Photo courtesy Avi Lewis/Facebook

In a sense, the NDP had been preparing for the 2025 federal election for most of its existence. Here was an unprecedented threat to Canada’s sovereignty, coupled with the seeming end of the free trade era, all presided over by the big, wet embodiment of the billionaire class. And here was a party built to oppose the economic elite, whose historic skepticism about integration with the United States was being validated in real time.

There are elections in which a movement finds its moment, and 2025 could have been one of them. It wasn’t.

American aggression might have given the federal NDP a powerful new relevance. Instead, it drove the party’s almost total collapse. Left-of-centre voters considered the stakes too high to risk splitting their vote, and they broke decisively for Mark Carney’s Liberals. The New Democrats were reduced to a mere seven (now six) seats.

But that failure isn’t what is most galling. The last election found Canadians in the middle of an era-defining debate about sovereignty, security, and democracy. Would that argument have been meaningfully different if the NDP did not exist?

Canadian voters took a sustained look at the NDP and answered in the negative. While Carney promised to remake our relationship with our dominant neighbour to the south, the New Democrats campaigned as if the world had not fundamentally changed. In doing so, they gave up a chance to determine the parameters of the national discussion, and found themselves shut out from it instead.

Last weekend, Avi Lewis was elected as the NDP’s new leader. His first-ballot win is reason to hope that the party will engage much more directly with this era of upheaval. Acknowledging the gravity of our political and economic crises is the minimum requirement for getting a hearing in Canadian politics right now, and Lewis is more than up to the task.

Lewis recently showed that awareness in an interview with Jacobin on the past and future of democratic socialism in Canada. After a nod to his journalistic and documentary work chronicling the rise of neoliberalism, he arrived at a crucial point: “We’re now living the endgame of that global phenomenon… with the rise of fascism.”

That diagnosis is difficult to dismiss. By the mid-20th century, the safety nets of the rich democracies had secured a degree of social peace. But from the perspective of conservative elites, fascism can also pacify—and at a lower cost. As neoliberalism has eroded public goods, fascism has begun to substitute for their function, albeit more recklessly and violently. Neoliberalism’s ever-more-outlandish inequalities are stabilized by fascism’s ever-more-outlandish race and gender hierarchies.

A disaffected Trump supporter unwittingly captured the logic of this bargain when he complained, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” Some governments claim legitimacy on the basis of their ability to deliver public goods. Fascist governments claim legitimacy on the basis of their ability to harm the “right” people.

But even if this reading of our situation is correct, when has being right ever been enough in politics? Lewis’s view of where we are—expressed not only in that interview, but in his victory speech, his willingness to use words like “socialism” and “collective struggle” as unabashed positives, and a platform heavy on investment in public goods—has two other advantages that are just as important.

First, it’s coherent. Any NDP leader could offer a laundry list of more-or-less appealing policies targeting the cost of living—and could probably even find a way to mention Donald Trump in the process, as a nod to relevance. But it’s something more to set those policies within the context of a wider history: a story of how and why we got here, and a set of policy responses that follow as necessary consequences.

Lewis’s strong win reflects the level of narrative skill he brought to the campaign—not the ability to spin up pleasing falsehoods, but the ability to make a platform look like the outcome of a worldview rather than a series of focus groups.

It’s a worldview that Lewis shares with a resurgent left in the United States. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has succeeded by presenting democratic socialism as the indispensable answer to Trumpism. “If there is any way to terrify a despot,” Mamdani declaimed in his acceptance speech, “it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one.”

When socialists convincingly cast themselves as the response to these bewildering times, they can achieve remarkable results. Similarly, Lewis sees the NDP as a force against oligarchs and monopolists—not simply because that’s the party’s reflexive position, but because our political crisis is so vividly demonstrating the cost of their economic dominance.

Second, this story is not only coherent but distinctive. It differs meaningfully from the accounts of the crisis offered by the NDP’s federal competitors, and it has to. In a first-past-the-post system, voting for a smaller party is always a risk. For voters considering defecting from one of the dominant parties, that risk is hard to justify when the “reward”—policy differentiation—is minimal. One advantage of Lewis’s socialist framing is the clear contrast it draws between the NDP and its competitors.

Take Carney. His bestselling book describes economic, political, and climate breakdown as the result of “a common crisis in values.” A responsible government, he wrote, would “channel the value of the market back into the service of the values of humanity.”

A central banker would hardly be speaking this way about capitalism’s moral failings without sustained pressure from the left. It’s difficult to imagine Carney writing those words a decade later had the Occupy movement of 2011 never taken place.

The left has pushed the issue of inequality into the mainstream, and can continue to shape how it is understood. We see it as a problem of power, not values. We believe that capitalism produces domination regardless of how we think or feel about it. And we reject the idea that the breakdown of democracy or the domination of our economy by oligarchs can be explained as a problem of morally unfit elites. Longing for a better class of capitalists is a limited read of the crisis that produces predictably limited results.

Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, meanwhile, are in an even tighter bind. Poilievre can barely acknowledge that Canada is in an economic and security crisis at all, because a critical mass of his party sympathizes with Donald Trump. Yet his “blue collar” messaging has helped to square this circle, because it allows Conservatives to talk affordability without talking power.

That messaging helped the Tories eat into the NDP’s base during last year’s election. No one should expect Lewis to singlehandedly reverse the left’s long-term struggles to retain its traditional base, which have weakened social democracy across Europe and North America for decades. But even beginning to reverse that decline requires encouraging Canadians to think of themselves in new ways. It matters that we will be able to hear Lewis speak about class from the left: not as a set of consumer choices or cultural signifiers, but as a question of power in the economy and at work.

It’s reasonable to hope this will translate into electoral gains. But even if it doesn’t, another measure of success still matters: Canada’s debate over this crisis will be meaningfully different because the NDP exists.

“What is the NDP for?” is an old question, and the answers often pit ideological purity against electoral success. And yet, as a party of the left, the NDP is uniquely positioned to recognize that electoral success is not the only kind that matters. I was struck by the way Lewis described himself in the Jacobin interview as working “in movement struggles and now, in the most recent decade of my life, in the electoral sphere.” I’m also interested to see how his critique of “the cult of leadership” will play out now that he is a party leader.

Comments like these reflect a long-standing leftist view: politics extends well beyond elections, and parties of the left should exist not for their own power or prestige, but to bring the voices of working people to the centre of decision-making.

Of course, I would like to see the NDP under Lewis hold the balance of power or even form government. But more than that, I want to see an NDP so capable of meeting this moment that it resets the boundaries of Canada’s political spectrum. More seats in Parliament would be an achievement, but a future in which the Conservatives split over the American crisis and the centre of political gravity shifts further left would be even more consequential.

The NDP does not have the power to bring that future about on its own, but it can still push history in that direction. To do so, it will need to encourage more Canadians to see democracy, power, and class from the left. That is a demanding task, and a deeply uncertain one. But hasn’t the last decade taught us to trust our certainties a little less?

Rob Goodman is Associate Professor of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University and a former US House and Senate speechwriter. He is the author of Not Here: Why American Democracy Is Eroding and How Canada Can Protect Itself.

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