Stephen Lewis led the Ontario NDP to Official Opposition status in 1975, by but 1978 he was out of politics and within a few years began his career in diplomacy and advocacy by accepting an offer to become Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations.John McNeill/The Globe and Mail
Stephen Lewis – whose life’s journey took him from growing up in a staunchly social democratic family to the leadership of Ontario’s New Democratic Party, to an outstanding career in diplomacy and international civil service – came to personify social justice and caring in Canada’s political class.
In a series of roles with the United Nations, he devoted the latter part of his career to the people of Africa.
“He helped position Canada as a principled leader in ending apartheid in South Africa and believed that proper health care was key to reducing poverty and growing economies,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a statement after Mr. Lewis’s death.
Mr. Lewis also furiously and despairingly called the world to account for the untold number of young parents, particularly mothers, who died of AIDS-related illnesses, and the orphans they left behind.
Former Ontario NDP leader and social activist Stephen Lewis dies at 88
During his decades-long engagement with Africa, Mr. Lewis was at times driven to despair by the cool responses of bureaucrats, donors and diplomats, and the sheer scope of the crisis.
“The absolute worst part of the job, the part I just can’t handle is the death,” he once said. “The omnipresence of death gets to you. I can’t stand it. And I just don’t know how to break through.”
Mr. Lewis, who battled stomach cancer for eight years, was in palliative care in his final weeks but let his family know he did not want to die before learning whether his son Avi Lewis had been elected the new leader of Canada’s federal NDP. He got his wish – just. The younger Mr. Lewis won on the first ballot at the party’s convention in Winnipeg on Sunday. Father and son had time to speak before the elder Mr. Lewis died on Tuesday morning at 88.
Avi’s election brings the third generation of the family into a leadership role in Canada’s titular social democratic party – or as Stephen described it in his last major political address, in Edmonton in 2016: “We’re a socialist party, for god’s sake.”
Born in Ottawa in 1937, Stephen Henry Lewis was called “Sholem” within his family, Hebrew for “peace,” because his birthday was Nov. 11, Armistice Day.
His grandfather, Maishe Losz, a leader of the Polish Jewish Labour Bund, had immigrated to Canada in 1921 to escape persecution from both the Polish and abutting Russian armies. Shortly afterward, his wife, Rose, and three children, including 11-year-old David, joined him. David could speak no more than a few words of English when he arrived in Halifax with his family but taught himself by using a Yiddish-English dictionary and reading a copy of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop.
Eleven years later, David was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. When he sailed to England to take it up, he was accompanied by Sophie Carson of Montreal, whom he married when they returned to Canada in 1935.
David Lewis, right, was an MP who was once considered Parliament’s finest speaker, but his son Stephen would eventually be considered his superior.John McNeill/The Globe and Mail
David became a labour lawyer and national secretary of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), forerunner of the NDP. He was elected to Parliament in 1962 for the recently formed NDP. He replaced Tommy Douglas as national party leader following the election of 1968.
In his time, David Lewis was considered Parliament’s finest speaker, but his son Stephen would eventually be considered his superior.
Stephen Lewis was at the centre – both as object and subject – of every conversation of which he was part. Known for his warmth, he brought people together in energized groups and gave new dimensions to the word “charismatic.”
In 1957, Stephen distinguished himself as a 19-year-old undergraduate by being chosen to debate then-senator (later U.S. president) John F. Kennedy at University of Toronto’s Hart House.
The Canadian academic Gerald Caplan, his long-time political colleague beginning in their university days, said Mr. Lewis had more influence on him than anyone he ever met.
From left: A 19-year-old Stephen Lewis, U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy and Gordon Coleman at Hart House in Toronto on Nov. 14, 1957.The Globe and Mail
Mr. Lewis was never known not to be immersed in a life full of purpose, however he also failed more than once to complete a university degree; he couldn’t bring himself to write final examinations. He delivered gloomy assessments of himself and what he imagined himself achieving in his life.
Nevertheless, he was elected to represent Scarborough West as a New Democrat MPP in 1963, at age 26. He served as leader of the party from 1970 to 1978.
Mr. Lewis was universally known as a magician of the language. He created an electric environment in the Ontario legislature for serious public-policy debate. Members of other parties would crowd into the chamber to hear him speak. Former federal NDP leader Edward Broadbent said he was probably the greatest inspirational orator of his time.
Stephen Lewis in 1963.Eaton's Portrait Studio
Yet paradoxically, members of his party worried that his effectiveness with language risked scaring voters away because he could succeed in turning issues into contests between good and evil, which made voters uncomfortable if they saw themselves shunted into corners labelled evil by Mr. Lewis’s dazzling rhetoric.
Mr. Lewis also earned the enmity of members of his own party who formed the ginger group known as the Waffle, a radical wing of the party that mirrored the New Left politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s and supported Canadian nationalism and Quebec’s right to self-determination.
Mr. Lewis led the campaign to force the Waffle to disband or be expelled from the provincial wing of the party, not because of what it stood for but because it was behaving like a party within a party. He was never entirely forgiven by the Waffle’s adherents and later experienced anxiety over whether he had gone too far with his anti-Waffle campaign.
On numerous occasions – including once in the middle of an election campaign – he had to be talked out of quitting the leadership, a task usually assigned to Mr. Caplan. Mr. Lewis’s wife, Michele Landsberg, has said he lived with an exaggerated sense of his own futility and looming failure.
Rather surprisingly, he became a friend and confidante of Ontario’s Conservative then-premier William Davis.
Do you have memories of meeting Stephen Lewis? Share your stories
When he was leader of the opposition in the Ontario Legislature Mr. Lewis once said audibly to Mr. Davis, sitting across the aisle: “I like you.”
Mr. Lewis stepped away from provincial politics in 1978 and established himself as a political commentator on radio and television, until he received a job offer that would introduce him to the world stage.
In 1984, Brian Mulroney took office as Conservative prime minister, just before reports began to emerge about a devastating famine in Ethiopia. Mr. Mulroney recalled in an interview in 2021 that he had always admired Mr. Lewis for his unsurpassed eloquence and he was also aware of Mr. Lewis’s interest in foreign affairs. This led Mr. Mulroney to consider him for a key posting.
In fact Mr. Lewis had a long-standing love for Africa that began when he was 22, doing an internship in London for Socialist International, the worldwide organization of democratic socialist parties. Mr. Lewis signed himself up to spend a week at the World Assembly of Youth in Accra, Ghana, and stayed more than a year.
Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney appointed Stephen Lewis ambassador to the United Nations in 1984.Tibor Kolley/The Globe and Mail
Said Mr. Mulroney, “When I became prime minister, I was dissatisfied with some of the suggestions [coming from the Department of Foreign Affairs] as to who would go where [in diplomatic postings] but I had already decided that Nelson Mandela would play an important role in Canadian foreign policy and I wanted somebody in New York who would articulate that concern as strongly as possible, and as colourfully as possible.”
Mr. Mulroney called Mr. Davis to ask his opinion on appointing Mr. Lewis as Canada’s ambassador to the UN.
“He said to me, ‘Brian you’ve just hit a home run with bases loaded.’” Mr. Mulroney recalled. “I think I asked Bill to talk to him about it, and Bill came back with solid enthusiasm and so I called Stephen and that was that.” That’s how politics works.
“I love the guy,” Mr. Mulroney said. “Even some of my old rednecks came to like him. Uniquely talented. Brilliant mind. His contributions to Canada and foreign policy will live on.”
Mr. Mulroney acknowledged that he and Mr. Lewis had policy differences but said that Mr. Lewis went out of his way not to embarrass him.
Lawrence Martin: Stephen Lewis was a man of moral vision
After Mr. Lewis left the ambassador’s job in 1988, however, he told an interviewer that working for the Conservative government had been difficult and declared the government did not intend to carry through on Mr. Mulroney’s promise to impose “total sanctions” against South Africa and to break diplomatic ties if there were not fundamental changes to the system of apartheid.
“It is clear that Canada has washed its hands of the leadership on South Africa,” he said, which fell short of an endorsement of his former employer, although he and Mr. Mulroney still were talking warmly on the phone in the months before the former prime minister’s death in 2024.
In 1992, following violent street disturbances in Toronto by racialized young people protesting against police brutality, Mr. Lewis wrote a Report on Race Relations for Ontario premier Bob Rae that became the first to label injustice in education in the province as anti-Black racism.
Mr. Lewis went on to become deputy executive director of UNICEF (1995 to 1999) and a UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa (2001 to 2006) where, despite his sense of ineffectiveness, he won wide praise for his accomplishments. He also sat on the panel appointed by the Organization of African Unity to investigate the causes of the 1994 Rwandan genocide that resulted in as many as 800,000 deaths.
Stephen Lewis became a leading advocate for Africa in various United Nations posts and other roles spanning decades.
His executive assistant for 21 years, Christina Magill, recalled that Mr. Lewis frequently said, when talking about AIDS in Africa, that his emotional range ran from rage to rage at the world’s failure to adequately address the issue.
“He’s certainly fuelled by anger,” Ms. Magill said, “but I know it’s been the experience of everyone who’s worked with him [that] he’s actually fuelled by love and the rage drives a lot of his work because he’s angered by the injustice.”
Former politician and social activist Stephen Lewis has died at the age of 88. Lewis spent a lifetime fighting for causes close to his heart – and his weapons of choice were words.
The Canadian Press
Mr. Lewis was awarded distinguished professorships at McGill, Ryerson and McMaster universities, was appointed to advisory roles in public health at Columbia University, Harvard University and the University of Toronto. He was named in 2005 to deliver the Massey Lectures on AIDS in Africa, broadcast on CBC Radio and delivered live in five cities across Canada. The lectures were adapted into his book Race Against Time, a bestseller.
Mr. Lewis was co-founder and co-director – with Paula Donovan (he always had senior female aides and associates) – of the advocacy group AIDS-Free World. He was also co-founder – with his daughter Ilana Naomi Landsberg-Lewis – of the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which assists mostly AIDS- and HIV-related grassroots projects in Africa. He holds 42 honorary doctorates but jokingly acknowledged that he could never write the exams to earn a regular degree.
Mr. Lewis leaves his wife, Ms. Landsberg, to whom he proposed in 1963 from a political platform in east-end Toronto; siblings, Michael Lewis, Janet Solberg and Nina Lewis-Libeskind; daughters Ilana Naomi Landsberg-Lewis, a lawyer, and Jennie Leah Lewis, a film agent; son, Avrum (Avi) Lewis, the new leader the federal NDP.
Mr. Lewis’s grandsons are Zev Landsberg Lewis and Yoav Landsberg Lewis, Toma Lewis-Klein and Zimri Lewis.
In a statement released upon his death, his family said, “The world has lost a voice of unmatched eloquence and integrity.”