Federal NDP candidate Avi Lewis speaks during a campaign stop at Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre in Ottawa, on March 5.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Avi Lewis likes neon-sign politics. That was the point of the Leap Manifesto he co-authored more than a decade ago in a bid to prod the NDP to the left. He didn’t propose steps. He wanted a leap.
“We’re challenging decades of political clichés. So we want to spend like drunken sailors,” he said then, in an interview at the 2016 NDP convention. “We need a shift in our sense of what’s politically possible.”
That’s what Mr. Lewis, 58, still offers New Democrats: an exercise in political imagination.
But in the more literal-minded world of electoral politics, you don’t want the words “drunken sailor” on a campaign sign. And Mr. Lewis is now the perceived front-runner in a race to head the NDP that will culminate in the announcement of a new leader on Sunday.
His leadership platform calls for an end to new oil production and a massive shift toward a state or public economy, with public grocery stores and banks, and a green economy program of $65-billion to $70-billion a year to employ a million people.
At a time when Prime Minister Mark Carney is moving the governing Liberals rightward, you’d think there would be room for the NDP nearer to the centre of Canadian politics. Yet, Mr. Lewis, the scion of an illustrious NDP family, proposes to leap left. The public is anxious, and Mr. Lewis is a disruptor.
The NDP has been through things a bit like this before. It has had a recurring internal debate between activist purists and party-politics pragmatists who want to build for electoral success.
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This time it’s happening at a low point, when the party is down to six seats in the Commons – and widely ignored outside it.
“This is definitely an existential moment for the New Democratic Party,” said former MP Charlie Angus in an interview, who came second in the 2017 leadership race.
How bad is it? A new poll by the Angus Reid Institute found a quarter of the 1,164 recent NDP voters surveyed – those who voted NDP in at least one of the last four elections – agree the party is irrelevant. And 39 per cent think its best days are behind it.
The current leadership race has barely been noticed, it seems, as 44 per cent say they don’t recognize the names of any of the five leadership candidates.
Perhaps if he were leader, Mr. Lewis’s attention-grabbing style and program would get people to pay attention. Or, as some party veterans fear, consign them to the margins and a long period of ghostly irrelevance.
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Other options have been available. Rob Ashton, the bearded, flat-capped national president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, argued the NDP had “lost its way” when it lost its focus on workers. He ran on jobs, fair wages, building affordable homes and even building pipelines – controversially, in the NDP. But his candidacy didn’t take off.
Mr. Lewis’s real competition is Edmonton MP Heather McPherson, but she hasn’t really fought Mr. Lewis on his grand plans and dreams of government groceries. Picking fights on the left is not a way to win today’s NDP.
NDP leadership candidate Heather McPherson.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Instead, she campaigned on her ability to rebuild the party, hold the government to account in the Commons where she already has a seat and – unlike Mr. Lewis, who lost two bids for office – win an election.
Ms. McPherson is making an argument for safe hands and stewardship. Mr. Lewis represents something else, something a part of the NDP has always wanted to be: unabashed leftists, unconstrained by the centrism of Canadian politics.
In the early 1970s, there was the left-wing movement known as the Waffle, which battled with the party establishment – including both Avi Lewis’s father, Stephen Lewis, then-leader of the Ontario NDP, and his grandfather, David Lewis, who won the federal NDP leadership at the 1971 convention where the Waffle was defeated.
After the disappointing 2000 federal election, there was the New Politics Initiative, which wanted to disband the party and create a new thing that would somehow integrate social movements of environmental, anti-globalization and gay-rights activists.
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The Leap Manifesto that Avi Lewis co-wrote with a group including his wife, author Naomi Klein, was another such episode. Its no-more-pipelines call to stop the expansion of fossil-fuel production angered then-Alberta premier Rachel Notley’s NDP government and caught federal leader Thomas Mulcair in the crossfire just before the 2016 convention where he was voted out.
Mr. Lewis’s leadership proposals hark back to that manifesto. It is heavily centred on transitioning away from oil and gas with massive public programs to build infrastructure and promote clean energy, public transit, retrofits and heat pumps for everyone.
Now, he isn’t trying so hard to break with political clichés. He argues his program has broad appeal and sometimes puts it in familiar terms for 2026 Canada, arguing that “Canadians are in the mood for big public projects.”
“It’s about the public leading, as Canada has done before,” Mr. Lewis said in a recent interview. “Like how C.D. Howe led with 18 new Crown corporations at a time of economic emergency and industrial transformation in the Second World War … making armaments, making all kinds of things – and in the postwar boom, building housing.”
Mr. Lewis speaks during the NDP English language leadership debate, in New Westminster, B.C., Feb. 19.ETHAN CAIRNS/The Canadian Press
But his is an economic plan centered on making the state a bigger supplier with a million people on the payroll. It doesn’t say where new customers, or their money, will come from. And how many Canadians are clamouring for Canada Post to open a bank? Or for a government grocery store?
“We can talk about all the big dream items of the idealists, but the realistic thing right now is we need new Democrats in Parliament who can be asking the hard questions and pushing government policy where it needs to go,” Mr. Angus said.
“I think a coherent plan for the NDP is to go back to the building blocks.”
That was the federal NDP’s past route to success. The late Jack Layton was seen as an urban lefty when he became leader, but he tried to bridge the party’s left with a long-term, step-by-step effort to build the party’s support and its seats.
The 2011 Orange Wave that brought the NDP to Official Opposition and 103 seats had been built with a deliberately moderate platform titled “Giving Your Family a Break: Practical First Steps.”
That was the party’s high point. At a low ebb, New Democrats might be more in the mood for a leap than practical steps.