Canada’s left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP) has elected a new leader, someone whose campaign drew comparisons to the politics and style of U.S. figures like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani. On March 29, the NDP elected Avi Lewis on the first round of balloting with 55 percent of the vote in his first successful political campaign.

The NDP was decimated in the April 2025 federal election. Former leader Jagmeet Singh lost his own electoral district, and the party only won seven seats, four short of what’s needed to maintain its official party status. It was the worst showing for the NDP in its 64-year history.

Lewis also came in third in that election in his electoral district, his second third-place finish in the two elections that he has run in.

But a commitment to be unapologetically left and a promise to overhaul the party were his key to his victory in the NDP leadership race. Lewis’s allies won key positions within the party, clearing the path for him to implement his campaign promises.

For decades, the NDP has watered down its left-wing policies. But with a Liberal government that has promised to pull tens of billions of dollars from federal departments to fund the military, party members are hungry for a left turn. Are Canadians ready for it?

Who Is Avi Lewis?

Lewis’s campaign was ambitious. He promised to implement national rent controls, build 1 million public housing units, increase taxes on the wealthy, expand the electricity power grid to phase out oil and gas, and fund free public transit. “We can have nice things, but we gotta fight for them together,” he said in one campaign video. The promise to be boldly progressive was music to the ears of many New Democrats who have been frustrated that the NDP has not been able to articulate a compelling reason for the high cost of housing and food, or a solution to the crisis.

Lewis’s campaign capitalized on widespread opposition to U.S. foreign policy, including the thousands of actions that Canadians have taken to show their solidarity with Gaza over the past several years. During his victory speech, he took aim at both U.S. foreign policy and Canada’s willingness to go along with it, saying:

We need a government … that acts with moral clarity when it matters. When missiles are falling on schools and hospitals; when Israel commits a genocide in Gaza, we call it by its name and we do everything in our power to bring it to an end. When the U.S. and Israel start an illegal and reprehensible war against Iran that sets the world on fire, we say Canada should have absolutely no role in it whatsoever.

While other NDP leadership candidates had similar positions on U.S. foreign policy, Lewis was able to rise above his peers by taking cues from social movement organizing, activists, and successful left-wing campaigns south of the border.

Lewis has very little partisan political experience himself, though he comes from a political dynasty. His grandfather, David Lewis, led the federal NDP from 1971 to 1975, and Avi Lewis’s father, Stephen Lewis, led the Ontario wing of the party from 1970 until 1978. His mother is iconic feminist journalist Michele Landsburg. Lewis, 57, has mostly stayed out of public life, until his first election campaign in 2021.

Some Canadians will remember Lewis as a host on the television channel MuchMusic. After that, he worked for CBC on the debate show “CounterSpin” and later, for Al Jazeera. He has produced a handful of documentaries. His wife, Naomi Klein, is a key left-wing voice in American politics. His campaigns have featured non-Canadian celebrity endorsements from Jane Fonda, Billy Bragg, and V (formerly known as Eve Ensler).

The Liberals under Prime Minister Mark Carney managed to eat most of the NDP’s support by framing a vote against Carney as a de facto vote for Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. The strategy worked during the 2025 election, and many people who would normally vote NDP voted Liberal, hoping that Carney would take on Donald Trump and protect Canada’s sovereignty.

While the NDP is now riddled with campaign debt, Lewis nonetheless out-fundraised all of the other candidates combined by pulling in more than 1 million Canadian dollars. That is equivalent to one-quarter what the entire party raised in the 2025 election.

A Rising Left to Combat a Right-Wing Liberal Party?

From 2022 to 2024, the NDP propped up Justin Trudeau’s deeply unpopular minority Liberal government. Trudeau betrayed his promise on electoral reform, souring many progressive Canadians on his tenure. And he became a symbol of Canadians’ frustrations with how the pandemic was handled, thanks to an aggressive right-wing movement to pin every pandemic-related inconvenience on Trudeau personally. In exchange for minor concessions like a dental care program for some low-income Canadians and coverage for diabetes medication and birth control under the public health insurance program, the NDP voted “yes” on confidence motions to keep Trudeau in power. Over the course of the agreement, the NDP voted 38 times alongside the Liberals out of 55 motions total, including for motions that wouldn’t have triggered an election.

In early 2025, staring down a federal election, the Liberals swapped Trudeau out for former two-time central banker Mark Carney. The NDP didn’t pivot, and Jagmeet Singh, who had attached himself to Trudeau through the confidence motions, came in third in his own electoral district.

Carney’s tenure has been a radical departure from the Trudeau era. He has promised more than $60 billion in cuts from the federal budget — cuts so deep that some journalists have noted similarities between his plan and what Trump’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” managed to accomplish.

Carney’s cuts are far-reaching. For example, they will result in fewer food inspectors, close experimental farms where research is done to make improvements to agriculture in Canada, and eliminate prison-based librarians. While there has been some outrage over these cuts, Carney’s popularity has grown slightly since he was elected. He has enticed enough politicians to change their party affiliation to the Liberals, NDP members included, that a majority government is within reach: Of the three by-elections to be held on April 13, two seats are seen as Liberal strongholds, and the Liberals won the third riding by a single vote in 2025. If Carney wins two of these seats, he will have his majority, and, due to Canada’s parliamentary system, will not need to form a coalition government.

Lewis is starting his tenure on difficult political terrain. He was barely noticed outside of the party faithful during the leadership race. The NDP membership only grew to 100,000 people during the race compared to 124,000 during the party’s last leadership race in 2017. When Naheed Nenshi ran to be leader of the Alberta NDP in 2024, 69,000 people in that province alone joined to vote in it. Despite the fact that the race had started on September 1, by mid-March, one poll showed that just 13 percent of Canadians selected Avi Lewis as their first choice (44 percent said they didn’t recognize any of the candidates’ names). While that was higher than the other leadership candidates, it has not turned Lewis into a household name, and many Canadians will first hear about him from a mainstream press, other politicians, and pundits who are antagonistic to left politics.

Backlash

Already, backlash to Lewis has been intense. One of the party’s seven members of parliament (MPs) switched to the Liberal Party during the final days of the leadership campaign (with rumors that Lewis will lose another MP to the provincial left-wing party Québec Solidaire). Then, immediately after Lewis’s victory, the leaders of the Alberta and Saskatchewan wings of the NDP criticized him publicly for being too far left. The leader of the Manitoba wing, Premier Wab Kinew, assured reporters that he supported Lewis even if their views didn’t line up perfectly.

Pundits and journalists were next. The National Post warned people to not “underestimate the appeal of Lewis’ Third Worldism”; the Calgary Herald said that a Lewis NDP “looks more communist than social democratic”; and The Globe and Mail columnist Konrad Yakabuski declared that in the wake of Lewis’s win, the NDP has “an antisemitism problem.” Never mind that Yakabuski is not Jewish, and Lewis — along with his new principal secretary and the new president of the party Niall Ricardo — are.

In anticipation of these attacks, the grassroots organization Independent Jewish Voices reminded Canadians that “the NDP is now Canada’s most Jewish-led party.”

A letter to the editor in The Globe that went viral on social media pointed out that Lewis’s father Stephen, who died shortly after Avi won the leadership race, was being praised by the same news outlets that were denigrating Avi Lewis, despite the two having virtually the same politics.

The Lewis campaign has so far withstood the attacks without giving into criticism, something that his team has no doubt learned from watching how other, similar campaigns in the U.K. and U.S. have unfolded.

Replicating Other Campaigns?

On March 30, Lewis delivered a speech to more than 1,000 delegates gathered in Winnipeg for the NDP convention. His victory was assured when, the day before, a slate critical of the party establishment and supportive of Lewis swept in through a very narrow election. His victory speech felt more like a victory lap than a crossing of the finish line.

He ended the speech with a nod to his cross-border allies: “This is about all of us, coming together to find our place and our power in the thrilling work in building our shared future. A government that works for the many, not for the money.” That slogan harkens to Jeremy Corbyn’s famous slogan for the many, not the few, and has appeared on podium signs behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during some of her public events. Lewis’s campaign demands and rhetoric closely mirror the populist rhetoric that underpinned Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.

This isn’t too surprising, given that Lewis has worked with Ocasio-Cortez before. He co-wrote the script for the short video A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019, working alongside Naomi Klein, who has been involved in campaigns for Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani. Lewis’s statement celebrating Mamdani’s victory said that Mamdani’s energy is “the same energy and vision that’s driving our campaign here in Canada.” He promised to create a public grocery service, a nod to one of Mamdani’s central campaign promises.

Lewis isn’t an insurgent member of a party that has enough reach in national politics to win the highest offices of the state, like Ocasio-Cortez is. Nor has he been elected before and practiced in the art of being a politician like Mamdani is. But he has clearly learned from their successes, hoping to borrow their more effective tactics. In a video with Klein the night of Mamadani’s victory, Lewis talked about how progressives need to understand that audacious proposals are key to securing electoral victories, which is what he takes from the Mamdani campaign.

Lewis doesn’t have the internal opposition that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have faced within the Democratic Party; the NDP leaders who have criticized him are now marginal in the party. The federal council and party executive support him; the path is clear for Lewis to put his bold words into action.

With no seat in the House of Commons, Lewis has the benefit of being free from the demands of parliamentary life. He won’t be tied down in Ottawa, present in the House of Commons for votes where, as the leader of a party without status, he is given very little time to push forward any motions. However, he will need to win a seat in the next few years to cement his position in the Canadian political landscape.

As social conditions continue to deteriorate, fueled by global crises like the war on Iran, there has scarcely been a better time for a left-wing insurgency. Will Lewis be able to rise to the occasion?

Holding Trump accountable for his illegal war on Iran

The devastating American and Israeli attacks have killed hundreds of Iranians, and the death toll continues to rise.

As independent media, what we do next matters a lot. It’s up to us to report the truth, demand accountability, and reckon with the consequences of U.S. militarism at this cataclysmic historical moment.

Trump may be an authoritarian, but he is not entirely invulnerable, nor are the elected officials who have given him pass after pass. We cannot let him believe for a second longer that he can get away with something this wildly illegal or recklessly dangerous without accountability.

We ask for your support as we carry out our media resistance to unchecked militarism. Please make a tax-deductible one-time or monthly donation to Truthout.