If Lewis’s leadership is going to launch a populist revival of NDP fortunes, it is going to take more than smithing the party’s policy mix, writes Dennis Pilon. Photo courtesy Avi Lewis/X.

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........

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