Can Avi Lewis save the NDP?

Avi Lewis has only just started his new job as federal NDP leader and already he’s been denounced in print by a who’s who of NDP insiders, including former leader Thomas Mulcair and leadership candidate Brian Topp. Normally a new leader gets a longer honeymoon period, especially from his own party. But the Lewis win is controversial within the NDP because his campaign has refused to tiptoe around the contradictions embedded in contemporary Canadian social democracy. Lewis stands accused of being too radical for the party’s target voting constituencies, hostile to the economic importance of resource jobs on the Prairies, and too focused on activist rather than bread and butter economic issues. Needless to say, the legacy media don’t love him either, alternatively damning his economic ideas as unrealistic or accusing him of antisemitism for criticizing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. His defenders claim he can revive the party’s fortunes with a mix of more radical progressive policies that will inspire supporters old and new. They also point to the party’s recent federal decline as evidence that the traditionally more centrist policies of the party are not working. They claim Lewis can broaden the NDP’s coalition, adding environmentalists and youth and those with a taste for more radical economic policy.

Given these competing narratives, what can we realistically expect from a Lewis-led NDP? How compelling are the rival claims that his leadership will either renew or wreck the party? If we take a step back and bring in some historical and comparative perspectives, both sides seem more than a little overdrawn. Up until the 2025 federal election Lewis’s predecessor Jagmeet Singh had produced results commensurate with the party’s traditional levels of support, gaining 16 percent of the popular vote in 2019 and 18 percent in 2021. Both contests produced minority governments that allowed the NDP to secure key policy victories on issues that Liberals had long promised but failed to deliver, like national daycare, pharmacare and dental care. The fact the party did not appear to benefit from securing these results in the 2025 election is not that surprising when we remember our history. In the mid-1960s the NDP were able to leverage their influence in a minority government to push through a national medicare program but in the subsequent election it was the Liberals that gained more votes and seats. On the other hand, arguments that voters are more likely to respond positively to moderate rather than bold leadership crash against the results of the 2015 contest where Mulcair clearly offered moderation, even promising to balance the budget if elected to govern. Mulcair’s leadership in 2015 pushed the party back down to 20 percent of the popular vote (from Layton’s high of 30 percent in 2011), pretty much in line with what Ed Broadbent had achieved in the 1980s and Singh more recently. Evidently, moderation is no magic bullet either.

In different ways, both sides of the debate over Lewis tend to oversell the impact of leadership, whether it’s on the voters or the party. A new leader is not going to move the needle on the party’s popularity as much as many commentators seem to think. Leaders don’t obscure or replace the basic ideological factors that distinguish parties and that voters base their choices on. While voters don’t necessarily think in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’ they are able to link the policies they care about with the party that comes closest to them. Leadership won’t make them vote for a party with no relationship to these issues. But what research on party leadership does suggest is the leader’s performance acts as a proxy for the public’s perceptions of a party’s competence and authenticity. This comes through starkly in the performance of two recent federal Liberal leaders: Stephane Dion was widely seen as incompetent while Michael Ignatieff couldn’t escape accusations that he was just a tourist in his country of birth. This was probably also a factor In 2015 when Mulcair failed to hold Québec, a province where voters had too recently seen him as a minister in a right-of-centre provincial Liberal government. Singh, too, appeared to have problems in the latter part of the 2021-25 Parliament as his leadership drifted and he struggled to defend the party’s relevance in the face of Trump’s threats to Canada’s sovereignty and the creeping prospect of victory for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party in the 2025 election. So, it is certainly possible that a reinvigorated leadership could make a difference in how the public sees the NDP.

Leadership contests are also an opportunity to mobilize new constituencies, alter the public’s perception of the party’s coalition dynamics, and offer important symbolic representation, often in response to the work that social movements have been doing. Past NDP contests are replete with strong symbolic indicators: David Lewis showcased the party’s commitment to organized labour; Broadbent, a professor, reflected the party’s outreach to a professional middle-class; Audrey MacLaughlin and Alexa McDonough represented both the NDP’s commitment to gender equality and new regional areas of voting strength for the party; Jack Layton embodied a community-based activism; and Jagmeet Singh demonstrated the New Democrats’ inclusion of racial, ethnic, and religious diversity. Beyond these outward-facing indicators, each campaign was also read as an internal battle between the party’s different factions, variously characterized as the left versus the centre, activist versus institutional, or simply outsiders challenging party insiders. Looking at the past six contests, the factional results appear to be split evenly between choices preferred by party insiders (Broadbent, McDonough, Mulcair) and outsiders (McLaughlin, Layton, Singh). But perceptions of what leaders represent can change over time. For instance, Layton’s win was widely seen at the time as a victory for the more activist wing of the party but he would later be seen as the force that ‘modernized’ the NDP by marginalizing members in favour of professional party staffers. On the other hand, Singh, whose leftism seemed to many to be more performative than substantive, was able to secure serious left policy achievements from a succession of minority Liberal governments.

But the biggest impact of leadership contests is arguably on the party’s internal dynamics. Divisive leadership results affect party unity, sometimes leading to party splits (as occurred in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and Germany in the 2000s). Public repudiations of a new leader from party insiders is usually seen as a ‘shot across the bow’ that the struggle over the direction of the party is far from over. These battles occur because leadership typically plays a key role in setting the priorities for what a party will do. Here, left parties—and Canadian left parties in particular—face a host of dilemmas about how to utilize their scarce resources. Should the party emphasize shoring up its working-class support or focus on recruiting more middle-class voters? Can it remain faithful to a traditional left commitment of using a strong central state to tame capital while accepting Québec’s need for an asymmetrical federalism to protect its language and culture? Should it invest electoral resources only in regions of potential strength and pragmatically abandon everywhere else? Leaders make a difference in what strategies ultimately get taken up, with winners and losers inside the party, depending on where their commitments lie.

Here are a few considerations for the Lewis leadership team as it charts a path forward amid these internal tensions.

First, there is no roadmap. There is lot of research about campaigns and campaigning but the lessons do not apply in every case and no one can say why something works or doesn’t work in particular moments. Layton’s breakthrough in 2011 is a good example. Analysts credit his deft performance on television and in debates as connecting with voters, particularly in Ontario and Québec. But this was his third time on the national stage and his performance was not that different from his previous two appearances. The point here is that context matters. Layton’s breakthrough came at a moment of crisis and weakness for the Liberals while at the same time the Harper Conservatives were seen as a rising ideological threat, particularly in Québec. It was this unanticipated opening that positioned Layton to break into that province in 2011. His leadership talent showed through in how he saw and acted on that opportunity rather than anything unique to his personality.

Second, the precise details of the NDP’s policy mix are much less important than the party’s approach to mobilizing an electorate than can act as an anchor for the progressive policies the party is trying to introduce. And here there are some striking trends that every left activist should be aware of. The most important finding from comparative research on social democracy is that the relative degree of working-class engagement with politics is a crucial determinant of achieving and sustaining left policy goals. Essentially, the more working-class people vote, the better the welfare state. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the trends in voter turnout over the past 50 years have seen a precipitous decline in working-class participation. All parties have converged on the middle-class as the lowest hanging electoral fruit because they are generally already motivated to vote. Rebuilding mass working-class participation is possible, but it will require genuinely new approaches to mobilization. One way is to utilize representation as an information shortcut by running more working-class candidates for office. Again, comparative studies of social democracy show that working-class politicians attract higher levels of working-class voter participation. As an added bonus, research also suggests that such candidates typically remain more loyal to policies that benefit working people. However, current levels of working-class representation in Western countries are at all time low—just two percent on average. In Canada this was only interrupted when the NDP became the official opposition in 2011, pushing the percentage up to six percent, largely because the party ran so many union-affiliated candidates.

Avi Lewis seems like an affable guy. He is full of ideas and his heart is in the right place. But leadership is much more than a winning personality and the right mix of policies. It requires a deft analysis of how to apply organizational resources to an unpredictable flow of events in real time. Until recently, roughly a fifth of Canadian voters have been prepared to support the NDP regardless of leadership style. Despite what the unusual 2025 election results might suggest, many of them are still out there. I am not convinced Lewis represents a dire threat to the NDP’s existence. On the other hand, if his leadership is going to launch a populist revival of NDP fortunes it is going to take more than smithing the party’s policy mix. Only by figuring out how to mobilize a working-class base that could anchor his good ideas against the usual storm of well-financed opposition might change that equation.

Dennis Pilon is chair and a professor in the Department of Politics at York University and a former member of the CD collective.