Front Burner - Avi Lewis’ vision for the NDP

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

Nearly a year after the federal NDP’s most devastating election result in history, the party declared Avi Lewis – who ran on a campaign of democratic socialism – its new leader.It was a decisive win – Lewis won over half of the 70,930 eligible votes cast. The turnout was high – at about 70 percent of membership.Avi Lewis talks to host Jayme Poisson about his vision for the federal NDP’s future, the challenges ahead for the party, and what pressures he plans to put on Prime Minister Carney’s Liberal government.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Tayari Jones used to call herself a committed contemporary novelist with no time for historical fiction. But then two young women from the 1950s appeared in her mind, and she had no choice but to write a historical novel that ended up on Oprah's list. She told me all about it on the podcast, Bookends. I'm not the kind of writer. I'm not one of those people's like, oh, I'm just a vessel. The story came through me. I'm not that person.

And now look at me, I'm over here being that person. Check out that conversation on bookends with me, Matea Roach, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. We are building a new foundation for our party, and we are ready to come roaring back on the Canadian political stage. Hey, everybody, it's Jamie. Nearly a year after the NDP's most devastating election result in history,

the party declared Avi Lewis, who ran on a campaign of Democratic Socialism, its new leader. After seven months of campaigning across this country and speaking to thousands upon thousands of Canadians, here's one thing I know for sure and I want to say it out loud. Canada, mark your calendar. The NDP comeback starts now. It was a decisive win. Lewis won over half of the 70,000 eligible votes cast. The turnout was high at about 70% of membership. Today, Avi Lewis is here. We'll talk about his vision for the federal NDP's future, the challenges ahead for the party, and what pressures he plans to put on Carney's liberal government. Mr. Lewis, how are you?

How are you doing? Don't ever Mr. Lewis, me if you don't mind. Okay. Avi, congratulations on your win. Thank you, Jamie. What was it about your message that you think appealed to the party? Well, I think we were really straightforward with our message from the very beginning of the campaign, which isn't always the case. in politics. Like we made a decision, and I mean, straightforward in the sense that with our policies, with our solutions, like with our offer, I think we made a kind of maybe an unconventional decision before the campaign launched about how we wanted to come out, which is, you know,

the normal thing is to do a sort of personal branding exercise to tell the story of who you are and where you come from. And we were just like, no, no, let's just launch with the solutions. There's so many crises going on. Let's come out with the proposals. And we just, These days, every politician claims to be shocked by the costs. What they don't talk about is why. We dropped a video and we talked from day one about a public option for groceries and a Green New Deal, getting off fossil fuels and creating, you know, hundreds of... We do the policy bit, you know, later, taxing wealth to pay for it,

actually creating good family-supporting industrial, a new industrial economy of jobs for things that lower people's cost of living and emissions at the same time. I mean, like, it was a very clear offer. We stuck with it all the way through. And I think that really galvanized our base and brought in new people at the same time. Because in part, I think it was the ambition of our proposals, suits, seems to suit the moment of the depth of the crises that people are living through. I think it was I know it was appreciated because people came to us at these events that just were getting bigger and bigger as the momentum increased, saying, I never got involved in politics because it just didn't seem to be for me, but this thing that you're talking about, like healthcare, eyes, teeth, mental health,

medicine, all part of your health, should all be part of our universal public health care system. Fight for the whole thing, not in like a little incremental piece. And people really got excited by that. It doesn't mean we're going to win it tomorrow. But we set a horizon of what we're a kind of world and life we're fighting for. Well, just on that point about how broad the appeal is for some of the policies that you're putting forward, I was looking at abacus data and it did some polling on how Canadian see the NDP, and just over half of Canadian say the NDP is not relevant in Canadian politics today.

David Coletto, who's the CEO of that company and his analysis about those findings, wrote, quote, when half the country does not see a party as playing a meaningful role, it becomes very difficult to grow. And I'm just curious to hear what you make of that and what you think it is going to take for the NDP to grow again. Yeah, I mean, I think that poll accurately reflects last election and the time since when we've been a party with no status, with half a dozen people in the House of Commons, with an interim leader who I think did a fantastic job trying to punch through, but in a world where every day brought another world-changing event. Like, you know, I think people, the world is cartoonishly awful these days. And every, you wake up in the morning and you

reach for your device and you think, should I, though, do I want to know what fresh horrors await us today? And in that kind of world that we've been living in, yeah, the NDP has not been on people's radar. So, but polls tell you where things are at in a moment or where things have been. and I think there's been something interesting about this campaign where something is happening under the skin of Canadian politics, where we are actually seeing people really respond to these specific proposals, particularly about the cost of living emergency. And we're attracting conservatives and liberals and people who have not been involved in politics before, and people who have drifted away from the NDP for different reasons, for decades, who are coming home because they sense the excitement. that's not registering on the polling level yet.

It's not registering in the national conversation where I'm still answering all these questions about the party on life support and stuff like that, which is fine, legit, right? But I don't think that's where we're going to be in six months in a year and more. Well, let me put something that former NDP leader, Tom Mulcair said to you. I know that you two are not completely aligned on a lot of things.

We're not best buds, but I do respect the guy. He was a federal leader of my party, and then that gets respect. Okay, so here's the quote about your vision for the party. Is this actually going to be a party that can speak to a broad base of Canadian voters, or is it going to be a boutique party that caters to the wishes and desires of a very small group of people in the large city? What's your response to that? Says a guy who squeaked through on the fourth ballot to a guy who won the biggest majority in NDP leadership history in the one-member one-vote era, where we raised money in 338 of 343 ridings,

where we signed up tens of thousands of new members in every single province and territory. I mean, I'm sorry. I'm happy to debate with Toml-Kare about anything. That's a bad faith critique that doesn't merit like a really serious response. We have demonstrated national scope and scale in this campaign. We have a massive mandate from the NDP base

and the NDP base all around the country. The last rally we had in Montreal had 500 people there. There was comedy, stand-up comedy, not unintentional comedy. There was music. People were waving their arms back and forth and chanting. And it was the biggest NEP rally in Quebec, probably in a decade. And so we have potential to grow big in all parts of the country, and we are a boutique nothing. I want to come at some of these policy proposals that you're making from.

from like a good faith position. So let's talk about the taxes, right? So what makes you think that you can convince enough people in this country to support wealth taxes? At this moment, like the liberals just had to back off the capital gains tax during the campaign, which was broad in, I think, like a pretty similar spirit that you're talking about. Well, the polling on wealth taxes from a couple years ago is the high 80 percentages of Canadians who support a a tax on extreme wealth. And a lot of that stuff was done before the, I mean,

because inequality is escalating every single year. And I think it is a super majority of Canadians that support taxing wealth. I think people are scandalized that six big banks made $70 billion in one year last year, while they're closing branches, while they're not serving remote communities, that Gail and Weston is worth $20 billion personally.

And loblas and shoppers, that whole conglomerate makes billions and billions and billions of profits every year, sometimes they're in a quarter. And just these latest figures that came out that a majority of Canadians have scaled back meal sizes or skipped meals or reduced caloric intake because food is too expensive. There's this grinding unfairness when we see the massive accumulation of wealth in our society and power in that wealth to push back on governments when governments propose modest tax on wealth or on high incomes.

I think it's a very popular position, and we're going to test it. Do you think that you can meet all these ambitious goals you have without raising taxes on the middle class, or is that part of the plan as well? Well, let's ask Mark Carney how he's going to fund half a trillion dollars of military investments in the next decade, because he announced a defense industrial strategy earlier this month. And I haven't heard a single reporter ask him how he's going to pay for it. There's a massive double standard between these things. And we believe that this is a country awash and wealth. And we are in a moment where Canadians are into nation-building projects

where we understand we have to do big things to Trump-proof our economy to return some economic independence to Canada. And there are massive projects in every province and territory that are being fast-tracked with no environmental regulation or indigenous consultation in the fast-tracking process or vastly reduced because people are ready to do big things. So look, we have a proposal. Let me go into a tiny bit of detail here, Jamie, on a public option for groceries. And we worked with a series of food experts, half of whom are Canadian, a couple of whom worked with Soron Mamdani in New York on his public option for groceries

proposal. They like ours way more because it's national and scope and scale. And having national procurement, large-scale wholesale procurement, is key to cutting the price of groceries. We have a proposal for 50, we call it like Costco plus local. So warehouse size stores, not 25,000 products, not 170 flavors of salad dressing, but 1,500 to 20 to 2,000 skews or individual products in a store, six or seven regional distribution hubs across the country. The federal government subsidizes the gross margin of the store. which means the operation costs, the land, the buildings, the electricity, the refrigeration, and the unionized labor. And I would love to see it be done by the United Food and Commercial Workers, who are the major union for grocery store workers.

And this model would slash grocery prices in our estimation by 30 to 45%. We've costed it. It would cost about $290 million to launch, about $300 million a year to run. $300 million a year. Yeah, who pays for that. From the federal government, $300 million a year, one half of one percent of our current defense budget versus half a trillion dollars of proposed new military spending

in the prime minister's defense industrial strategy. Who is getting asked questions about whether or not we can afford it? Of course we can afford it. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story.

What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's do the defense budget, right? You have accused Carney of wanting to turn Canada into a quote, militarized petro state, a junior arms dealer on the world state. And just if you could put the petro state aside for a moment because I want to come back to it. Let's do the militarized junior arms deal.

That might have been a rhetorical, a moment of rhetorical flourish. That was a little overdone now that I, hear it back from you. But yes, it is part of that strategy to increase arms exports by 50%. But look, I'm just thinking about the geopolitical moment that we're in and just how much anxiety is around that. And given the annexation threats that we saw Trump make against Greenland and also against Canada against us and the increasing presence of Russia and China in the Arctic, why do you not think that those forces demand greater deterrence and demand greater investment in our Yeah. I'm not a kumbaya singing peace, Nick. I believe that Canada needs a military, a modern military, which is well equipped. On the other hand, just this year, we have poured tens of billions of dollars willy-nilly into the defense budget just to meet an arbitrary target that we did not meet for many, many, many years and still were able to be members of NATO. And suddenly, Donald Trump started calling people to the carpet. And Carney arrives. And suddenly, and suddenly, Donald Trump started calling people to the carpet. And Carney arrives. And suddenly, and suddenly,

suddenly we are making the 2%, with three quarters of our defense spending, Jamie, going directly to the United States right now in the short term. Now, the prime minister, to be fair, has plans to try to change that. But in the sudden injection of tens of billions of dollars into defense spending to meet an arbitrary target demanded by Donald Trump, we are now giving three quarters of that money directly to the arms companies of the country that is threatening to annex us. So yes, Canadians are scared, we are under threat, and we need a more secure country. pouring military dollars into the country that is threatening us is not going to do it.

We need a plan and a vision of how to make Canada safer. And the reality is that we either spend 2% or 5% or 50% of our entire economy on weapons, if the United States declares war on Canada, our best case scenario is a Russia-Ukraine grinding battle, which nobody wants to, and I mean, I don't think that's going to happen. but like we have the longest undefended border on earth. And we have to be, we have to be serious with Canadians about where this money is going, what it's paying for, and how it makes us safer.

And I don't see even a value proposition offered just an arbitrary target and a fountain of public dollars in the immediate short term and going forward into the next decade without a clear map or a drawing or a sketch even of what it's supposed to get. get us, that's going to make us so much safer. Mm-hmm. I mean, just what about the Arctic in particular, you know, being able to mount some kind of deterrence up there? I think that's a stronger threat. I think that's a stronger scenario, for sure. And it's a specific place. Because the climate is breaking down and unraveling, the Arctic is becoming much more seetworthy for vessels. And so that is

a crowded zone. And I think there's a better case for that. But that's not the exclusive focus. of these truckloads of money that are being unloaded at military companies. You campaign on stopping new fossil fuel development. And in 2016, of course, you co-wrote and pushed for the LEAP manifesto, this roadmap to move Canada economy away from fossil fuels. And so we have now seen NDP opposition leaders in both Alberta and Saskatchewan disagree with you about resource development. Alberta NDP leader Nihid Nenshi said,

essentially the direction that you're taking the party in is not in the interest of Alberta. And quote, we believe in Alberta and we believe in Canadian energy and the good jobs it creates. Saskatchewan NDP leader Carla Beck called your position on oil and gas development, quote, ideological and unrealistic. She says that it puts over $13 billion in economic activity annually

at risk in her province. And just how do you plan to deal with these fault lines in the party? Well, first of all, we've been reaching out to Carla for months. And Carla decided to send a public letter saying that she wouldn't meet with us until we reversed our position, which I don't think is a reasonable request. I think, you know, I was elected with a huge mandate among the NDP federal membership for a very clear policy offer that we repeated from day one until the final day of the campaign. and I have an obligation to be consistent to the members and to my, you know, to my own politics, but it's not just mine is the point. It doesn't, to say we must stop increasing fossil fuel production is what we've been saying for a decade. Nobody has ever said, shut it all down tomorrow.

That's just a mischaracterization, an industrial scale mischaracterization of the proposal, which is generated and pushed by the fossil fuel industry in order to kick the can down the road endlessly to stop the possibility of even starting a transition. Now, in that last decade, since we started really leading into that idea of no further expansion, we don't have to endlessly expand fossil fuels. If you look at the chart of Canada's emissions versus all the other G7 countries and all the European countries, I mean, everybody's line has gone down, down, down, way below 1990. levels and we keep going up, up, up, up. We're a climate pariah. Forget climate policy for a second.

In the last decade, the oil and gas industry has figured out how to make a barrel of oil with 45% fewer workers. While they've made tens of billions of dollars, they have been throwing workers under the bus. We owe fossil fuel workers a debt of thanks for keeping the lights on in our country for more than a century. But it is not doing them any favors to deny the fact that we need to make a transition. We are being left behind in Canada. We have to prioritize as taking care of those workers. And the NDP is the only party you can trust to take care of workers first, which is why I've been saying throughout this entire campaign, and now as leader, I am continuing to say, we need to create a generation of family supporting good unionized jobs that fossil fuel workers can see in their communities

before we ask anyone to transition. You cannot transition into a slogan. You can't feed your family on the promise of some future job. So when we talk about power lines, not pipelines, the generational investment in a 21st century electrical grid, we're talking about tens of thousands of unionized jobs in every part of this vast land using Canadian steel, which we can't sell to the United States, laying the spine for a renewable energy revolution. But in the meantime, building the infrastructure that will create all those good jobs, they can happen quickly, and fossil fuel workers can see alternatives and be supported to transition into those jobs. and nobody's talking about killing the jobs tomorrow.

But this argument just means that we delay and delay starting the transition. In the UK this week, the government announced that every new home build has to be accompanied by a heat pump and solar panels because the price of oil is exploding again. It's going to drive another price shock, which is going to drive another inflation crisis. Go and fill up your car. Gas is way over two bucks a liter. This is not a good boom and bust us roller coaster that we're on, and our economy needs to get off of it. On the expansion point, like on the pro-expansion argument, I just wonder how you would respond to the argument that this is to create jobs, but also to make us less reliant on other countries in the face of all this global instability and threats to our sovereignty.

And, you know, we're seeing right now the consequences of shocks to the global oil market in the Middle East. And I've seen many people argue that Canada should expand because even with the transition to renewables or world will still need oil for some time. And we are this reliable, democratically produced supply that are us. Okay. So a couple different, yeah, a couple of different arguments in there. One of as a recycled as a relevant talking point about ethical oil from a decade ago from the Harper era, which I'm not going to dignify that with a detailed response. And the other is about energy independence, which is we export all our fossil fuels. And the export market is drying up.

And there's a glut of oil supply before the Strait of Hormuz crisis. China is revolutionizing the energy economy of the planet by, in a short 18 to 24 months, collapsing the price of battery storage, exporting renewable energy inputs and technology to every country on Earth, except for the ones in North America that are doubling down on fossil fuels. And countries are moving off oil and gas as fast as they can, especially given this current war. And in Australia, they've installed so much solar that there's three free hours of electricity in the middle of every day. People are going home from work to do their laundry in the middle of the day. In Pakistan, in one year, the year before last, people installed how.

Half of the country's entire electricity needs, not the government, individual people with balcony solar panels that they bought on Alibaba and TikTok and YouTube videos to install them. Half the country's electricity needs in a single year with balcony solar. The world is changing. And Canada doesn't need to go backwards. We need to go forwards, taking care of workers first and foremost. But there is a path forward. It's a safer, more secure path. People don't go to war over the sun and sunlight.

People don't bomb factories full of wind. And if we want energy independence, we can use an energy system which the inputs are free forever. And there's no straight where all of the renewable energy gets clogged up. That's energy independence. That's a stable and safe, secure supply. And Canadians can breathe easier when we're not dependent on exporting this resource that the world is trying to move away from. You mentioned LNG. BC NDP Premier David E.B.

has been a real proponent of LNG in the province. And so do you see a fault line with the BC Premier as well here? I don't see these as fault lines. I see these as part of a long tradition of democratic debate in the NDP, of provinces that have very specific political contexts. The NDP is in a two-party system from everywhere west of Ontario in the Prairie provinces. You have the extreme right. You have no provincial liberal party, and you have the NDP.

They have a different voting coalition. They have different regional economies, fossil fuel producing provinces. They have very different realities. The federal NDP needs to make a national offer to all Canadians that make sense. And there have been these fault lines, well, I don't consider the fault lines. There have been these discussions within the NDP for a really long. time. Wob Canoe, I'm here in Manitoba in Winnipeg for the convention, and I had a very warm hour with Wob Canoe in his office at the legislature yesterday. And Wob said yesterday, look, we don't

have to agree on every single thing in order to do big things together. So he said with the Manitoba NDP and the federal NDP, let's do big things on grocery prices. Let's do big things on housing and health care, on the classic NDP priorities. And let's do them together. And we can work out are differences around specific issues, preferably behind closed doors, and stay out of each other's way in the media. But it doesn't have to be a huge rupture. And I think you're going to see Jamie, to be honest, I think we're the provincial sections and the federal party at this moment, a big change for everybody. We're kind of settling into our seats in the movie theater. We're shuffling around. People are putting their bags down. We're going to get ready for the show

and everyone's going to settle in, I believe. I believe these things are done through discussion, and my hand is outstretched to Carla Beck and Nahed-Nanji. I have said, and we'll say over and over again, I cannot wait for Carla back to be the Premier Saskatchewan. It is so important that we bring down the Scott Moe government. And the same with Daniel Smith in Alberta. I think the two most right-wing and regressive provinces in the country,

and Nahed-Nechi is going to make a fantastic NDP premier of Alberta. and we're going to have our debates. We're a Democratic Party. It's our tradition. And I think it means, I think it's healthy. I think it means our tent is growing. And democratic debate within a party is, I think, a good thing. I know that ultimately you are going to say that you want to form government in Canada,

that you want to be the prime minister, of course. I'm not going to happen in the next election. Well, so that's the question. Unless there's an earthquake in Canadian politics, I think that would be history-making. We have recently seen a pretty big earthquake, so I don't know. That's true. But what does political success look like for you, say, in a year or 18 months from now? Just, you know, honestly.

I mean, honestly, the reason I'm doing this, and I think the reason that so many people have gotten excited about this campaign and entered politics as participants rather than passive recipients in the past six, seven months is that we are fighting for the change we need in our lives. life is grindingly unfair in Canada. People are working harder and harder, and it is just impossible to get by. Working hard does not earn a living in this country anymore. And until we change the fundamental conditions of our daily lives, we are not done. So the idea of winning more seats is great. We need back party status. Terrific. The idea of achieving the official opposition or holding the balance of power in a minority parliament, great, we might be able to get some things done. Just getting elected government in Canada at a federal level, which has never happened before, is not enough on its own either. We need to make the change. We're in this to make the material changes in

people's lives. It is such a wealthy country. It is so irrational that we can't live dignified lives when we work our butts off. And that's what needs changing. So political, the goal of politics is that and nothing less. Okay. Avie Lewis, thank you very much for coming by. Thanks so much, Jimmy. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.