private monopolies that have come to dominate our economy. He refuses to triangulate on natural resource issues, and pairs his ambitious case for a green industrial transition with an environmental plan that refreshingly puts jobs at its centre. Needless to say, Lewis has long been a principled voice on Palestine as well and, in the face of rising militarism throughout the globe, can be counted on to show Canadians there’s a different way.

As Liberal and Conservative elites seek to push Canadian society further to the right, this is the kind of political and policy vision the country desperately needs: one that actively seeks to expand our democratic horizons; one willing to name and confront the malefactors of great wealth without hesitation or apology.

Beyond his policy offering, Lewis promises a revitalized culture of organizing within the NDP and has visibly drawn all the right lessons from recent left wing successes like Zohran Mamdani’s unlikely triumph in New York. At the heart of his campaign there is a dynamic vision of movement-building: one less inclined to either the excessively top-down ethos that has periodically impaired the NDP or the vibes-based style of leadership that has come to dominate so much of the political mainstream. Good content and slick messaging are all well and good — and, incidentally, the Lewis campaign has both in spades — but the social democratic left needs both mass mobilization and a creative populist strategy if it is to succeed. Between the impressive crowds at his events and his campaign’s apparently record-breaking fundraising haul, we have strong evidence that Lewis’s repeated emphasis on organizing is much more than a slogan. (He also, unique among the field of candidates, speaks French — an absolute must if the party is ever going to win back the seats it briefly held in Quebec).

Relatedly, I am optimistic that an NDP led by Avi Lewis would see a broader change in its culture that is badly-needed. I have been engaged with the party in a number of different capacities over the years: as a staffer, as a provincial candidate, as a volunteer, as an ordinary member, and (most recently) through my collaboration with Ed Broadbent. It’s been my general experience that the party often lacks a healthy culture of internal debate, and that members or activists who have perfectly reasonable disagreements or concerns are dismissed as malcontents whose complaints are undermining the cause.

Some operatives, moreover, have come to see conventions primarily as media set-pieces, and embrace the simplistic view that professionalization is somehow an either/or proposition. In this telling, you can either be a modern political party staffed and directed by professional operatives or an amateurish outfit committed to ideological purity and doomed to the fringes.

This dichotomy, however, is a false one. A democratic culture capable of accommodating good faith debate and accepting disagreement is a strength not a weakness, just as the active participation of members is not incompatible with the effective use of data, polling, and message discipline. Debates and disagreements will inevitably exist within a movement that spans a large and complex country and writing them off as inherently “divisive” reflects a conservative attitude reminiscent of the DNC establishment’s cynical attacks on figures like Mamdani and Bernie Sanders. In his willingness to embrace disagreement, and his campaign’s dynamic approach to organizing, Avi Lewis offers a refreshing break from a party culture that has sometimes been too cautious and circumspect for its own good.

At its best, the tradition represented by the CCF/NDP has expanded Canada’s democratic horizons and widened the scope of its moral imagination. At the national level, and through ambitious populist administrations like the Douglas government in Saskatchewan and the Barrett government in BC, it has shown what can be achieved by breaking from the playbook of establishment politics and offering people a real alternative. In a moment of national peril and geopolitical uncertainty, Avi Lewis brings a cheerful, insurgent energy that channels the tradition of the CCF/NDP at its best — and offers a historic opportunity for the NDP to rebuild and renew itself.

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NOTE: Avi Lewis can only win if you vote for him. To vote in the NDP leadership race, sign up as a member before the cut-off date on January 28th, 2026. You can do so here for as little as $5, and visit lewisforleader.ca to sign up for campaign updates or volunteer.