Avi Lewis for NDP Leader (Editorial)
by Keith Porteous
The Canadian partisan landscape has taken a dramatic move to the right, with the Liberals governing with conservative policies, corporate tax cuts, more pipelines, and less environmental review and First Nations consent. They’ve raised Canada’s military budget by 150%, while implementing an austerity budget for working people. These are Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative policies under a Liberal banner.
Even while supporting Gord Johns as our local MP, I had mostly abandoned partisan politics. The NDP had evolved into a Liberal-Lite party, and the Liberals had become a centre-right party. The Greens had become irrelevant, and they have not moved the needle under Elizabeth May’s leadership. Gord Johns was attentive to important local issues in Parliament, pressing on the absence of shipbreaking regulations.
We now have an opportunity to reclaim a more authentic Leftist party in the NDP leadership race with Avi Lewis’s candidacy. He and his partner Naomi Klein have been champions of real Left politics in Canada for more than 25 years. The NDP leadership had drifted to the centre resulting in only 7 NDP members left in Parliament, and the 2025 election of international banker and hedge fund manager, Mark Carney.
The vast Leftist political space has been abandoned, and Avi represents the best opportunity to re-occupy it. He has innovative ideas for working people, the environment, the elderly, and the marginalized, but he also brings the populist Left characteristics of NDP pioneers like Tommy Douglas, and his father Stephen Lewis, former UN Ambassador to the United Nations. Avi is committed, bright, and a gifted communicator.
My faith in State sponsored partisan politics has not returned, but I am willing to make some compromises in order to give voice to those of us who oppose war and corporatism, as a bulwark against the worst and most pernicious policies of the Liberal-Conservative governing duopoly. We simply cannot rely on the 1% to deal with the current crisis’, and we cannot have social and environmental justice without economic justice.
If you wish to vote in the NDP leadership contest in March, you must be a member of the NDP by January 28, costing you a mere $10. You can just search “NDP membership” online to join. You can find Avi’s policy proposals on his “Lewis For Leader” website, outlining his bold ideas for food, housing, and the basics of living in this time of economic struggle for most families and individuals. It’s time to reclaim the Left.
