I can’t tell if the NDP just made a brilliant move or a catastrophic one.
As a Conservative partisan, I should be celebrating as the NDP elects a self-described democratic socialist who wants to nationalize groceries and slap an export tax on oil and gas. A party polling in single digits just handed its leadership to a guy with no seat in the House, $13 million in debt, and a platform that reads like it was drafted at a faculty lounge brainstorming session.
And yet I can’t quite bring myself to dismiss it.
Here’s what bothers me. Avi Lewis won 56% of the vote on the first ballot — a decisive margin that tells you the membership didn’t stumble into this. They chose it. He clearly has some organizing chops, even if we’re looking at a depleted party. Nearly 40,000 people looked at a platform that includes public grocery stores, public telecom companies, a million government-built homes, postal banking, and a Green New Deal funded at 2% of GDP, and said: yes, this is the direction.
These are proposals that wouldn’t survive a single Treasury Board meeting. The idea that Canada Post — an organization that struggles to deliver packages on time — should also handle your mortgage is, on its face, absurd. But dismissing it entirely requires ignoring something that’s been building for a while.
Mark Carney has moved the Liberal Party to the centre. Some would say centre-right. He’s polling in the high 50s, projecting economic competence, and governing in a way that has made a lot of progressive voters quietly uncomfortable. He voted for a defence budget that Avi Lewis called “austerity that would have made Stephen Harper smile.” He cut a pipeline deal with Danielle Smith. He supported — with some regret, as he put it — the strikes on Iran.
That leaves a vacancy on the left. And Avi Lewis is the only person standing in it.
The Corbyn comparison is the one everyone’s reaching for, and it’s instructive — but not in the way most people think. The thing about Corbyn isn’t that he lost badly in 2019. It’s that he nearly won in 2017. The commentator class that had written him off as a joke spent election night watching the results come in with their jaws on the floor.
I’m not saying Lewis is about to replicate that. The Canadian context is different. But the mechanism is the same: populist messaging that sounds unrealistic in a boardroom can sound like a lifeline at a kitchen table. And kitchen tables are where elections get decided.
The case against Lewis is straightforward and strong. His own provincial peers started distancing themselves within minutes of the result. Nenshi in Alberta came out swinging. Beck in Saskatchewan sent an open letter that read more like a separation notice than a congratulations. The NDP’s electorally successful provincial wings — Manitoba, BC — look nothing like what Lewis is proposing. He’s targeting degree-educated urban progressives in Toronto and Vancouver, which is a real constituency but not one that wins you government. And he has no mechanism to get into the House of Commons anytime soon.
But the case for Lewis is subtler and harder to dismiss. In an environment where affordability is the dominant issue and trust in institutions is low, the guy saying “the grocery companies are ripping you off and the government should do something about it” has an audience. It doesn’t matter that the policy is unworkable. What matters is that the diagnosis resonates. And right now, with gas prices climbing and the cost of everything else following, a lot of Canadians are more receptive to that message than the political establishment wants to admit.
The NDP has either planted a seed or dug a grave, and I still can’t tell which one it is.
