I’ve been following your work for almost ten years and I think this article and the recent Q and A episode of your podcast where you more broadly laid out what you want the future of the NDP to look like have energized me like nothing else.
I want to fight for a party where it would be impossible to confuse it with a liberal party, where it’s not the cliche liberal speech of how a candidate spoke to a farmer who said they need a baroque tax credit program that they were going to do anyways, I want a party where it’s possible for a hotel worker who is a dues paying member of the party themselves to democratically come up with an idea and the rest of the party hears agrees with and fights for together.
Love to read this Luke and welcome to the team. I've been volunteering with the Vancouver branch for the past 3 months and it has been really inspiring to see the momentum build to where it is today.
I agree that this is an incredibly opportune time to rebuild and reorient the party, and that Avi is our best bet to do so. And I'm organizing with some pretty radical people and yet Avi doesn't scare my boomer Mom (love you mom). Socialism can indeed be a big tent, and it's fucking wet out there right now.
Avi's housing strategy is great, but was missing any reference to expanding housing-oriented public transportation, which is super weird from an urbanist perspective seeing as Canada has some of the worst forced car-dependency rates on earth. Could you ask the leadership team if we can expect a transportation strategy soon?
There's so much talk about public ownership, yet renationaising our railways so they can be modernized, electrified (to replace the dirty diesel locomotives) and start to prioritise regional passenger rail over freight never gets mentioned. Not one candidate has brought it up! It's bizarre.
FWIW Lewis has taken much the same approach to transit as he has to other things. More detail needed here, obviously, but the campaign has spoken to this. https://lewisforleader.ca/ideas/green-new-deal/
I’ve seen that, and it’s a good start, but I’d like to see the same level of detail that he provided for housing but for transportation. So far, when it comes to regional travel, Avi has mentioned buses far more often than trains. Frankly, buses will never be an election issue, or a voter getter, or a charming, fun, attractive way to travel. Canadians do not queue up to see a new model of bus. Trains on the other hand, attract crowds. Canadians are hungry for them.
Selling CN and CP Rail back in the 1990s was a colossal mistake. The CEO of CN makes $18M a year by prioritising freight over passenger service (regularly causing VIA massive delays), while the tracks haven’t been electrified so dirty diesel locomotives are required. (According to wikipedia, 0.2% of Canadian tracks are electrified, by far the lowest in the industrialised world, compared to 100% in Switzerland).
What Avi’s transportation policy could promise:
A ban on Tesla cyber cars due to safety concerns (following the EU model)
A mandatory maximum speed limiter for all new vehicles (following the EU model)
A national surcharge on dangerous, poor site line, non-commercial wank panzer SUVs (their weight causes undue road wear)
A strategy to connect every city over 100,000 with electric passenger rail service
Demand VIA’s new carriages by Siemens be manufactured in Canada instead of the US
A promise to renationalise CP and CN railways and cap executive pay.
A five year plan to modernize, expand, and electrify 33% of publicly owned railways.
Demand that closing steel plants be retrofitted to produce the galvanized steel needed by ALTO and the railway upgrades
A national fund and strategy to add 1000kms of safe, segregated cycling infrastructure per year
Legislate that only 50% of federal transportation infrastructure investments can be car-centric
Improving our national rail system is a key component of our Canadian Green New Deal.
Imagine it: accessible, affordable and comfortable public high-speed rail that makes flying to neighboring provinces a waste of time and money. It would be part of a revolution in green transportation: trains and buses that connect people within and between communities. I’m honestly most excited about EV buses, just because they’re much faster to manufacture and roll out. But high speed rail obviously makes immediate sense in the high population corridors (ie: Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City). And the stretch goal is to reconnect the whole country once again.
Key to this is re-introducing Taylor Bachrach’s rail passenger priority act, which would give passenger rail priority on our tracks - that’s critical for addressing the current embarrassing state of passenger rail in this country.
In terms of selling it to Liberal and Conservative voters, these are popular ideas that will make travel easier, cheaper, more comfortable and convenient. Polling shows that 2/3 of Canadians support expanding high-speed rail. With our history in rail, we could easily be a global leader in this industry - like Spain is today. The key, of course, is public ownership. The market is not going to fix this, it’s a true nation-rebuilding project. "
Much better messaging! Glad to see this. Still plenty of room for improvement. The short term aim should be a blurb about electrical collective transport that does not mention buses. (Buses have an entrenched socio-cultural stigma and will never be a vote winner. Trains are the opposite – there's a massive hungry fan base waiting to be engaged).
Avi could also distinguish between high speed rail (TGV, Shinkansen, ALTO, etc, 60-year old tech that requires special tracks), and higher speed rail (electric powered trains on regular tracks that hit max speeds of 250km/hr).
Best to ignore the US-style fake HSR like Florida brightline completely (it's diesel). Then talk about the missing routes for higher speed rail. There's no passenger train between Calgary and Edmonton, or Victoria and Nanaimo. Customise the train talking points for every province. They all have the same fundamental problem: None of the lines have been electrified. (Even California has managed to electrify a line!)
At no point do buses need to be mentioned. If he wants to go into multi-modal mobility, there's no better combo than train and bicycle. Talk about that!
I think he could still be much harder on CN. Their CEO clears $18M a year in compensation, yet none of their tracks have been electrified with overhead wiring, which means slower, heavier, dirty diesel power is required on all routes. And plenty of popular routes don't even have double tracks – not even Ottawa-Montreal. Take the mouching parasitical CEO to task. The neoliberal experiment has clearly failed, as CN hasn't invested the bare minimum to upgrade their tracks.
Another corporate target is Siemens Canada – their fulfilling their VIA order through their California factory. Call them out. It's unacceptable. Alstrom is manufacturing their TTC order in Canada. Why isn't Siemens?
Thank you for laying out this clear and thorough case, Luke. I am of the same mind that Avi's leadership would give us the best chance to revitalize the party.
I do have to quibble about one detail: it is an exaggeration to say that Avi speaks French. He does have the strongest French in a field of candidates lacking French language skills, but the Montreal debate showed that he has ground to cover to even catch up with Carney's level of spoken French. He is far from fluent at this point, though his ability to speak Spanish and pledge to spend time in a Francophone community after the race concludes allow me to feel cautiously optimistic about where his French will be once Canada faces another federal election.
Let’s goooooo! I really value your opinion and the fact that it matches my own is giving me a lot of confidence. Checking in from Winnipeg, where there is a small but dedicated ground team for Avi and the things he stands for.
Lewis is going to have to push hard and fast for Proportionate Representation(PR) to expand the party's fortunes. FPTP heavily favors the LibCon cabal and that has to change so we truly have rep by pop.
“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.”
Then you should be incensed with the vetting of Bianca Mugyenyi under the absurd pretext that she stands as a proxy to Yves Engler. Would Engler have worn black face and a dress in order to surreptitiously enter the race? Would Naomi Klein ever be accused of being a proxy for Avi Lewis should she have run? For the NDP apparatchiks to suggest that Bianca cannot stand on her own two feet is, at best, extremely condescending, and probably more accurately described as racist and misogynistic. The hundreds of well-meaning, engaged citizens who collectively donated $100,000 to Bianca’s campaign are being dismissed as naive or ill-intentioned by a party that is irredeemably unwilling to allow “a healthy culture of internal debate”. Shame!
I have to say I was a little saddened to hear this endorsement on 'Micheal & Us'. Don't get me wrong Lewis will be #2 on my ballot. But sitting here in BC, Lewis seems so much closer to this province's social democratic elite and in continuity with the party's professionalising turn than a labour leader and booster of grassroots activism like Ashton. Is it just the French? Because to my ear there isn't much of an edge to stand on there
Respectfully, I don't think that's an accurate characterization of where Lewis sits in the context of BC politics or where his campaign is orienting itself vis a vis professionalization. When it comes to the latter, it's really the only campaign in the race that has specifically identified this and spoken to it as a problem to be rectified. When it comes to the former, it's Ashton — in his recent salvo against Lewis — who has staked out the position that it's inherently bad to disagree with things provincial NDP governments do (BC being one of those he specifically names). Ashton is most definitely taking that position to align himself with the party elite in the province, against the candidate that elite is a largely opposed to.
Your point about Ashton and deference to Eby, Kinew, and I think implied and most significantly Notley-Nenshi is well taken. And I'm definitely gonna take it up with the man next chance I get. But that's the thing. I worry about Lewis' media-academic-professional social position. We work to elect social democratic politicians because they're the most likely to buckle under pressure from collective action. And I worry about rallying the left of the party around a candidate that's building a new network of accountability versus one that from the left of the Labour movement. Respect to your work, thanks for your thoughts!
“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.”
Then why did Avi Lewis’s campaign push so hard and so dirty against Yves Engler’s candidacy? Why did the NDP apparatchiks exclude Engler from the race? Why did the party refuse Engler to attend party events? Such BS!
If you genuinely cared for the health of the NDP and its significance for Canadian democracy then you would be repulsed the blatant hypocrisy and cynicism of Lewis’ pitch for “good faith debate”. Looks like you prefer to live in DNC-like denial (or cynicism).
"Avi Lewis has driven his supporters down an authoritarian, anti-socialist, path. The NDP leadership candidate’s role in assisting the party establishment’s bid to crush an insurgent campaign doesn’t portend well for an individual whose family’s history is steeped in crushing the left.
NDP leadership candidate Heather McPherson has applauded an individual who fought for Hitler and supported Ottawa paying $35 billion for the Trans Mountain pipeline. She has also repeatedly spoken alongside and praised leading Zionist Irwin Cotler, attended a CIA-influenced Trilateral Commission meeting in 2022 and is a member of the NATO Parliamentary Association.
But Lewis has repeatedly applauded McPherson. He describes her as one of the “magnificent seven” NDP MPs in Parliament and treats McPherson with respect. The Upper Canada College alumnus — whose name is listed between those of David Thomson and Galen Weston Jr among the elite high school’s “notable alumni” — has never suggested McPherson should be excluded from the race.
Lewis and many of his supporters’ reaction to my campaign is far different. Incredibly, Lewis justified the party brass blocking me and my three-year-old from an NDP social the night before the party’s first official debate in Montreal. The video of his support for my exclusion from an event open to the public went viral.
Lewis was also the only leadership candidate willing to tell the Globe and Mail that we should (effectively) be excluded from the race. Conversely, Tony McQuail told the Globe we should be allowed into the race and Heather McPherson previously suggested as much to the National Post. (Afterwards our campaign communications lead Mike Palacek emailed Avi to clarify his position. He failed to respond as with other requests we’ve made to Avi to express himself in favour of our participation in the race.) Five days after it was reported that we were blocked from the race Lewis responded to a question about this attack on party democracy by (effectively) justifying it. Pressed on the matter, Lewis said his campaign would release a statement on vetting in a few days but he’s yet to do so.
When they were simultaneously leader of the national and Ontario NDP Avi’s grandfather, David Lewis, and father, Stephen Lewis, expelled the leftist Waffle from the party in 1972. While he regularly cites his grandfather and father’s record, Avi hasn’t distanced himself from their expulsion of the Waffle.
In his bid for power, Lewis and his campaign have driven a sizable segment of leftish NDPers to articulate morally unconscionable positions. One of his high-profile backers, Judy Rebick, was asked directly on Facebook if she thought it was ok for the unelected three person NDP vetting committee to block members from having a right to select a socialist campaign with substantial support. Rebick responded “I don’t know”. Over the past three months Rebick has repeatedly smeared me. In that Facebook thread she noted, “all Yves has ever done is promote himself” and then “the only thing I've ever seen Yves Engler do besides his writing is to harass politicians and disrupt meetings.”
Like most Avi supporters, Rebick isn’t worked up about McPherson applauding a Nazi, supporting buying a tar sands pipeline, engaging with a CIA talk shop, sitting on a NATO parliamentary body or praising Canada’s leading proponent of a state that’s committed a holocaust.
In another example of the punch left attitude elicited by the NDP brass/Lewis, Rabble editor Kim Eliott joined Rebick in the smear stating that the NDP vetters’ “intimidation and harassment concerns” should have been “sufficient to disqualify a potential leadership candidate”. In the same Facebook conversation, Eliott denies that “the concerns about intimidation and harassment were simply for haranguing politicians as many activists would do”, suggesting the vetters had some unstated — non-political — ‘harassment’ justification for excluding me from the race. I’ve probably written 200 columns for Rabble over the past 25 years.
The Lewis campaign has been smearing me for months. Two months ago Avi’s longtime “advisor” Martin Lukacs engaged in a ten-minute smear claiming I was a “grifter” breaking NDP and Elections Canada rules (NDP vetters did not cite any rule violation in excluding me from the race, which didn’t stop Lukacs’ The Breach sidekick, Desmond Cole, from simply moving on to new procedural criticism of my campaign).
The leftists who have joined the brass’s bid to suppress an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist campaign are ignoring the role the NDP leadership race should play in pushing the “Overton window” in the direction of social and economic justice. Additionally, how will a victorious Lewis defeat the neoliberal, imperialist, power structure within the NDP if he drives out/alienates socialists from the party?
As Dock Currie recently noted, “In this calamitously anti-democratic NDP ‘leadership race,’ Avi Lewis is not the villain… With that said, what Avi is running on is ‘democratic renewal’, ‘taking back control of the party’, ‘real democracy’, etc., and that really doesn’t jive with being placid and indifferent to one’s own ‘social democratic’ party procedurally excluding, and demonizing, a passionate and committed anti-war activist. Those things juxtapose as jarring and incongruous.”
Ok lets unpack this for a sec because this is exactly the kind of baseless and inflammatory language which is the reason why most New Democrats lose no sleep over Yves being excluded from this race.
References to nameless "individuals" who he tries to tie to Avi. Drawing tenuous associations to Weston when Avi has been going after him more than almost anyone. Suggestions that he should not treat his opponents with respect and instead call for their expulsion. Mention of a "viral" video of Avi speaking out against him that seems not to actually exist. These are the sins of Avi Lewis as Yves sees them.
Yves has clearly amassed a following of conspiratorially minded individuals who have no antennae on what actually goes on within the NDP and as such he would have very little impact on this race whether he is on the ballot or not. A very small minority making a whole lot of noise.
Sorry, but a lot of this is simply not true, nor relevant. So he hasn't decried Heather McPherson, and that makes him sympathetic to both the CIA and the Nazi's? Avi has more important issues to focus on than scrutinizing McPherson's every meeting or manoeuvre... he has a campaign to win.
Moreover, Lewis has actually sympathized with Yves' rejection from the race and came out publicly to that effect.
I’ve been following your work for almost ten years and I think this article and the recent Q and A episode of your podcast where you more broadly laid out what you want the future of the NDP to look like have energized me like nothing else.
I want to fight for a party where it would be impossible to confuse it with a liberal party, where it’s not the cliche liberal speech of how a candidate spoke to a farmer who said they need a baroque tax credit program that they were going to do anyways, I want a party where it’s possible for a hotel worker who is a dues paying member of the party themselves to democratically come up with an idea and the rest of the party hears agrees with and fights for together.
Love to read this Luke and welcome to the team. I've been volunteering with the Vancouver branch for the past 3 months and it has been really inspiring to see the momentum build to where it is today.
I agree that this is an incredibly opportune time to rebuild and reorient the party, and that Avi is our best bet to do so. And I'm organizing with some pretty radical people and yet Avi doesn't scare my boomer Mom (love you mom). Socialism can indeed be a big tent, and it's fucking wet out there right now.
Avi's housing strategy is great, but was missing any reference to expanding housing-oriented public transportation, which is super weird from an urbanist perspective seeing as Canada has some of the worst forced car-dependency rates on earth. Could you ask the leadership team if we can expect a transportation strategy soon?
There's so much talk about public ownership, yet renationaising our railways so they can be modernized, electrified (to replace the dirty diesel locomotives) and start to prioritise regional passenger rail over freight never gets mentioned. Not one candidate has brought it up! It's bizarre.
FWIW Lewis has taken much the same approach to transit as he has to other things. More detail needed here, obviously, but the campaign has spoken to this. https://lewisforleader.ca/ideas/green-new-deal/
I’ve seen that, and it’s a good start, but I’d like to see the same level of detail that he provided for housing but for transportation. So far, when it comes to regional travel, Avi has mentioned buses far more often than trains. Frankly, buses will never be an election issue, or a voter getter, or a charming, fun, attractive way to travel. Canadians do not queue up to see a new model of bus. Trains on the other hand, attract crowds. Canadians are hungry for them.
Selling CN and CP Rail back in the 1990s was a colossal mistake. The CEO of CN makes $18M a year by prioritising freight over passenger service (regularly causing VIA massive delays), while the tracks haven’t been electrified so dirty diesel locomotives are required. (According to wikipedia, 0.2% of Canadian tracks are electrified, by far the lowest in the industrialised world, compared to 100% in Switzerland).
What Avi’s transportation policy could promise:
A ban on Tesla cyber cars due to safety concerns (following the EU model)
A mandatory maximum speed limiter for all new vehicles (following the EU model)
A national surcharge on dangerous, poor site line, non-commercial wank panzer SUVs (their weight causes undue road wear)
A strategy to connect every city over 100,000 with electric passenger rail service
Demand VIA’s new carriages by Siemens be manufactured in Canada instead of the US
A promise to renationalise CP and CN railways and cap executive pay.
A five year plan to modernize, expand, and electrify 33% of publicly owned railways.
Demand that closing steel plants be retrofitted to produce the galvanized steel needed by ALTO and the railway upgrades
A national fund and strategy to add 1000kms of safe, segregated cycling infrastructure per year
Legislate that only 50% of federal transportation infrastructure investments can be car-centric
etc, etc.
From his reddit AMA today:
"
Improving our national rail system is a key component of our Canadian Green New Deal.
Imagine it: accessible, affordable and comfortable public high-speed rail that makes flying to neighboring provinces a waste of time and money. It would be part of a revolution in green transportation: trains and buses that connect people within and between communities. I’m honestly most excited about EV buses, just because they’re much faster to manufacture and roll out. But high speed rail obviously makes immediate sense in the high population corridors (ie: Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City). And the stretch goal is to reconnect the whole country once again.
Key to this is re-introducing Taylor Bachrach’s rail passenger priority act, which would give passenger rail priority on our tracks - that’s critical for addressing the current embarrassing state of passenger rail in this country.
In terms of selling it to Liberal and Conservative voters, these are popular ideas that will make travel easier, cheaper, more comfortable and convenient. Polling shows that 2/3 of Canadians support expanding high-speed rail. With our history in rail, we could easily be a global leader in this industry - like Spain is today. The key, of course, is public ownership. The market is not going to fix this, it’s a true nation-rebuilding project. "
Much better messaging! Glad to see this. Still plenty of room for improvement. The short term aim should be a blurb about electrical collective transport that does not mention buses. (Buses have an entrenched socio-cultural stigma and will never be a vote winner. Trains are the opposite – there's a massive hungry fan base waiting to be engaged).
Avi could also distinguish between high speed rail (TGV, Shinkansen, ALTO, etc, 60-year old tech that requires special tracks), and higher speed rail (electric powered trains on regular tracks that hit max speeds of 250km/hr).
Best to ignore the US-style fake HSR like Florida brightline completely (it's diesel). Then talk about the missing routes for higher speed rail. There's no passenger train between Calgary and Edmonton, or Victoria and Nanaimo. Customise the train talking points for every province. They all have the same fundamental problem: None of the lines have been electrified. (Even California has managed to electrify a line!)
At no point do buses need to be mentioned. If he wants to go into multi-modal mobility, there's no better combo than train and bicycle. Talk about that!
I think he could still be much harder on CN. Their CEO clears $18M a year in compensation, yet none of their tracks have been electrified with overhead wiring, which means slower, heavier, dirty diesel power is required on all routes. And plenty of popular routes don't even have double tracks – not even Ottawa-Montreal. Take the mouching parasitical CEO to task. The neoliberal experiment has clearly failed, as CN hasn't invested the bare minimum to upgrade their tracks.
Another corporate target is Siemens Canada – their fulfilling their VIA order through their California factory. Call them out. It's unacceptable. Alstrom is manufacturing their TTC order in Canada. Why isn't Siemens?
Thank you for laying out this clear and thorough case, Luke. I am of the same mind that Avi's leadership would give us the best chance to revitalize the party.
I do have to quibble about one detail: it is an exaggeration to say that Avi speaks French. He does have the strongest French in a field of candidates lacking French language skills, but the Montreal debate showed that he has ground to cover to even catch up with Carney's level of spoken French. He is far from fluent at this point, though his ability to speak Spanish and pledge to spend time in a Francophone community after the race concludes allow me to feel cautiously optimistic about where his French will be once Canada faces another federal election.
I’m not Canadian but I did travel to Quebec and it’s true: you do need to win seats there to govern 😎
Thanks for this. I would love to know what the other candidates’ platforms are. Bit I will do my own homework I guess.
Let’s goooooo! I really value your opinion and the fact that it matches my own is giving me a lot of confidence. Checking in from Winnipeg, where there is a small but dedicated ground team for Avi and the things he stands for.
Lewis is going to have to push hard and fast for Proportionate Representation(PR) to expand the party's fortunes. FPTP heavily favors the LibCon cabal and that has to change so we truly have rep by pop.
“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.”
Then you should be incensed with the vetting of Bianca Mugyenyi under the absurd pretext that she stands as a proxy to Yves Engler. Would Engler have worn black face and a dress in order to surreptitiously enter the race? Would Naomi Klein ever be accused of being a proxy for Avi Lewis should she have run? For the NDP apparatchiks to suggest that Bianca cannot stand on her own two feet is, at best, extremely condescending, and probably more accurately described as racist and misogynistic. The hundreds of well-meaning, engaged citizens who collectively donated $100,000 to Bianca’s campaign are being dismissed as naive or ill-intentioned by a party that is irredeemably unwilling to allow “a healthy culture of internal debate”. Shame!
I have to say I was a little saddened to hear this endorsement on 'Micheal & Us'. Don't get me wrong Lewis will be #2 on my ballot. But sitting here in BC, Lewis seems so much closer to this province's social democratic elite and in continuity with the party's professionalising turn than a labour leader and booster of grassroots activism like Ashton. Is it just the French? Because to my ear there isn't much of an edge to stand on there
Respectfully, I don't think that's an accurate characterization of where Lewis sits in the context of BC politics or where his campaign is orienting itself vis a vis professionalization. When it comes to the latter, it's really the only campaign in the race that has specifically identified this and spoken to it as a problem to be rectified. When it comes to the former, it's Ashton — in his recent salvo against Lewis — who has staked out the position that it's inherently bad to disagree with things provincial NDP governments do (BC being one of those he specifically names). Ashton is most definitely taking that position to align himself with the party elite in the province, against the candidate that elite is a largely opposed to.
Your point about Ashton and deference to Eby, Kinew, and I think implied and most significantly Notley-Nenshi is well taken. And I'm definitely gonna take it up with the man next chance I get. But that's the thing. I worry about Lewis' media-academic-professional social position. We work to elect social democratic politicians because they're the most likely to buckle under pressure from collective action. And I worry about rallying the left of the party around a candidate that's building a new network of accountability versus one that from the left of the Labour movement. Respect to your work, thanks for your thoughts!
“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.”
Then why did Avi Lewis’s campaign push so hard and so dirty against Yves Engler’s candidacy? Why did the NDP apparatchiks exclude Engler from the race? Why did the party refuse Engler to attend party events? Such BS!
"I'll take things that never happened for 5 cents, Alex."
If you genuinely cared for the health of the NDP and its significance for Canadian democracy then you would be repulsed the blatant hypocrisy and cynicism of Lewis’ pitch for “good faith debate”. Looks like you prefer to live in DNC-like denial (or cynicism).
Please give a real example of Avi or his campaign pushing so hard? Genuinely interested.
I know he got ratfucked by the NDP but it feels like Avi is getting singled out for things he hasn't done.
This from Yves Engler:
"Avi Lewis has driven his supporters down an authoritarian, anti-socialist, path. The NDP leadership candidate’s role in assisting the party establishment’s bid to crush an insurgent campaign doesn’t portend well for an individual whose family’s history is steeped in crushing the left.
NDP leadership candidate Heather McPherson has applauded an individual who fought for Hitler and supported Ottawa paying $35 billion for the Trans Mountain pipeline. She has also repeatedly spoken alongside and praised leading Zionist Irwin Cotler, attended a CIA-influenced Trilateral Commission meeting in 2022 and is a member of the NATO Parliamentary Association.
But Lewis has repeatedly applauded McPherson. He describes her as one of the “magnificent seven” NDP MPs in Parliament and treats McPherson with respect. The Upper Canada College alumnus — whose name is listed between those of David Thomson and Galen Weston Jr among the elite high school’s “notable alumni” — has never suggested McPherson should be excluded from the race.
Lewis and many of his supporters’ reaction to my campaign is far different. Incredibly, Lewis justified the party brass blocking me and my three-year-old from an NDP social the night before the party’s first official debate in Montreal. The video of his support for my exclusion from an event open to the public went viral.
Lewis was also the only leadership candidate willing to tell the Globe and Mail that we should (effectively) be excluded from the race. Conversely, Tony McQuail told the Globe we should be allowed into the race and Heather McPherson previously suggested as much to the National Post. (Afterwards our campaign communications lead Mike Palacek emailed Avi to clarify his position. He failed to respond as with other requests we’ve made to Avi to express himself in favour of our participation in the race.) Five days after it was reported that we were blocked from the race Lewis responded to a question about this attack on party democracy by (effectively) justifying it. Pressed on the matter, Lewis said his campaign would release a statement on vetting in a few days but he’s yet to do so.
When they were simultaneously leader of the national and Ontario NDP Avi’s grandfather, David Lewis, and father, Stephen Lewis, expelled the leftist Waffle from the party in 1972. While he regularly cites his grandfather and father’s record, Avi hasn’t distanced himself from their expulsion of the Waffle.
In his bid for power, Lewis and his campaign have driven a sizable segment of leftish NDPers to articulate morally unconscionable positions. One of his high-profile backers, Judy Rebick, was asked directly on Facebook if she thought it was ok for the unelected three person NDP vetting committee to block members from having a right to select a socialist campaign with substantial support. Rebick responded “I don’t know”. Over the past three months Rebick has repeatedly smeared me. In that Facebook thread she noted, “all Yves has ever done is promote himself” and then “the only thing I've ever seen Yves Engler do besides his writing is to harass politicians and disrupt meetings.”
Like most Avi supporters, Rebick isn’t worked up about McPherson applauding a Nazi, supporting buying a tar sands pipeline, engaging with a CIA talk shop, sitting on a NATO parliamentary body or praising Canada’s leading proponent of a state that’s committed a holocaust.
In another example of the punch left attitude elicited by the NDP brass/Lewis, Rabble editor Kim Eliott joined Rebick in the smear stating that the NDP vetters’ “intimidation and harassment concerns” should have been “sufficient to disqualify a potential leadership candidate”. In the same Facebook conversation, Eliott denies that “the concerns about intimidation and harassment were simply for haranguing politicians as many activists would do”, suggesting the vetters had some unstated — non-political — ‘harassment’ justification for excluding me from the race. I’ve probably written 200 columns for Rabble over the past 25 years.
The Lewis campaign has been smearing me for months. Two months ago Avi’s longtime “advisor” Martin Lukacs engaged in a ten-minute smear claiming I was a “grifter” breaking NDP and Elections Canada rules (NDP vetters did not cite any rule violation in excluding me from the race, which didn’t stop Lukacs’ The Breach sidekick, Desmond Cole, from simply moving on to new procedural criticism of my campaign).
The leftists who have joined the brass’s bid to suppress an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist campaign are ignoring the role the NDP leadership race should play in pushing the “Overton window” in the direction of social and economic justice. Additionally, how will a victorious Lewis defeat the neoliberal, imperialist, power structure within the NDP if he drives out/alienates socialists from the party?
As Dock Currie recently noted, “In this calamitously anti-democratic NDP ‘leadership race,’ Avi Lewis is not the villain… With that said, what Avi is running on is ‘democratic renewal’, ‘taking back control of the party’, ‘real democracy’, etc., and that really doesn’t jive with being placid and indifferent to one’s own ‘social democratic’ party procedurally excluding, and demonizing, a passionate and committed anti-war activist. Those things juxtapose as jarring and incongruous.”
Ok lets unpack this for a sec because this is exactly the kind of baseless and inflammatory language which is the reason why most New Democrats lose no sleep over Yves being excluded from this race.
References to nameless "individuals" who he tries to tie to Avi. Drawing tenuous associations to Weston when Avi has been going after him more than almost anyone. Suggestions that he should not treat his opponents with respect and instead call for their expulsion. Mention of a "viral" video of Avi speaking out against him that seems not to actually exist. These are the sins of Avi Lewis as Yves sees them.
Yves has clearly amassed a following of conspiratorially minded individuals who have no antennae on what actually goes on within the NDP and as such he would have very little impact on this race whether he is on the ballot or not. A very small minority making a whole lot of noise.
Sorry, but a lot of this is simply not true, nor relevant. So he hasn't decried Heather McPherson, and that makes him sympathetic to both the CIA and the Nazi's? Avi has more important issues to focus on than scrutinizing McPherson's every meeting or manoeuvre... he has a campaign to win.
Moreover, Lewis has actually sympathized with Yves' rejection from the race and came out publicly to that effect.
https://globalgreen.news/en/avi-lewis-breaks-with-ndp-bureaucracy-over-engler-vetting-pledges-democratic-reform/
Too little, too late from Avi! So you're an Avi guy and testimony from the vetted candidate himself is not credible for you.
The substantive issue: Would the NDP (and democracy) have benefitted from the inclusion of Yves Engler?