Is Avi Lewis’s NDP doomed? Don’t write the obituary just yet

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Here’s the conventional wisdom: The election of aging nepo-baby Avi Lewis as leader of the federal New Democratic Party is a tipping point that could see a marginal and unpopular party pushed over the edge into non-existence.

Maybe.

But that’s what a lot of people said about the Liberal Party in 2013, when Justin Trudeau became leader.

Before I get into why the mainstream take on the NDP could be wrong, a few words about that conventional wisdom – and the enormous weight of evidence in its favour. The party is in a world of trouble. An enumeration of all of its injuries involves adding pages to the patient’s bedside chart. It’s why so many spin doctors are ready to sign off on political MAID.

NDP Leader Avi Lewis vows to move party to the left and stop oil industry expansion

The NDP got just 6 per cent of the vote in the 2025 election, reducing them to seven seats and costing them official party status. They’ve since lost one member to the Liberals and their only Quebec MP is expected to decamp for provincial politics. Their odds of retaining that riding are zero.

In Saskatchewan – birthplace of the movement – provincial NDP Leader Carla Beck released a letter after Mr. Lewis’s election, calling on him to “publicly reverse your position” on oil, gas and other natural resources. She said that she will not meet him until he does so.

Alberta provincial NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi has similarly quarantined himself from the Lewis bacillus, writing on Sunday that “it is clear that the direction of the federal party under this new leader, someone who openly cheered for the defeat of the Alberta NDP government, is not in the interests of Alberta.”

Mr. Lewis’s history of opposition to fossil fuel development is entirely at odds with these provincial parties — parties that, unlike the federal cousins, have formed governments, and could do so again. The NDP brand hangs like a millstone.

Opinion: The NDP hopes Avi Lewis will set the right kind of fire to Canadian politics

At last year’s press gallery dinner, MP Don Davies joked that “my pronouns are broke and irrelevant.” It got a huge laugh in the room, but a member of the NDP old guard having fun with the sacred practice of pronoun sharing can’t have played well with the party’s activist base. At the leadership convention, organizers tried to prioritize the voices of the racialized and genderized by handing out literal victim cards, which could be played to jump the queue at the microphones.

This turn to identitarian particularism is part of the reason why the Conservatives are increasingly the choice of blue collar voters.

Want more? Mr. Lewis has no seat, no experience in government and little experience in electoral politics – he finished third in 2025 in a riding where the NDP had previously finished second. His French is as weak as non-alcoholic beer. The party is deeply in debt. And he’s almost two decades older than Mr. Trudeau was when he became Liberal leader.

So yeah: The federal NDP is knee-deep in trouble. But don’t write the obituary just yet.

In most other developed countries, politics is becoming increasingly radicalized, with options on the far-left and far-right becoming increasingly popular. Canada is an outlier – for now.

In our last federal election, the middle-of-the-road Liberals devoured the NDP and Green vote, while the Conservatives captured nearly all of those who had once voted for the People’s Party.

In U.S. politics, the Republican Party has moved far to the right, while Democrats who get the most attention are those who have moved aggressively to the left, like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. In Britain, Labour and the Conservatives are each bleeding support to their right and left.

In Canada, however, voters moved to the centre in 2025. That centre might continue to hold for a very long time. Or not.

The NDP’s base was once in rural Western Canada, where it traded voters with the Conservatives. Those voters are mostly long gone.

The NDP is now a party of a certain cohort of urban progressives. Mr. Lewis shares the concerns, solutions and obsessions of this demographic. He touched on them throughout his campaign, and in his victory speech.

He wants to lower the cost of things such as groceries, housing and phone plans through public ownership; he wants a transition off fossil fuels; he wants less spending on national defence. He wants higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy; and his signal foreign policy issue is condemnation of Israel, in part for its behaviour in Gaza and in part for existing.

The best thing that can happen to Mr. Lewis is for Prime Minister Mark Carney to get a comfortable majority through floor-crossings. He is in no hurry for an election, and on Monday, he said he was in no hurry to run in a by-election. There are few ridings where he could even finish second today, let alone win.

If Mr. Carney succeeds, and voters retain their love for the middle of road, Mr. Lewis and the NDP may drift into non-existence. But give it a year or three. There could be more than a few voters who, finding themselves unsatisfied with Liberal driving, are open to a hard-left turn.