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avi lewis
Avi Lewis Models How to Be a Climate Champion Despite Opposition
His forthright approach on a difficult issue is likely to appeal to voters.
Apr 01, 2026
Well, as honeymoons go, that was brief.
Avi Lewis may well have set a record for honeymoon brevity in Canadian politics. He wasn’t even done accepting the great prize of winning the leadership of the federal New Democratic Party (NDP) last Sunday before two key figures in his own party denounced him over his resolve to move the country beyond fossil fuels.
Lewis may also have set something of a record for sheer cheerfulness in the face of such speedy backstabbing.
In response to Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi’s attack, Lewis didn’t miss a beat. Even as reporters pressed him for some hot words, Lewis remained buoyant and smiling as he insisted these disputes are necessary and inevitable. He even went on to voice strong support for Nenshi, maintaining that what really matters is Nenshi defeating Danielle Smith to become Alberta premier.
But while the issue is tough, the way forward is clear. Science doesn’t give us a lot of wiggle room; the clock is running out on the world’s remaining chances of preventing carbon emissions from reaching catastrophic levels.
Talk about turning the other cheek; that was a class act. It suggests that Lewis may have a shot at knitting the party together, despite this rather troubled start.
Of course, knitting the party together won’t be easy. There’s a serious divide in the NDP over whether fossil fuels should be kept in the ground, for the sake of saving the planet.
Let’s face it—this is a tricky issue for the NDP.
On one hand, climate action is a winning issue for the party; most progressive voters care about climate, and Prime Minister Mark Carney has opened up lots of territory on his left flank by abandoning any plausible claim to being a climate champion with his willingness to embrace Big Oil.
On the other hand, the fossil fuel industry is powerful and employs Canadians, particularly in Alberta and Saskatchewan—the two provinces where NDP leaders are hostile to Lewis.
But while the issue is tough, the way forward is clear. Science doesn’t give us a lot of wiggle room; the clock is running out on the world’s remaining chances of preventing carbon emissions from reaching catastrophic levels.
Furthermore, the world has already started transitioning to renewable energy. Not only are renewables increasingly affordable—battery costs have declined by 99% over the last three decades—but rebuilding our economy around them would be a huge job creator.
In fact, fossil fuel employment is on the decline, as the industry becomes less labor-intensive. Over the past decade, fossil fuel employment in Canada has already shrunk by 38,000 jobs, even as oil and gas production has risen significantly, notes economist Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work.
So Lewis is doing the right thing—not only in championing climate action, but in coming out and stating his position clearly, despite the political heat he’s taking for it inside his own party. This forthright approach on a difficult issue is likely to appeal to voters.
In addition to the knives wielded inside the party, Lewis can expect scorn from mainstream commentators, who tend to dismiss him as a left-wing extremist.
But are his positions too extreme for the electorate, or just too extreme for mainstream commentators?
Lewis advocates publicly-owned grocery stores and banks—ideas outside the political mainstream. But, given the way grocery and bank monopolies are squeezing customers these days, is it far-fetched to imagine voters might support public alternatives?
Interestingly, Toronto City Council voted last week to establish a pilot project for public grocery stores. And public banking through the post office, which existed in Canada for decades, could be a welcome alternative for low-income customers stung by payday loan operators, as well as for residents in rural areas, where banks are scarce.
Lewis also proposes a wealth tax on the very rich—again, an idea ridiculed by many mainstream commentators. But polls show it has wide popular support.
Perhaps these sorts of left-wing populist ideas have had trouble succeeding in Canadian politics because they’ve lacked a passionate and articulate advocate.
That may have just changed.
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Progressive Champion Avi Lewis Wins Leadership Race for Canada’s NDP, Vowing Left Party Will Come ‘Roaring Back’
"The NDP will start winning again because we will become that beacon to the 99%," Lewis said.
Mar 30, 2026
Progressive activist Avi Lewis is pledging to bring Canada's New Democratic Party "out of the wilderness" after being decisively elected as its new leader on Sunday on the back of an ambitious, affordability-focused agenda aimed at winning back working-class voters.
Lewis, the grandson of one of the NDP's cofounders, cruised to a resounding victory, earning 56% of the vote to take over leadership of the long-ailing left-wing party, which has bled members in recent years to both Prime Minister Mark Carney's Liberals and Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives.
He was introduced at Sunday's Winnipeg convention by his wife, the acclaimed author and activist Naomi Klein, who said her husband's victory was an invitation for Canadians to “dream big once again" and renew the fight against corporate greed at a time when more than half of the population says they struggle to afford basic necessities.
Lewis has proposed a sweeping agenda of “public options” aimed at combating Canada’s affordability crisis, including publicly owned grocery stores and banks to compete with price-gouging corporate monopolies.
A scion of the party that helped to build Canada’s universal healthcare system—which covers hospital and physician care—he’s called for it to be expanded into a “head-to-toe” care system that guarantees dental, drugs, vision, hearing, and mental health services for all Canadians.
In order to pay for these programs and others—including public housing, green energy investment, and subsidized phone and internet plans—Lewis has campaigned to pass a wealth tax on the richest 1% of Canadians, who own nearly $1.25 trillion, almost as much as the bottom 80% of Canadians, according to a recent report by Oxfam Canada.
"This country is awash in wealth. We can have nice things," Lewis asserted to a raucous crowd during his acceptance speech. "Banks made $70 billion in profits last year alone. Oil companies are expecting a new windfall in the tens of billions. Grocery baron Galen Weston alone is worth $20 billion."
During his campaign, Lewis railed against tax cuts for wealthy Canadians passed by the Liberal government, which are projected to cost the government nearly $76 billion over five years and slash an estimated 57,000 public-sector jobs by 2028.
"It is time, far past time, to properly tax the billionaires and corporations that have been riding a tidal wave of profit," Lewis said.
While he acknowledged that Carney is still largely popular in Canada, in large part due to his fiery denunciations of US President Donald Trump's tariff war and threats to annex Canada, Lewis argued that the prime minister's revulsion toward Trumpism is only skin-deep.
"I think when you connect the dots, his moves do not add up to the vision that Canadians truly want and deserve in this perilous moment," he said. "Half a trillion dollars in a decade for weapons to make Canada a major arms exporter in a war-torn world. Slashing our cherished public services, sweeping aside indigenous rights... No regulations on AI and pipelines."
"In the last federal election, Canadians voted to say no to Trump and Trumpism," Lewis said. "What they're getting instead is our government following the US into a future of wars, fossil fuels, austerity, and job-killing generative AI."
Lewis will face a difficult task ahead in rebuilding the NDP from a disastrous loss of support under its previous leader, Jagmeet Singh, who stepped down from his post after the party suffered the worst defeat in its history during last April’s elections, dropping to just seven seats in Parliament—not even enough to be considered a “recognized” party.
The role of NDP leader is the highest office Lewis has held in his life, having run two failed campaigns for parliament in his native Vancouver in 2021 and 2025.
Though NDP currently sits at a distant third, with only about 7% support according to an Abacus poll from March, other polls show that their positions, including a wealth tax and expanding federal health coverage, are popular with the vast majority of voters across party lines.
Other polls show that Canadians, especially those with low incomes, increasingly view affordability and inequality as pressing issues, especially as Trump's war against Iran has caused global energy shortages and price hikes.
"The NDP is coming back because we know that a thriving world is possible, and we know who is standing in our way, and there are way more of us than there are of them," Lewis said. "The NDP will start winning again because we will become that beacon to the 99%."
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NDP Candidate Avi Lewis Calls for 'Public Options' to Fight High Costs of Groceries, Housing, and Telecoms in Canada
“When people are being gouged at the checkout aisle, on their phone bills, and in their rents, it’s clear that the market is failing,” Lewis said.
Nov 24, 2025
As Avi Lewis moves forward with his bid to become the next leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, the progressive activist, filmmaker, and journalist, announced his first major policy proposal on Monday: an array of "public options" for groceries, housing, phone bills, and other necessities aimed at combating Canada's cost-of-living crisis.
After two failed parliamentary bids in 2021 and 2025, the Vancouver-based Lewis in September launched his bid to take Canada's leftmost party in a more economically populist direction following a series of defeats under its long-serving, Jagmeet Singh.
He hopes his laser focus on corporate greed, which he says is driving Canada's cost-of-living crisis, will help set him apart from other front-runners, including Edmonton Member of Parliament Heather McPherson and British Columbia union leader Rob Ashton.
“It’s a moral outrage that so many people in Canada can’t afford the basics of a dignified life at a time when corporate profits are only skyrocketing,” Lewis said as he unveiled an array of new proposals Monday. “When people are being gouged at the checkout aisle, on their phone bills, and in their rents, it’s clear that the market is failing.”
Lewis called for the creation of a public not-for-profit grocery store chain that would operate coast to coast to combat the growing crisis of food insecurity.
According to data published earlier this year by the Canadian Income Survey, approximately 10 million Canadians—over 25%—lived in food-insecure households in 2024, nearly doubling since 2021 amid skyrocketing food prices.
Lewis described it as a "market failure" that so many Canadians could struggle to pay for food while Galen Weston, the owner of Canada's largest grocery chain, Loblaw, has a net worth of over $18 billion.
Lewis called for the government to create "a low-cost alternative to the big grocery chains, using a high-volume, warehouse-style model supported by local and regional food hubs." He likened the proposal to Mexico's chain of state-owned grocery stores and the government-run commissaries that provide affordable food to US servicemembers and their families, both of which cost less on average than shopping at major grocery chains.
"Think Costco—but run as a public service," Lewis explained in a policy document.
Lewis proposed a similar solution for the cost of cell phone and internet service, which are higher in Canada than in other peer countries.
Attributing this to "an oligopoly of telecom providers that dominate cellphone and internet services in Canada and gobble up smaller competitors," he proposed that the nation create a network of public telecom providers modeled after SaskTel. This publicly owned company serves the province of Saskatchewan and has led to "substantially lower” prices for customers than in other parts of Canada, according to the nation's Competition Bureau.
To combat the spiking cost of rent and a growing homelessness crisis, Lewis also pledged that his NDP would once again prioritize the construction of public housing, which Canada built prolifically until the early 1990s.
He pledged that under his leadership, Canada would establish a public builder to create a million new units of social, co-op, non-profit, and supportive homes within five years.
Lewis also championed the return of nationwide postal banking as an antidote to the predatory fees and interest rates of Canada's financial institutions.
He plans to leverage the nation's national postal service, which is already the only option for financial services in many remote parts of the country, as a competitive alternative to Canada's six largest banks, which brought in more than $50 billion in profits last year, and to predatory payday loan and check-cashing companies.
Finally, he proposed the reestablishment of Canada's government-owned nonprofit pharmaceutical company, Connaught Labs, which created and cheaply mass-produced life-saving vaccines and other medications like insulin for free public distribution. The company was privatized in the 1980s under former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
"During the Covid pandemic, for-profit pharmaceutical companies made billions while countries competed with one another for vaccine supplies instead of distributing them globally to stop the virus's spread across borders," Lewis said.
He said that his new version of Connaught would invest in the public development of innovative pharmaceuticals, such as mRNA vaccines and cancer immunotherapies, and share that technology with low-income countries.
"It's time to take the power back from the price-fixing corporate cartels that have a stranglehold on our economy and put it in the hands of the people," Lewis said. "It's time to build a new generation of public options to reduce costs and raise our quality of life."
Lewis described his "next generation" of public options as following in the footsteps of those pursued by NDP-led provincial governments.
"Whether it's public auto insurance in Manitoba, the agricultural land reserve to protect food security in British Columbia, a public telecom provider in Saskatchewan, or, of course, Medicare, our party has created public institutions that continue to make people's lives better and more affordable decades after their creation."
"The cost of living crisis we face today demands bold solutions," he added. "That means expanding public ownership to lower bills and improve services while creating good union jobs in the process."
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