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Avi Lewis Wants to Save the Planet. It’s Tearing His Party Apart

His climate plan has provoked a furious response from NDP leaders in Alberta and Saskatchewan

On March 29, Avi Lewis, the veteran left-wing journalist and activist, defeated four rivals to take the helm of the federal New Democratic Party. His honeymoon was brief.

NDP leaders in Alberta and Saskatchewan have clashed with federal leader Avi Lewis’s anti–fossil fuel stance

The feud reflects a larger dilemma of how to transition away from oil without abandoning the communities that depend on it

Canada’s reluctance to move beyond oil is leaving it out of step as the world races toward a clean-energy economy

About an hour later, Carla Beck, the head of the Saskatchewan NDP, released a missive on official letterhead, declining to meet with the new national leader unless he disowned pretty much every position on climate change he’d ever taken. “It’s impossible to support—and respect—working people without respecting the jobs they have, not the ones you think they should have,” she wrote.

Not long after, Naheed Nenshi, the NDP’s leader in Alberta, reacted similarly, describing Lewis’s election as “not in the interests” of the province. “We believe in more pipelines and in reducing emissions,” he said. The message was clear: in Alberta and Saskatchewan, at least, the provincial NDP can’t get far away enough from its federal counterpart.

What accounts for such swift hostility? It’s true that Lewis’s platform is a threat to the oil and gas sector, which is concentrated in Alberta and Saskatchewan and is the largest single source of Canadian greenhouse gas emissions; Lewis supports an end to new fossil fuel development and a transition to sustainable energy. Inconveniently for the industry, this happens to be the only rational response to the existential threat of climate change. Inconveniently for Nenshi and Beck, Lewis’s position risks alienating the voters and interest groups whose economic fortunes remain tied to fossil fuels.

The attacks on Lewis, in other words, didn’t just represent internecine party sniping. They also helped illustrate the Anthropocene’s most fundamental political problem. Leaders across the spectrum may claim to accept overwhelming scientific consensus and to understand what must be done to avoid catastrophic levels of warming. They just aren’t willing to act on it.

Tensions between the provincial and federal NDP are nothing new. In the prairies, the Liberal brand never recovered from the Pierre Elliott Trudeau era, with its bitter wars over oil-export taxes and the National Energy Program, which means the NDP occupies the centre-left space that would otherwise belong to the Grits. Even though Western Canada was the birthplace of the NDP, the party there is now more liberal technocratic than social democratic. Just like Nenshi and Beck today, past provincial leaders have sometimes taken pains to distance themselves from their federal comrades, particularly on issues of energy and the environment.

Something about this spat, though, feels different. One reason is the sheer speed and vehemence with which Beck and Nenshi threw Lewis under the bus. Although this might be partly explained by legitimate ideological differences, on closer examination, it looks more like desperation.

Neither Beck nor Nenshi are in power—they’re both........

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