Isaac Phan Nay
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The Tyee
[Editor’s note: This is the second Q&A in a series on labour issues with NDP leadership candidates.]
To say Avi Lewis is having a busy fall would be an understatement.
After taking point on child care during flu season, the journalist, documentarian and activist flew to Ottawa in mid-October to run the political media gauntlet. From there, Lewis headed to Montreal where, from a room in a rental apartment, he sat down for a series of virtual interviews about his new campaign for NDP leadership.
“Engaging with the big problems of our time and trying to figure out how to actually solve them — it’s thrilling,” he said. “Apart from the discomfort of being middle-aged and sleeping in different beds and missing my kid and my beautiful wife, I get a huge amount of energy from the work.”
Orange runs deep in the family. His grandfather David Lewis helped steer the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation for more than two decades; helped found its successor party, the NDP; and led the New Democrats for four years. His father, Stephen Lewis, was an MPP in Scarborough West for 15 years and led the Ontario NDP for eight before Brian Mulroney appointed him to be Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Now, Lewis is taking up the family cause. In 2016, he spearheaded an effort to have the federal NDP adopt the Leap Manifesto — a list of political proposals on how Canada could transition from fossil fuels.
He ran as an NDP candidate in the last two general elections, although he failed to win a seat in either the riding of West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country in 2021 or Vancouver Centre in 2025.
In the race to lead the party, Lewis is up against labour leader Rob Ashton, social worker and Campbell River city Coun. Tanille Johnston, organic farmer and eight-time Huron-Bruce NDP candidate Tony McQuail, and the only candidate currently sitting as an MP, Heather McPherson.
The Tyee sat down with Lewis to talk about a campaign “laser-focused on the cost-of-living emergency.”
“Fascism feeds on economic desperation and on the despair of people who live in a system that is just grossly unfair,” Lewis said. “That’s the system — late-stage capitalism — that we’re in. It’s planting seeds for authoritarianism because it is failing people every single day, so that’s got to be the emergency that gets front-loaded.”
The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
The Tyee: You propose to address affordability issues by creating publicly owned projects like grocery stores and telecom networks and public transit. Tell me more.
Avi Lewis: We’re living through multiple emergencies, but the most pressing, most immediate one is this: you go shopping, you get to the checkout, you look at the total, and your jaw drops.
Why are the basics of life, food and shelter, unspeakably expensive? And I think we know: it’s because we have five big grocery giants that control most of the market, and they price fix and they price gouge and they collude. They’ve been caught multiple times, and if they ever get fined, it’s just a cost of doing business for them.
This is a case of market failure. It has utterly failed to deliver the things that people actually need to survive, food, shelter, transportation, communication — these are all off-the-charts expensive.
That’s when the government steps in. We need a public option because the market is gouging us and people can’t take it anymore.
Take transportation. The federal government loves shiny capital projects, new subways and light rails, where they can cut a ribbon.
The federal government has to fund the operation of transit systems around the country. They’re all failing to generate the revenue that they need to because we forced an essential service into a business model that doesn’t make sense for them.
We have an opportunity here, while we’re talking about nation-building projects, to solve a daily crisis that affects the actual everyday life of Canadians — the crappiness of public transit.
Instead of handing out fountains of corporate welfare to corporate buddies, the federal government could be funding the operation of transit systems. We could have an electric bus revolution in Canada under public ownership, where the auto industry in Ontario and Quebec could be saved.
We could use Canadian steel, which we’re tariffed out of selling to the United States right now. We could slash emissions, reconnect communities and provide fast and free public transit across the entire country. It’s a nation-building project that would actually reconnect us, help people, create tons of unionized jobs, use Canadian steel and make our economy more independent.
Yes, this is a big-swing idea, but so is a list of megaprojects that won’t accomplish all of the policy goals and all of the human needs that I’ve just outlined.
I’m surprised you’re sharing so many policy ideas so soon out of the gate. It seems as though other candidates are really keeping specific positions close to the chest.
That’s the way politics is done these days. Everything’s carefully scripted. Everything is carefully timed out.
If you put too much out there, the conventional wisdom says it’s risky because you haven’t developed all the details yet. The more you put out there, the more people could pile on and you might lose control of the narrative.
But we’re in an emergency. We have got to start talking about what we’re going to do about it, and we’re going to work this out together. This has to be a collective process, but it can’t be a technical process of trying to dole out strategic bits, because voters are too smart. Voters don’t want to be manipulated, and when voters see politics as usual, it turns them off instantly.
Maybe that was part of how the NDP lost so much support. But we can’t do the same thing over and over and expect a different result, so we’re trying something new.
You’ve long advocated for environmental stewardship and against fossil fuels, while the NDP is traditionally the party of labour — sometimes, these two causes can be diametrically opposed. How do you plan to balance labour and environment priorities?
I don’t agree with the narrative of jobs against the environment. I think that whole framing was created by the fossil fuel industry to delay and derail climate action.
I do think there are lots of workers in the oilpatch and in other fossil fuel regions of our country who didn’t choose to live in places where that was the main industry. I have always believed passionately that those workers cannot pay the price for getting off fossil fuels, which is just a hard reality of our world.
Canada is being left behind. We’re climate pariahs, the only country in the G7 that is utterly failing to bring down our emissions in any serious way, because we keep expanding fossil fuel production.
Meanwhile, last year the world spent US$2.2 trillion on renewable energy and US$1.1 trillion on new fossil fuels. We’ve passed the tipping point, and now we’re just being left behind.
So the question is not “How do we balance the need for jobs versus the need for action on climate change?” The question is “How do we make sure that not one single worker pays the price for the fact that we’ve continued to expand fossil fuels in defiance of what we know we need to do?”
There are hundreds of thousands of abandoned and orphan wells in Alberta alone, and if the government actually enforced the law and made those companies — the polluters — pay, there would be work for decades.
I’m also for a huge number of job-creating projects — nation-building projects — all of which would help us get off fossil fuels and put money in people’s pockets and unionized jobs in communities.
Ten years ago, your Leap Manifesto was said to be divisive. Some saw it as a promising path forward, while others criticized it for being too radical. I’m curious how its policies factor into your campaign now.
I encourage people to go and read it. It’s less than 1,200 words. It’s not a radical document. Never has been. The only thing that was ever controversial about it was a very basic and science-based claim that we don’t need new fossil fuel infrastructure.
I’ll be honest with you, we lost control of the narrative around the Leap Manifesto because our opponents convinced us that we shouldn’t fight back, that we were endangering the party. Meanwhile, they dominated the narrative in the aftermath, and it’s too bad.
When the manifesto got to the floor of the NDP national convention in 2016, it passed with a huge majority in a hand vote.
The fact that the people running the NDP didn’t actually follow through with its resolution to explore the manifesto’s policies points to a democratic deficit in the party.
Our constitution says that the highest decision-making body of the NDP is the convention of all the members, whereas in reality, for much of the last 20 years, most decisions have been made by a very small number of people in the leader’s office.
But there were dozens and dozens of unions that signed the Leap Manifesto. There were Indigenous leaders. There were environmental groups. There were tens of thousands of Canadians who signed it. It speaks about a healthy economy moving beyond fossil fuels in a way that benefits everybody. Especially the workers, who the document says should have a strong democratic say in how we get off fossil fuels.
Earlier this year, the Conservative party led a huge effort to court blue-collar construction and trade unions. I’m curious to hear how the NDP can appeal to that demographic in the next election?
We have to do it far before the next election. It’s about how we fix the everyday emergencies that people are facing.
We have a housing emergency in this country that is driving the homelessness crisis, which is being exploited by the far right as a justification for crackdowns that just don’t work. People need help, not jail.
We have a big housing push from the prime minister. I can tell you right now that it is going to fail, because it’s the same approach that the Liberals and Conservatives always use, which is to shove a bunch of public money to their friends in the private sector, and then sit back and hope that the private sector is going to solve the problem.
What we actually need is to have a public option for housing. We need the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. to actually be a public developer. It needs to create public construction companies to hire workers — all of whom should be unionized — and put them to work in a real wartime-level build-out of public housing. Housing like co-op housing and non-profit housing that actually works for people who will never be able to afford market rents.
Let’s just try to imagine how market logic would solve our housing crisis right now. What private developers on planet Earth would build so much housing that prices would come down? That’s not how capitalism works, guys, come on. This is a public emergency. The government has to step in and build housing that the market won’t, because it’s not profitable enough.
That’s just one example of how we address the NDP’s relationship with skilled trades and construction and the housing crisis all at the same time.
What do you see as the party’s role in this government and the next?
At the Canada Labour Congress forum, we were asked to choose a walk-on song — like a campaign song. I chose a song called “Bella Ciao,” which is an anti-fascist song from Italy.
But I almost chose a song by the Clash called “The Magnificent Seven,” in tribute to the seven magnificent NDP MPs punching way above their weight in Parliament right now. They’re doing a heroic job of actually pointing out the danger to Canadians when Prime Minister Mark Carney tacks to the right and Pierre Poilievre strays further right than Carney.
There’s a massive lane open on the left in Canada, as Carney ran as a progressive and is governing as a conservative. The NDP is still standing up for working people and pushing back against a government that is going to drive this country off the cliff.
If we have austerity right when we’re heading into a recession — we’ve seen this movie before. This is the last time the government should be slashing public spending and public services. People need assistance because the economy is shaking and looks like it’s going down.
Canadians do not want a two-party system. We’ve seen where that leads. The growth of authoritarianism in the United States is linked directly to the fact that they have a two-party system. Canadians don’t want that, and I think we are going to need to remind them why the NDP matters.
So the structural need for the NDP is really there, and I think we have a strong chance of coming back big time.
