Bernie, Mamdani, Avi: A New NDP Is Possible
Avi Lewis won a clear majority of membership first ballot votes to win the leadership of Canada's federal NDP (New Democratic Party) on March 29 2026. Avi's victory offers new hope that a genuinely left and powerful political party can be (re)built across Canada, at least at the federal level.
This is the first of several articles planned on the new NDP that is positioning itself as unapologetically for democratic socialism, ecosocialist, left populist, working closely with progressive social movements and organizers in and outside of the party, and much more.
In this article, I will list the key features of the new NDP as laid out in A New Democratic Party: The Comeback of the Left, edited by Martin Lukacs, the editor of the online newspaper The Breach and publisher of Breach Books (see breachbooks.ca). The book summarizes interviews with key people in and around the Avi Lewis campaign, including Lewis himself, albeit a few weeks before Avi won and became leader.
Each of the features are of necessity aspirational. Avi Lewis and his supporters aim to change the NDP in the wake of a major defeat of the federal party, by the Mark Carney Liberals, in the April 2025 election. The best has yet to come.
(1) Unapologetic Champion of the Causes of Progressive Social Movements
This was made flesh by the way that Avi campaigned for the leadership.
"The campaign rooted its proposals in an explicit orientation to mass organizing both within the party and beyond it… This was evident both in what the campaign did -- helping form more than a dozen, decentralized regional chapters across the country and hosting large digital organizing events, alongside more traditional phone and text canvassing operations… Educational efforts went hand-in-had with the organizing, centering on online 'solidarity sessions' where Lewis was in conversation with organizers from migrant rights, Palestinian solidarity, trans justice, and other movements. All of this was backed by a clear message from Lewis that electoral politics can accomplish little unless popular power is considerably built up on the left outside the party, with the NDP functioning most effectively as the parliamentary wing of a common front of social forces". (p6)
This is truly exciting stuff. Easier to say than to do , of course. Lots of things to figure out, lots of relationships to form, and lots of differences to negotiate and debates to conduct. Hopefully a lot of this will be done in public, and radiate outward to engage more and more of the general public.
(2) Unapologetic Commitment to Building a Democratic Socialist Canada
Committing to building a democratic socialist economy and society is not the same thing as committing to champion the causes of progressive social movements. Very few social movement organizations are explicitly committed to seeking socialism of any kind, although lots of activists are personally pro some kind of socialism and/or anti-capitalist.
The kicker here, of course, is that very few left movements or parties around the world today dare to say that they know the answer to the question: "What exactly is [democratic] socialism as a new kind of economy and society?".
Having said that, here is Martin Lukacs on the Avi Lewis core agenda:
"[Avi's] campaign was defined by a left populist communication style, drawing lines of antagonism between a broad, diverse working class and the corporate culprits that are fuelling the crises of the cost-of-living and the unravelling climate. It proposed ecosocialist policies that could easily be understood as meeting people's pressing material needs, using public ownership to create affordable options for food, phones and internet, free and functional public transit, and a massive buildout of public housing with public developers. It called for major reinvestment in public services like head-to-toe health care and what the campaign called the care economy of eldercare, childcare and education. It also revived the Green New Deal [which Lewis, and the NDP left generally, have been actively promoting in and outside the party for many years, preceding the US version]". (p5)
(3) A Left Populism Laser-Focussed on an Affordability Agenda
The Avi Lewis new NDP is self- consciously, if not quite formally, a left populist party.
The existing NDP is a parliamentary social democratic party. It was formed in 1961 as a Labour party, with most of Canada's unions affiliating to it, as a continuation of the CCF (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation) that was formed in the 1930s. Avi's grandfather David Lewis was one of the chief founders and leaders of the CCF, and later was federal leader of the NDP in the early 1970s. Avi's great-grandfather Moishe was a leader of the Jewish Bund in pre-Russian Revolution Russia. Avi's father, Stephen Lewis, was the leader of the Ontario NDP in the 1970s. His mother, Michelle Landsberg, was the first feminist columnist in a major Canadian mainstream daily newspaper, the Toronto Star. Avi has deep roots in the NDP and in the non-communist democratic socialist tradition.
Avi is well suited to being an effective leader of a left populist version of a social democratic political party. He started out as a journalist in Toronto in late 1989, moved on to host several pop music as well as current political issue TV shows in the 1990s, and then settled into a career as a documentary film-maker and, since 2021, an associate professor teaching Climate Justice and Documentary Film. Here is Avi's self-description:
"I came up in the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s… I've been doing storytelling, communications work, and film-making alongside social movements for much of the last 30 years -- increasingly around the climate emergency and its intersection with all the other crises that we face." (p104)
And here are a few of the ways that Avi asserts his left populist approach to doing electoral politics:
"[I]t's a time when people are rightly preoccupied with what our campaign calls the 'everyday emergency' of just trying to get by in an impossible, unfair, and rigged economy. Which is why we've been laser-focused on the cost-of-living emergency and the real solutions to it from the get-go" (p111)
Avi notes one intentional departure from the left populist playbook, the deliberate effort to not build the party around a charismatic leader, who is at least treated by the media as being the party itself:
"We made an explicit decision not to launch [my leadership campaign in a way that would make it] about personal political branding. Because the cult of leadership is a failed model… We decided: We're going to launch with ideas. We're going to launch with solutions." (p112)
Avi clarified that he was not proposing a leaderless, horizontalist NDP where all decisions are made by consensus. But he wanted to increase deliberative and participatory democracy in the party, and encourage a degree of initiative and autonomy exercized by NDP members at the local constituency association level:
"[We need a party] that names the villains in our economy -- the billionaire class… [and we will] propose things like public ownership that would actually address the failures of capitalism… we need to democratize the party, make the offer clearer and more ambitious, and channel the legitimate rage of people at the daily unfairness they have to face -- and those things have to be done all at once." (p116)
And finally:
"In a way, we don't lead with ideology, and I don't think that's necessary these days. What is necessary is addressing the material emergency of people's lives with solutions that actually work… We actually know what needs to be done because we're living in an epic period of market failure. When the market is failing to give people the things that they need at a price they can afford, that's quite literally what government is for." (pp118-119)
(4) No More Pollster-run Campaigns That 'Move to the Center'
Matthew Green, a trade union leader and former federal NDP MP in Hamilton Ontario challenges the myth that earlier NDP leader Jack Layton's 2011 electoral breakthrough was due to Layton's letting pollsters dictate the messaging. It was true that Layton's personal charisma made a difference. And Layton let the professional consultants and the leader's office run the party alright. But the breakthrough was mainly due to a temporary fractioning and collapse of the conservative parties, especially in Quebec. (p50) It was not due to a clever positioning of the NDP two inches to the left of the Liberal party on all issues. It was not due to 'Moving to the Center'. Indeed, "[u]ltimately it leads to what we've just experienced in the last three elections: a steady decline of the party due to not taking bold positions and clearly differentiating ourselves from the Liberal Party." (p51)
(5) Winning Popular Support with Strong Ideas, Not a Strongman Leader
This point was made above by Avi himself above. Except that everyone else draws attention to his strong communication skills. I already quoted Martin Lukacs who observed that "[Avi's] campaign was defined by a left populist communication style." (p5) We will see.
(6) A Red and Green NDP: Ecosocialism
Avi Lewis lives and breathes ecosocialism, an approach to organizing that forefronts the twin issues of the environment and building a democratic socialist economy. Ecosocialism tries to link the issues of capitalism's destruction of the economy and exploitation of workers at the point of production with issues of environmental destruction. Avi has made documentaries and contributed to books and public intellectual speaking and media work on these topics for virtually his entire adult life.
Most impressive is the clear stance saying that we have to actively work to get off fossil fuels, period. This approach is likely to be adopted by the new federal NDP. It will probably get wide support from party members, and to a lesser extent NDP voters. There is a lot of political education to do here, because powerful vested interests are at stake, not the least American ones. There will be strong opposition from those provincial NDP leaders and those who have predominated in the federal party up to now. The reason will be that they believe that it will prevent the NDP (and themselves) from getting into power. Anyone with a brain can see that the world will have to get off fossil fuels in the near future. As Avi has put it eloquently, Canada needs to become an electrostate not a petrostate.
(7) Winning Back Workers and the Need for an Updated Class Analysis
How will the NDP win the support of "organized labour" with its more left wing stance? Avi answered with two points.
First Avi replied : "[T]he labour movement itself faces a lot of the same challenges that the NDP does. I think there are a lot of union leaders… who can't get their members to vote NDP… I think our problem is that the right ate our lunch. And I think that the lunch they ate was not our policy proposals… [T]he way the right ate our lunch was by channeling the legitimate rage of people about how shit their lives are, and how hard they are working -- and we didn't speak to that". (p121)
Second Avi replied: "I reject utterly this caricatured and right-wing constructed narrative that we went into identity politics and that's why we lost workers." (p121)
What then exactly are the ways that different groups of workers experience their exploitation on and off the job? What ways are common to most workers?
Avi responded with these observations:
"[A]nother important piece of this for me is recognizing what we mean when we say 'working class'… Conservative leader Pierre Polievre… has won a section of the working class by telling a very nostalgic 1950s, very gendered story about [male] breadwinners.. I think those skilled workers -- tradesmen, in coveralls and work boots and pickup trucks -- are very important people whom we need to build a lot of things as we transition off fossil fuels… but they're only a part of the working class. The larger part of the working class is actually in the care economy… There are more than 3 million people that work in health care, education, long-term care, and childcare in Canada. And they are 75 percent women, a massive proportion of whom are racialized women… And so recognizing the working class as immigrants, suburban workers, in retail, in service sectors -- the kind of workers that Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been incredibly clear in standing with in New York City -- that is the expansive vision of the working class that allows us to reconnect not just to the 99 percent, but also to union members and to the union movement." (pp122-123)
These are insightful comments, but they are a very preliminary start to answering the questions of how different workers experience their exploitation on and off the job. And exactly which parts of capital are doing the exploiting and how. And which other social groups are involved in organizing the exploitation and in what precise ways.
For example, Avi repeats the Occupy Wall Street meme that 'we are the 99 percent'. But that is clearly wrong if it is intended to say that the class of exploiters is only 1 percent of the population (leaving aside that it suggests that exploitation is done by some individuals to other individuals, rather than being above all a highly institutionalized and organized power relationship between classes and groups).
It is wrong if it is intended to say that everyone else beyond the 99 percent are exploited workers, or at least that they are more or less in the same relation to capital as working class people. A large part of the population are managers or professionals or others, who may be "just following orders" from the owners, but who nevertheless act as agents of capital and the State in doing work that enables the bosses to exploit the workers.
Yes the middle classes are also bossed and they suffer degrees of what can be called exploitation too. But their class position is different, and that matters. A lot of working class people get this (this is precisely the group of allegedly liberal and 'woke' people that the political right builds up a hate about, in order to deflect anger from capital and the overall ruling class), but in the absence of analysis and theorizing to frame what is happening here, they do not understand it any better than anyone else.
To be clear, I think that Avi and the NDP left know better. They/We cannot be expected to put forward a more accurate analysis, of how all the different parts of both the working class and middle class are exploited on and off the job, if we have not done the work to have a detailed analysis. Nevertheless, it is dangerous to repeat the 99 percent type rhetoric because, if taken seriously, it leads directly to the false idea that the problem with capitalism is that there is a corrupt elite of 'bad individuals' who are ruining an otherwise good (free enterprise capitalist) system. And that the only place where we need any democratic socialism is in those exceptional cases where there have been 'market failures'.
CODA
Avi Lewis winning the leadership of the federal NDP is a wonderful turn of events. I think that a left populist NDP is the best that the left is capable of, here in Canada or anywhere else, given our very weak level of social analysis and theorizing, and the state of fragmentation of the working class and the overall Movement of movements. So I hope to critique the NDP from the vantage point of a genuine supporter, who does not know any better than anyone else what the answers to all the important questions are. The political future looks brighter in Canada than it did as recently as a few months ago. And it is going to keep getting better with an Avi Lewis led NDP.