Avi Lewis Wins Leadership of the Federal NDP on First Ballot

Leadership conventions sometimes generate unexpected results. For the NDP in 2026, there was very little to be surprised about: Avi Lewis, widely considered the frontrunner since the beginning of the race, clinched the NDP leadership on the first ballot with 56 percent of the vote.

The day before, a Lewis-aligned “change, together” slate of candidates had swept the executive of the NDP, foreshadowing what was to come in the party’s leadership at the highest level. Today, they and their new leader are newly responsible for moving the party forward from a very challenging decade.

Since its founding, The New Democratic Party has been labelled the conscience of Canada, providing a progressive option for people who feel both Conservatives and Liberals fall short. That identity still carries weight: many Canadians agree with NDP positions on affordability, industrial strategy, and social policy. In a Parliament where Mark Carney’s Liberals appear to have ideologically crossed to the Conservative bench—adopting legislation limiting democratic checks and balances, threatening certain Charter rights, and doing away with hard-won environmental protections—there is room for a confident counterweight.

But there is a wide chasm between voters agreeing with your ideas and believing those ideas have a path forward under a party with a federal caucus small enough, in the words of journalist Nick Taylor-Vaisey, to carpool to Parliament in “an old-school station wagon.”

Can Lewis grow the party from group chat to government-in-waiting?

• Canada Is Edging Toward a Two-Party System. That Would Be a Mistake
• Can the NDP Rebuild—or Is It Time to Start Something New?
• The NDP Can’t Call Itself a National Party If Its Leaders Can’t Speak French

Things weren’t always this gloomy for the NDP. In 2011, they represented a credible, if untested, alternative to then prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. Despite some of the NDP candidates barely speaking French, Quebec voters flocked to them, hoping to keep Harper out of power. A few years later, with Thomas Mulcair as leader, they began an exhaustingly long campaign in a good position but were quickly outflanked to their left by Team Trudeau. While Mulcair spluttered, Justin Trudeau said the Liberals would accept a bigger deficit in exchange for stronger social programs, introduced the Canada Child Benefit, and announced that the economy and environment would henceforth go hand in hand—effectively borrowing the language that had long defined the NDP.

Things have since gone from bad to worse. Nothing could keep the party afloat: not Jagmeet Singh’s youthful energy; not the Supply and Confidence Agreement, which gave them some level of influence over the government’s policy agenda; and definitely not the constant barrage of attacks on the party from populist Poilievre Conservatives hungry to attract disenfranchised voters in blue-collar communities. Dippers knew the end was nigh for Singh, and probably for most of the party’s caucus. If you were a supporter, it was hard not to feel disappointment and alarm over their electoral future.

2025 was brutal. The NDP caucus shrank from twenty-five members of Parliament to seven—a floor that has declined further since, with Lori Idlout’s departure and MP Alexandre Boulerice eyeing Quebec’s National Assembly. With such a small presence in the House of Commons, the NDP doesn’t currently have official party status. This leaves them without a voice on the important parliamentary committees, where much of the legislative work is done. Parliament does not provide them with an opposition budget: many of their staff were let go. They were also reportedly saddled with unpaid campaign loans, risking fines.

Interim leader Don Davies, in a self-deprecating speech at the Parliamentary Press Gallery Dinner, put into words how many New Democrats felt coming out of the year: “My name is Don Davies, and my pronouns are broke and irrelevant.”

The one bright spot in an otherwise devastating year was the launch of the NDP leadership race, which attracted a slate of compelling candidates, an uptick of fundraising, and fresh energy.

Although the party’s numbers in the polls have barely budged, any of the main contenders for leadership could have plausibly reset its trajectory. Vancouver documentary filmmaker and activist Avi Lewis, dockworker and union president Rob Ashton from British Columbia, and Alberta MP Heather McPherson are, by all accounts, in politics for the right reasons. Only McPherson has experience as an elected official, but all three are effective communicators (in English—none of them would pass a high school French exam) and genuinely progressive.

Leadership conventions are rarely interesting to anyone immediately outside of hyperpartisan circles. In this case, however, both Conservatives and Liberals have something to lose from a stronger NDP. In the last federal election, Conservatives won enough votes which were previously going to the NDP, especially in BC and Ontario. But if the NDP regains strength in those key ridings (especially, again, in BC), the Conservatives will have a much harder time holding on to those seats in the next election.

The Liberals likewise “stole” votes that typically go to the NDP. The fear of US president Donald Trump’s threats convinced many left-of-centre voters to side with Carney, thereby leading to the NDP’s collapse. If those voters return to the NDP, the Liberals will have to find people who voted Conservative or stayed home.

Whether the party will turn its fortunes around is an entirely different story.

Much of the leadership race focused, unsurprisingly, on policy platforms. Despite being in “violent agreement” about the need for more housing, improving life for the working class, and workers’ rights, the leadership hopefuls occasionally clashed on energy policy and the autonomy of provincial NDP factions.

One may be forgiven for not paying attention to these debates. To a certain extent, they don’t matter. The increasing probability of a Liberal majority government means that whatever policies the NDP adopts pale in comparison to the next leader’s ability to hold the caucus and base together. Rousing campaign speeches and rallies may be one thing, but managing the day-to-day problems that arise when a committed group of party faithful are forced to work together is quite another. Style, in this case, trumps content.

Both Ashton and McPherson have a proven track record of sustaining consensus building over the long run. As union president, Ashton negotiated multi-million-dollar collective agreements. McPherson is appreciated as a hard-working, effective parliamentarian. Though they may disagree about what, exactly, is needed to reform the party’s structure, they both know what it’s like to build relationships, navigate arcane processes and infrastructure, as well as encourage dissenters to use their inside voice.

Lewis’s record is less clear. On one hand, the filmmaker, former journalist, and activist has brought a surge of new funding and energy to the party. On the other, he is vulnerable due to his role in the 2015 Leap Manifesto, a climate broadside he and his wife, Naomi Klein, launched alongside prominent figures such as Leonard Cohen, David Suzuki, Alanis Morissette, and Rachel McAdams.

The document called for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, a massive expansion of public investment in renewable energy, stronger Indigenous sovereignty, and a broader rethinking of Canada’s economic model in the face of climate change. Critics labelled it as too radical, and its proposals divided the party. The Leap’s call to halt fossil fuel infrastructure, at a time of declining jobs in the oil patch, didn’t resonate in Alberta. Then provincial NDP leader Rachel Notley described it “ill-considered and, quite frankly, very tone-deaf to the economic realities that are being experienced in Alberta.” Mulcair, eager for pragmatic platforms to help win an election, seemed wary (Paul Wells wrote in Maclean’s in 2021 that he “greeted” the Leap document “the way your vegan cousin might greet a gift of lamb shanks.”)

But the Leap’s undoing had as much to do with process as policy. It was drafted largely outside the NDP’s internal structures, and then introduced at the party’s 2016 convention in a very public way with the expectation that members would adopt it quickly. This unilateral, hard-nosed approach is one reason the project was ultimately sidelined within the party—it was sent into a consultation process that drained its momentum without it ever becoming policy. Resentments still dog Lewis today. His political views have remained remarkably consistent; the policies he is now putting forward track closely to the Leap. Hopefully, the decade-old saga bears lessons for him and his team as they try to stabilize and re-energize the party now under their purview: building the institutional capacity to drive forward ambitious policy requires patient, thankless internal work.

That kind of patient and thankless work might look a lot like Singh and Trudeau’s Supply and Confidence Agreement. Most of its benefits weren’t showy: the NDP was simply allowed into the rooms where decisions were being made on legislation they had proposed. NDP MPs and staff invested tons of work to achieve partial victories—while fending off criticism from within their own base and ceding credit to the Liberals. It was unglamorous. Putting aside partisanship to gain tangible outcomes may not have won the NDP any votes, but it definitely improved people’s well-being.

Rebuilding a national party, and bringing Canadians back into the NDP fold, will necessarily be an all-hands-on-deck endeavour spanning years. What Lewis will ultimately need—perhaps more than the Leap ever demanded—is discipline. Pundits and party faithful believe Carney’s move to the right has freed up a lot of space on the left. Progressive voters should, the theory goes, gravitate naturally to the NDP. But unless it rebuilds confidence in its internal infrastructure, voters may not think the party is credible enough to champion the values and ideas they stand for.