Guest Opinion: Avi Lewis’s ideas for change terrify the establishment

By Dr. Roberta Lexier on April 4, 2026.

Last Sunday morning, in a windowless hall in downtown Winnipeg, illuminated only by giant screens glowing New Democratic Party orange, Avi Lewis secured a decisive, first-ballot victory to become the new leader of a beleaguered federal party.

Unapologetically democratic socialist, the anti-Zionist Jew and environmental activist, who ran on a bold platform that included a wealth tax, affordable housing, head-to-toe health care, public options for groceries and other necessities received the most ever votes for a leadership candidate, the largest margin of win, and successfully replaced the executive team – the president, vice-president and treasurer – with allies, Niall Ricardo, Libby Davies and Keira Gunn, respectively.

If we listen to commentators like Don Braid at the Calgary Herald, or even Saskatchewan and Alberta NDP leaders Carla Beck and Naheed Nenshi, the outcome is a travesty. The sky is falling. The world is ending.

And they are not entirely wrong.

Not because Lewis now leads an organization whose caucus, jokes former Medicine Hat News reporter Jeremy Appel, could’ve shared a cab to the convention centre. One that doesn’t even hold party status in Parliament. One that sits millions of dollars in debt.

People are struggling. Albertans are struggling.

The gap between the rich and poor is higher than any point since the Second World War. Wages are failing to keep pace with inflation, while technological changes, like automation and AI, threaten job security and contribute to growing unemployment. Affordable housing is increasingly out of reach for many, groceries a luxury. Delayed action on the climate crisis – and an ongoing dependence on oil and gas – undermines long-term economic stability, drains provincial coffers and turns too-short summers into hell-scapes choked in wildfire smoke. Fascism is rising across the globe.

The NDP emerged from eerily similar circumstances; its predecessor, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, formed in 1932 (in Calgary) in response to the Great Depression. Farmers, workers and socialists of various stripes joined forces to challenge an economic and electoral system that, “in an age of plenty … condemns the great mass of the people to poverty and insecurity.”

The 1933 Regina Manifesto called for the replacement of the “capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a social order from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated, in which economic planning will supersede unregulated private enterprise and competition, and in which genuine democratic self-government, based upon economic equality, will be possible.”

And their platform proved quite popular among Canadians. By 1943, the CCF had enough seats to form Official Opposition in Ontario and, the following year, provincial government in Saskatchewan.

Fearing “the threat on the left,” successive Liberal governments adopted policies that formed the backbone of the postwar welfare state: Unemployment Insurance (now Employment Insurance), family allowances, hospitalization insurance and, later, Medicare and the Canadian Pension Plan. More recently, Pharmacare and dental care.

The results were undeniable: the country entered a sustained period of prosperity, economic inequality decreased and standards of living rose for (almost) everyone.

Success was a double-edged sword though. By the mid-1950s, the CCF entered a period of significant decline, its critiques of capitalism less relevant to an increasingly comfortable electorate. In 1961, it joined with the newly-formed Canadian Labour Congress to create the New Democratic Party that sought reform rather than radical transformation.

For the past half-century, Canadians have been told there is no alternative. We cannot properly tax or regulate corporations or the wealthy: they will move elsewhere. Drastically diminished government revenues justify the dismantling of the social safety net. Profits are more important than the people. And the planet.

But there are options. And a true left-wing electoral party can remind us there are different ways to organize our society. That governments can, and must, serve the masses, not a small, privileged elite.

Already, on his first day as leader, Lewis forced a shift in the national conversation, challenging existing assumptions about Canada Post as a profit-driven corporation rather than a necessary public service, that anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic and not simply critiquing an imperialistic strain of Judaism (and Christianity), and that economic equality is central to a functioning democracy.

There is significant work to be done. Lewis must be held accountable by the thousands who voted for his platform and he cannot achieve its outcomes on his own. But he is presenting an alternative, and the status quo is not happy.

Perhaps the extreme response from the establishment, including leaders in Alberta and Saskatchewan, merely demonstrates that the federal NDP, for the first time in a long time, is on the right track. That, like its CCF predecessors, it can contribute to change that truly benefits the majority of Canadians.

It’s happened before.

Dr. Roberta Lexier is a professor at Mount Royal University in the departments of general education and humanities