My Interview With Avi Lewis, Candidate for Leader of the Federal NDP
by Keith Porteous
I met Avi Lewis 30 years ago when he was a journalist working at CityTV in Toronto, while I worked across the street in the National Film Board building. We’d meet for coffee and talk a bit of politics. When I recently got to speak with him about his candidacy for Leader of the NDP, I was surprised that he remembered. Since that time he’s been with his partner, author Naomi Klein, and gone on to make documentary films and teach at UBC, splitting time between Vancouver and the Sunshine Coast with their 13 year old son. We spoke by phone for about an hour and here’s his answers to the questions I had for him:
KP: Your campaign is highly focused on cost of living issues. What are your central ideas for dealing with what is a crisis for so many people?
Avi: We’re focused on the cost of living crisis in what we call a rigged economy. The market has failed us. We need a public option for food when 5 grocery chains control 80% of the market, and while they price fix. We’ll tackle out-of-control rents with a national cap and stronger protections for tenants. We’ll tax big corporate landlords and investment properties. We’ll get the federal government back into the business of building public homes. And we’ll finally address the federal government’s abject failure to close the housing gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. We have 6 big banks that made $70 billion in profits last year, and we can have a public banking system. We pay the highest cell phone and internet rates in the global north, and 3 companies control the market. We need a public option for the essential services of cell phones and the internet. And, we will tack-on climate solutions to our cost of living efforts.
KP: Your primary rival for the NDP leadership seems to be Heather McPherson, the Alberta MP. How would your leadership be distinctly different from hers?
Avi: In our campaign we have emphasized collective leadership, and not the cult of personality that hasn’t served our party well. Our campaign represents a break from business as usual, giving people more than just a vote every 4 years, and not just small incremental changes, but offering solutions that are as big as the crises we are facing, while offering plain talk and moral clarity.
KP: PM Carney describes the “rules based international order” as a long standing “pleasant fiction.” What other fictions do governments and media continue to hold?
Avi: The number one fiction is that the role of government is to create the conditions for maximum profit accumulation, because it will trickle down and lift all boats. That’s an absolute lie. The collapse of that fiction, and the economic desperation of the majority of people, is paving the way to fascism.
KP: As Canada is a member of the U.S. led NATO alliance, the biggest single carbon emission source on the planet, what are we to make of PM Carney raising Canada’s military budget to $150 billion a year?
Avi: I don’t believe we need to spend 2% of our GDP on military spending, as we need that money for other things, including the climate emergency, which is costing us more money while destroying towns and filling our lungs with smoke. The idea that we should now move to 5% of GDP is a destructive and nihilistic fantasy, pouring fuel on the climate fire. Leaders have been gung-ho for more integration of our military with the U.S., and sending most of the increased spending directly to U.S. arms manufacturers. None of this is the direction Canada should be going in. I would like Canada to be a force for peace and prosperity.
KP: PM Carney is moving to increase Canada’s export of raw materials, old growth logs, and Alberta tar sand bitumen and shale gas, What are your thoughts on this?
Avi: Besides the gaping chasm between Carney’s words and his actions, we recognize that Canada is under attack from our closest trading partner. The problem is that Carney is doubling down on the things we’ve always done, which is exporting raw resources where most of the benefits and the jobs go to other countries, and the environmental damages are a massive subsidy to those corporate profits because those damages are borne by us. That’s why we’re calling for a Green New Deal, creating a million jobs, building a 21st Century electric grid, not pipelines, and an electric bus revolution. We don’t need to double down on making Canada a place where we turn nature into money, and where we are running out of finite resources.
KP: I saw your YouTube clips of street interviews with bankers and other financial players. Funny stuff! Should you become NDP leader, will you continue to engage with people, one on one in the street?
Avi: Absolutely! I’ve always loved doing streeters since I was a local reporter in Toronto in 1990, and the accessibility of politicians and the ability to talk to anyone is really important these days when people are so cynical, and rightly so. about politics and politicians. In general, how many more lawyers and narcissists do we need in the House of Commons?
KP: Evan Solomon has been appointed as Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation by the Prime Minister. Can you frame your position on Ai and the push to automation?
Avi: My position is the anti-Evan Solomon position. I’ve been cheekily calling him the Minister For Ai Sales and Marketing. He’s adopted a dangerous tech-bro attitude toward a world changing technology that has the potential to completely revolutionize the world’s economy, and not in positive ways. He did a 30 day national consultation he called a sprint, showing how deeply he’s adopted the culture of big tech billionaires, a nihilistic bunch of weirdos. We’re calling for a pause on data centres for generative Ai, and a pause on the pedal to the metal approach that the Carney government is taking, so we can have a national debate on how we can regulate this technology. Look at the data centre fight in Nanaimo. You have an extremely water stressed area that has gone to stage 4 and 5 water restrictions. The reward is about one extra job.
KP: Do you see yourself as part of a shift to Left populism, and why do you think the word “populist” has taken on a pejorative context for so many people?
Avi: I do see myself as part of a shift to economic populism, and I’m excited about it. I think populism has got a bad name because the right has been so out front on it, and during this period of political history in Canada, it has largely been a right-wing phenomenon. I think right-wing populism is super dangerous, leading to fascism. But I do not think the same thing about left-wing populism.
KP: Should you win the NDP Leadership, what are your first priorities for revamping the NDP as a political force?
Avi: If we can come back in the next election, and I think we can, as we think this is the beginning of an NDP comeback nationally, and if we hold the balance of power with a Liberal minority, then we will go in with one demand, to force proportional representation. We could have a citizen’s assembly, but no more studies and referendums. We might only have one shot at reform, one that unleashes all the others. And we can’t bluff.
KP: You and your partner Naomi Klein are parents. How does this affect your worldview, and can we assume that Naomi would be an advisor, should you prevail in the Leadership contest?
Avi: Naomi has just sent in the manuscript for her new book, End Times Fascism, which she co-wrote with Astra Taylor. Naomi and I have been together for 30 years, you know, young love, and our son is 13 now and deeply into reading Substacks about politics. It’s now a three-way conversation. Not only will Naomi be an advisor, we’ll have our son Toma there with us as well.
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My faith in state sponsored electoral systems has not returned, but I am willing to compromise my scepticism in order to give voice to a resistance to the policies of the Liberal-Conservative governing duopoly. Avi Lewis and the grassroots movements he is aligning with to build a Left coalition, represent a significant change from the centrist wing of the NDP that advocates for small incremental changes, instead of a more bold Left vision that’s grounded in the populist traditions of Tommy Douglas, and that gave us socialized healthcare and many of the public benefits we receive today. The NDP Leadership Convention takes place in Winnipeg, Manitoba, March 27-29, 2026.
