Former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis speaks during the 2016 NDP Federal Convention in Edmonton, April 9, 2016.CODIE MCLACHLAN/The Canadian Press
In all the reflections pouring in at the passing of Stephen Lewis, you’ll be hard-pressed to find – notwithstanding his left-side politics, with which many differed – a negative word.
It is testimony to his stature as a humanitarian giant. On the global stage, Canada never produced a more eloquent standard-bearer for social justice than Mr. Lewis.
I first had the pleasure of seeing him in 1976 when he was leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party. Mr. Lewis was a symphonic force. As he spoke he had a unique mannerism. He’d hold his chin a bit to the side and upward, as if drawing inspiration from above.
He was a cut above. His future in politics, we thought, was limitless. But his party suffered a painful setback in the 1977 provincial election, and he resigned the next year.
He was sought after and likely could have succeeded Ed Broadbent to become federal leader in 1989. But Mr. Lewis resisted those calls, because as magnificent as he was in English, he was hopeless in French. How many potentially exceptional leaders have been lost because of that tall-order deficiency?
Human rights advocate Stephen Lewis fought to alleviate suffering in Africa
In Mr. Lewis’s case, it was okay though, because while his party never got his leadership, the world did. It was Tory Brian Mulroney of all people who set the social democrat on the global path. After his election in 1984, Mr. Mulroney was being trashed in the media for awarding his close Conservative friends with patronage appointments. What better way to counter it than by appointing a New Democrat as United Nations ambassador.
It was an inspired choice. Mr. Lewis became a shaper of United Nations policy on Africa, the land he had fallen in love with when, after dropping out of law school twice, he journeyed there to teach English. He became the special envoy on HIV/AIDS for that continent, a galvanizing force in drawing attention to that calamity. For the genocide in Rwanda, he had sounded the alarms. No one spoke with greater moral clarity on the dispossessed, and in the years that followed on issues like gender equality, income inequality and environmental degradation.
He’d honed his oratorical skills at the University of Toronto debating club where, in 1957, he clashed with a visiting U.S. senator by the name of John F. Kennedy.
Mr. Lewis had a sonorous preacher’s cadence, but it was more than the delivery that set him apart. It was the richness of his vocabulary, his ability to find words so different from the cant and clichés of most politicians, words which flowed with harmony and emotive force. By comparison, John Diefenbaker was a bulging-eyed, spellbinding orator, but once transcribed, his words hardly made sense.
One example of the Lewis word power was a Massey Lecture speech castigating NGOs and others for turning their backs on Africa at the G8 summit in 2005 in Scotland. They had been completely co-opted by British leader Tony Blair, Mr. Lewis said. They engaged in “adoring complicity.” They found themselves “basking in the incestuous aura of power.” Most of the players knew they’d been had, he continued, “but there was a willful contagion of laryngitis…They could barely summon a twitch of indignation, let alone a spasm of outrage.”
Some criticism would come Mr. Lewis’s way. Where was his criticism of the corrupt and woefully malfunctioning African governments? But his social activism was unwavering. “You grit your teeth and you keep fighting,” he said. He contracted abdominal cancer in 2018 and he did that very thing and hung on long enough, just barely long enough, to see his son Avi win the federal NDP leadership prize.
Do you have memories of meeting Stephen Lewis? Share your stories
The son will fight for the same social justice goals as his father and grandfather, former party leader David Lewis. At the leadership convention, Avi noted that Stephen Lewis was, at age 88, “more passionate about the promise of democratic socialism than he has ever been in his life.”
But “he told me something kind of heartbreaking that David, his father, said to him once. David said, ‘Son, not in my lifetime, but maybe in yours.’ And recently, my dad told me the same thing: ‘Not in my lifetime, maybe in yours.’”
Avi Lewis hopes he will not have to give the same message to his kid. Though he is a strong public speaker, he doesn’t have the podium power his dad had. It’s hardly a slight, given Stephen Lewis’s standing.
What a human rights crusader he was. They come into our midst so rarely, these men of moral vision. The country needs to cherish his memory and take strength from his indelible footprint.