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ACCORDING TO LIZ - The leadership convention of Canada’s New Democratic Party ended last Sunday, March 29 with the decisive election of Avi Lewis on the first ballot with 56%, almost twice that of his nearest competitor, with support of over 70% of party members eligible to vote.
La Donald is certain to write off Avi as inconsequential, a nobody, but he has been mis-estimating Canada and Canadians for decades.
Lewis is a Vancouver-based documentary filmmaker, educator, and co-founder of the Leap Manifesto, a 15-point plan that called for Canada to transition beyond fossil fuels. His father (who died two days after seeing his son elected) and grandfather were prominent progressive politicians, and he’s married to anti-corporatist author Naomi Klein.
His journey to NDP leadership was grounded in Lewis’ conviction that he could help form a government “that serves the many, not the money,” generating excitement that will hopefully lead to a resurgence of progressive populism north of border.
His victory speech underlined challenges ahead:
“Canadians are living on the edge. We’re under economic attack by the U.S., while Donald Trump stomps around the globe grabbing foreign leaders and oil fields and starting wars he has no idea how to stop” and “the everyday emergency of just trying to get by in an impossible economy.”
He accused both the Liberal and Conservative parties of being coerced by “a tiny group of billionaires who control every part of our economy” to shift blame from corporate Canada and their multinational overseers to anything but... immigrants, Indigenous rights, overly-restrictive regulations, and more.
The major criticism Lewis faced from Heather McPherson, a six-year veteran in Canada’s Parliament and his best-known opponent, was that he had never been elected and the party required someone who had a winning track record.
But the party has been losing for years and needed a reboot; something that American establishment Democrats must also absorb or lose miserably this fall.
The NDP entered last year’s election with 24 seats. It saw its caucus reduced to just seven members and recently lost another seat to the Liberals. For a party to retain or gain official party status, it must hold at least 12 seats – double what it has now.
Yes, Lewis ran unsuccessfully twice, but he was up against entrenched longtime Liberal incumbents. Their money and (mostly-unfulfilled) promises peeled away progressives who saw the encroaching power of the increasingly-radical Conservatives as the greater threat.
Today Lewis brings 35 years of movement-building experience, combining grassroots organizing with an ability to reach millions.
When it comes to national policy, Lewis calls for advancing “solutions as big as the crises facing working Canadians: public ownership, worker power, climate justice, and an economy built on care. In short, addressing the crises of rising inequality, climate change, collapsing health care and growing fascism.
Adopting the transformative approach of Silicon Valley Democrat, Ro Khanna, Lewis is an advocate for “dignified work in a digital age.” His proposed creation of over a million union jobs through “Green New Deal” environmental initiatives hope to transition workers in the fossil fuel and other labor-intensive industries into well-paying 21st-century careers.
His NDP campaign platform called for affordable housing, improved health care, and a variety of ideas targeting price gouging.
Policy proposals include:
* a “wealth tax” on Canada’s top one percent of earners
* capping rent increases and establishing a “Federal Housing Secretariat” to co-ordinate home-building projects.
* countering Trump tariffs with a tax on oil and gas exports to the U.S.
* imposing the digital services tax that Carney abandoned under American pressure
* pausing expansion of A.I. data centres in Canada
* investing two percent of Canada’s GDP in tackling climate change
* launching a public alternative to the big grocery chains which could cut grocery costs by up to 40 percent
* instituting public pharmaceutical production to ease reliance on foreign drug suppliers and build domestic supplies for future emergencies
His planned roadmap has the backing of environmentalists, Indigenous leaders, social and food justice advocates, academics, artists, and some labour organizations. Although alienating many core NDP leaders, particularly in the fossil fuel-rich western provinces.
To address their concerns, Lewis plans to expedite rebuilding the national party’s relationship with local ridings, actively working to diffuse the simmering resentment of a pro-environment reboot.
In stark contrast to partisan politics to the south, last weekend’s candidates were respectful and cordial, supportive of each others’ key positions in debates; and the need to keep working together to increase the NDP’s vitality and relevance with a focus on holding government and individual leaders accountable.
Of interest to Americans, is the diversity of candidate backgrounds that can flourish in a less deep pocket-driven political environment. Only one of the five, McPherson, was a national politician. Other candidates included a Quaker farmer who wanted to repurpose Canada’s military budget to help people, an anti-colonialism First Nations social worker and small-town City Councillor, and a dockworker who rose through union ranks by uniting diverse voices to lead the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in British Columbia.
Like the other candidates, Avi Lewis is a supporter of Palestinian rights, taking a strong stand against the Liberal government’s tacit support for the Netanyahu regime’s oppression of Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank.
As well as for Israel’s endless hostilities purportedly taking out putative terrorists but maiming and murdering thousands of innocent civilians in the process including children, destroying infrastructure pushing communities back to the stone age, generating massive amounts of global-warming pollution, and violating multiple international treaties on warfare and human rights.
The NDP has also denounced Carney support for the Iran War, contrasting it with the strong Canadian opposition to George W. Bush’s equally illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Lewis’ bold socialism proposes to revive the moribund NDP, and offer Canadians a progressive alternative to the increasingly conservative Liberals and the Conservatives which has devolved into a Republican-style environment-destroying profits-over-people partisan party.
With his feet solidly planted in the Leap Manifesto [[[https://leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto/]]], Lewis has been at the forefront of efforts to make climate the cornerstone of Canadian politics for over a decade. Now he has combined this with a panoply of creative proposals folding it into affordability and job-creation initiatives, expanding the public sector through non-market and community-led alternatives to the private monopolies that dominate today’s world economy.
He calls for the rapid paring down of extractive energy industries paired to a green industrial transition and environmental commitments centered on creating quality employment that rejects global militarism and the need for carbon energy growth.
Lewis will continue to face resistance from party professionals as well as the provincial NDP establishment that feel his environmental agenda threatens their traditional unionized base in the oil and gas industries.
But his ability to mobilize passionate left-wing voters, the economically marginalized, immigrants, and a generation of young men, all increasingly disenchanted by an overly cautious Carney could lift Lewis, the progressive populist, into the forefront of Canadian politics, beheading the Tea Party-style right-wing populism leveraged by opposition leader Poilievre and his Conservative cohorts.
Putting forth a blueprint for accelerating dramatic change in the United States that would directly threaten the plutocrat-controlled Congress and its hydra-headed executive branch.
Young Americans, like young Canadians, have had their dream futures shattered by wars, squeezed by the affordability crisis, and by being condemned to suffer the consequences of a wounded and warming planet.
That the age of those voting for the NDP leader can be as young as 12- or 14-years-old depending on where they live, gave them an earlier voice in their futures than their American cousins.
Now, what’s going to happen if a major political party on his northern border successfully reduces Trump to inconsequential, a nobody?
Will he, as he should after his magical-thinking war-gaming in Iran, slink away in shame?
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
