Avi Lewis has always loved a big idea. A decade ago, Tom Mulcair lost his job as leader of the federal NDP at a convention marked by the Leap Manifesto, a climate change–centric cri de coeur co-authored by Lewis and a coalition of thought leaders, including his wife, writer Naomi Klein. “It became a flashpoint between opposing visions of the party,” Mulcair wrote recently. “Was it to become more activist, movement-driven, eco-social or more electorally savvy, labour-rooted, and broad-tent?” Now, after Lewis’s resounding first-ballot win last month, the man once blamed for fracturing the party is tasked with putting it back together.

If any leader can drag the flailing NDP out from the wilderness and back into the national discourse, he has as good a shot as anybody. Lewis, a veteran filmmaker, broadcaster, professor and environmental activist, is NDP royalty. In so many ways, the party represents his family’s life’s work: his grandfather David presided over the federal party in the early ’70s, railing against the big-business “corporate welfare bums” who received government subsidies paid for by taxpayers. Lewis’s father, Stephen, led the NDP’s Ontario contingent for nearly a decade before becoming a U.N. ambassador and special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. Those activist influences give him momentum.

Still, it will be hard going. In last year’s election, under Jagmeet Singh’s leadership, the party hemorrhaged its eclectic mix of 25 seats—in urban centres, working-class suburbs and rural communities—clinching just seven, an even worse result than its previous low watermark of nine, set in 1993. The party was wiped out of Ontario entirely, and lost official status, big-name MPs (like New Westminster’s Peter Julien) and rising stars (like Taylor Bachrach in B.C.’s Skeena region). Now that Mark Carney has managed to secure a parliamentary majority through floor-crossings and by-elections—and, therefore, doesn’t need the NDP to support his legislative priorities—there’s less reason to care what its members think of Ottawa’s Issue of the Week. Their past leverage is gone.

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The key problem currently facing the NDP is not that they’re Liberal-lite or, in more extreme views, communists coming to uproot the very fabric of the country. It’s that, in trying to become everything to everyone, the party offered nothing of value to anyone. It lost progressives who desired a robust, sharp defence of social liberalism when it abandoned core issues, refusing to back tougher gun-control measures and aligning with Conservatives on repealing the carbon tax. It also lost working-class voters focused on meat-and-potatoes issues, like jobs and inflation. (Singh’s past campaign against Loblaws, intended to cast him as a populist railing against corporate greed, didn’t win him any favours with lower-income voters who felt the cost-of-living squeeze especially acutely.) Moreover, an Abacus Data poll from January of 2024 showed that more than one-third of Canadians who voted for Singh’s NDP in 2021 preferred Pierre Poilievre to Justin Trudeau as prime minister, a warning sign of the party’s rickety coalition—and that many of its supporters aren’t exclusively doctrinaire progressives, as might’ve been assumed.

To fill the void the NDP currently occupies, Lewis has to make a decisive choice between one of two paths. The first was taken by Zohran Mamdani, whose rise to the New York mayor’s office has been heralded as a rare win for the American left. In his first 100 days, Mamdani mostly eschewed the culture wars that circled him and, instead, focused relentlessly on achieving a concrete agenda for his constituents: tackle rent control, lower the cost of child care, food and transit, and prioritize effective service delivery (best reflected in his recent pothole-filling blitz). If Lewis takes a similarly practical approach—de-emphasizing social progressivism in favour of a straightforward economically populist message, centred on lowering costs for the working class and raising taxes on the wealthy—he could craft a strategy that plays as well in Toronto’s Spadina riding as it does in Skeena.

The other path for the NDP is perhaps truer to Lewis’s time in public life: reorienting the party away from a purely seats-based organization and turning it into a pressure group to stop the Carney government from veering too far to the right. Such a party would double down on Lewis’s well-established track record of climate activism and reiterate the party’s commitment to Palestinian statehood and human rights, doggedly painting Carney as a conservative in red paint. In his first year in office, his government has repealed the carbon tax, begun to undo some of Justin Trudeau’s most audacious bail reforms, and—at least initially—supported the Trump government in foreign hostilities twice. As the Liberals have attempted to squeeze the Conservatives by drifting rightward, there should be room for a party to rise to their left.

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If it goes the latter route, the NDP could see significant gains in votes and donations, as younger, urban voters who voted Liberal to stop Poilievre in 2025 become disillusioned by the insufficient progressivism of Carney’s Liberals. This wouldn’t necessarily gain them seats the next time an election rolls around. But such an engaged activist base, even if inefficiently distributed across the country, could help improve the NDP’s ruinous financial position. Is that a success? The party is in such a hole that it’ll have to be.

The task that Lewis now faces is seismic, and old divides already seem to have resurfaced: Saskatchewan NDP leader Carla Beck declined a meeting with Lewis over his opposition to new fossil-fuel development, while Naheed Nenshi released a distancing statement within minutes of Lewis’s victory. (“Our focus is not on what the federal NDP says or does,” it read.) Will there even be a party for Lewis to hand off after his time in charge? Yes, if he can harness his propensity for proposing bold, new visions to break his party’s addiction to inertia and revive Canada’s left. If he can’t, the NDP’s death knell will be delivered at the hands of its most famous son. No pressure, though.

Evan Scrimshaw is the author of Scrimshaw Unscripted, a politics-focused Substack.

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