Avi Lewis isn’t breaking the NDP—he’s reclaiming it |
David Lewis (left) and Stephen Lewis (centre) congratulate Ed Broadbent (right) at the opening session of the 1978 NDP provincial leadership convention in Toronto. Photo courtesy Toronto Star archive.
Avi Lewis has barely taken the helm of the federal NDP, and already the reaction from mainstream punditry has been predictably overwrought. In the span of a week, right-wing commentators have cast him as both politically irrelevant and an existential threat to the country—a dangerous “communist” and an antisemite-harbourer whose rise signals something deeply sinister. The contradiction would be amusing if it weren’t so revealing.
Critics argue that Lewis represents a break from traditional NDP values, that the party’s old guard has been swept aside and replaced by a kind of “woke Marxism” that would have troubled Tommy Douglas. Even some less alarmist takes frame his victory as the culmination of a long-running internal struggle, with the party’s left finally prevailing over its establishment wing. Andrew Coyne, for instance, has suggested that this moment amounts to a delayed triumph for the Waffle faction over the party’s mainstream leadership once led, ironically, by Lewis’ own grandfather, David Lewis:
Somewhere, James Laxer is shedding a wistful tear. Along with Mel Watkins, Cy Gonick and others, Mr. Laxer led the radical Waffle faction within the federal NDP in the late 1960s and early 1970s, whose mission was to pull the party sharply to the left.
They advocated for nationalization of major industries, strict limits on foreign ownership, sharply higher taxes on the wealthy, and perhaps most controversially, withdrawal from NATO. They were organized, disciplined and uncompromising: a party within a party.
So alarming were they to the party leadership that they were eventually expelled. I believe the leader’s name was—no, don’t help me—it was… Ah yes: David Lewis.
There are, however, several problems with Coyne’s claim that Lewis represents a break from the party of his father and grandfather. It’s true that the Waffle challenged the NDP establishment and championed an unapologetically left-wing agenda. But the notion that they stood in stark opposition to a centrist party elite doesn’t hold up.
The ideological divide between the Waffle and the broader NDP, while real, has often been overstated. Even as party leaders pushed back against the faction, the mainstream NDP of the 1960s and 1970s remained firmly committed to democratic socialist principles. In fact, under........