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Last year’s federal election was nothing short of calamitous for Canada’s New Democratic Party. Entering the campaign with some 24 of the 343 seats in the House of Commons – Canada’s lower house of parliament - the social democratic NDP finished with only 7 seats and saw its vote share drop from 18 to 6.3 percent, marking the party’s worst ever result. Compounding the defeat, the NDP remains saddled with debt and lacks the prerogatives granted to officially recognized parties in the House of Commons. Under Prime Minister Mark Carney, meanwhile, Canada's governing Liberals are still riding high in the polls and now wield a parliamentary majority thanks byelection victories and floor-crossings, mainly defections from the Coservatives to the Liberals.
Luke Savage is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in the New Statesman, The Guardian, and the Washington Post. He is also co-author of Seeking Social Democracy (2022) with Ed Broadbent, former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada.
Given this context, the race to succeed former NDP leader Jagmeet Singh — who lost his seat and resigned on election night — might easily have been a demoralized affair. Instead, the NDP’s leadership contest ultimately saw record turnout and a fundraising haul for its victor so impressive there is good reason to think the party’s current financial problems will not persist for long. Winning 56 percent support from delegates on the first ballot at the March 2026 leadership convention in Winnipeg, journalist and filmmaker (and writer Noami Klein’s husband) Avi Lewis campaigned unabashedly from the populist left and now looks to adapt and scale up his strategy before Canada’s next federal election.
What accounts for Lewis’s victory? And, as the NDP aims to recover from its worst ever defeat, what are the prospects for a successful renewal of parliamentary socialism in Canada amid the ongoing turbulence of the second Trump era?
The Perpetual Third
Before we return to more recent events, some further background on the NDP and its history may first be useful.
Despite being formed in 1961 through the merger of its predecessor, the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) with Canada’s trade union alliance, the Canadian Labour Congress, the NDP’s roots in the CCF go back to the Great Depression. A populist alliance of farmers, workers, and socialists, the CCF was an explicitly anti-capitalist formation that aspired to nothing less than a sweeping transformation of Canadian society. In 1944, it formed North America’s first ever socialist government in the tiny prairie province of Saskatchewan and there pioneered what would ultimately become the country’s system of public health insurance. Through the formal partnership with organized labourthey entered into in 1961, Canada’s socialists hoped to achieve the long elusive goal of winning federal power. But, notwithstanding its various policy victories, successes at the provincial level, and periodic surges in popular support, the NDP has mostly remained a third force in Canadian federal politics, behind the traditionally dominant Liberals and Conservatives.
Notwithstanding its various policy victories, successes at the provincial level, and periodic surges in popular support, the NDP has mostly remained a third force in Canadian federal politics, behind the traditionally dominant Liberals and Conservatives.
In 2011, under the leadership of Jack Layton, the NDP won an unprecedented 103 seats in parliament, formed Canada’s Official Opposition, and even achieved a breakthrough in Quebec — where it had never previously held a seat. Since Layton’s untimely death from cancer just weeks after the 2011 campaign, the NDP has experienced nearly a decade of sectional decline culminating in last April’s historic wipeout.
The NDP’s electoral frustrations, both recently and historically, do not fit neatly into any single narrative. As a third party, it is structurally disadvantaged by Canada’s first past the post electoral system, which tends to inflate seat counts for larger parties and underrepresent smaller ones in Parliament. As distinct from its sister parties in Europe, it has also had to confront a political landscape where questions of regional identity and national unity loom unusually large. In Quebec, Canada’s second largest (and most social democratically-inclined) province, divisions between pro-federalist liberals and left-leaning sovereignists have for decades posed a distinct challenge. This is all to say that the NDP’s electoral struggles, though particularly acute in recent years, are partially related to more longstanding strategic dilemmas.
Going into last year’s federal election, however, there was some cause for optimism. Justin Trudeau, prime minister for the Liberals since 2015, was beset by low approval ratings and widespread public frustration over his handling of Canada’s ongoing cost of living crisis. Having entered into a confidence-and-supply agreement under which the NDP would furnish the liberal minority government with the required votes in Parliament in 2022, the NDP hoped to carry its policy victories — among them the extension of public dental coverage to low-income families and a ban on the use of scab labour in federally-regulated industries — into a campaign it expected to wage largely against the Conservatives in 2025. Instead, amid Donald Trump’s reelection and Trudeau’s sudden departure, a quick succession of events abruptly gave rise to a more volatile and less advantageous political landscape. In a span of just a few weeks, the NDP slid from a relatively competitive position in national polls to the single digits.
Two immediate factors accounted for the shift. First, Donald Trump’s trade war and his threats of annexation had a profound psychological impact on the Canadian electorate. If Trudeau had remained in office, it’s anyone’s guess what might have happened. But the arrival of former central banker Mark Carney simultaneously allowed the incumbent Liberals to ride the resulting rally around the flag effect while also seizing the mantle of novelty. Carney’s brand of centrist civic nationalism — built on the rhetorically appealing if largely unspecified promise of “nation-building” — in turn carried the day.
While the NDP has doubtless had to confront a set of daunting strategic challenges imposed by the idiosyncrasies of Canada’s political landscape, its internal politics have also been punctuated by debates that will be familiar to those elsewhere. Like many parties of the left, it counts a mixture of activists, trade unionists, and socialists in its ranks alongside a centre-left tendency that champions more conventional electoralism. The party’s 2025 defeat did much to bring these fault lines into the open.
A Populist Alternative
Though Avi Lewis’s own direct involvement with the NDP only began fairly recently, his family boasts deep roots in the party. Prior to being its leader in the early 1970s, his grandfather was among the key architects of its alliance with organized labour and helped draft the founding manifesto of the CCF in the early 1930s. Lewis’s father, meanwhile, led the NDP’s Ontario wing and his mother was a leading voice in Canada’s feminist movement. Lewis himself has mostly spent his professional life as an activist, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He ran for Parliament unsuccessfully in 2021 and 2025 and has been notably engaged with issues related to climate justice and Palestine.
Against the conventional wisdom that the NDP can either embrace big tent progressivism and broaden its coalition or run from the left and lose, Lewis him successfully made the case that a more radical direction is the most pragmatic way for the party to rebuild.
From the outset, Lewis’s bid for the leadership was a highly disciplined exercise in left populism that quite consciously drew on the best efforts of the populist left elsewhere. His family pedigree notwithstanding, he campaigned as an insurgent outsider championing socialist solutions to Canada’s ongoing cost of living crisis. Against the conventional wisdom that the NDP can either embrace big tent progressivism and broaden its coalition or run from the left and lose, Lewis and the activists around him successfully made the case that a more radical direction was, in fact, the most pragmatic way for the party to rebuild.
In both strategic and policy terms, this meant downplaying the politics of personality and instead emphasizing how issues like the soaring cost of food and rent might be addressed through ambitious use of the public sector. Here, the campaign’s signature ideas included plans for a national chain of publicly-owned, non-profit grocery stores, the creation of a public telecom provider, the large-scale construction of new social housing, a green industrial strategy, and an expansive offering of other policies in a similar vein. It simultaneously championed internal democracy and pledged to bring the campaign’s own culture of organizing into the NDP.
After Lewis’s overwhelming victory on the first ballot, a left wing sweep of the party’s federal executive, and record membership signups, there is good reason to be optimistic about the party's prospects for recovery and renewal going forward. Nevertheless, Lewis and his team will now face an uphill battle on several fronts: among them the party’s ongoing financial woes, the recently-announced retirement of its last remaining Quebec MP from Parliament, the fact that Lewis’s himself does not have a seat in the House, and a political mainstream that is instinctively hostile toward the left.
Carney's Regressive Policies
Beyond Lewis’s own skills as an organizer and communicator, and the talent that remains in the NDP’s now smaller caucus, the party will likely find ample room in which to maneuver. While Carney’s personal approval ratings remain high and his global reception continues to be positive, his leadership over the past year has seen the Liberals pivot sharply to the neoliberal right. Behind the prime minister’s rhetoric about nation-building and his largely theatrical resistance to the Trump White House, the Carney program is easily the most regressive and pro-corporate Canada has seen in generations: in effect, one of publicly financed but privately led economic development facilitated by the roll back of environmental and regulatory safeguards, a lavish round of tax cuts for high earners, an austerity approach to public spending, and an embrace of military Keynesianism.
Left-wing populists believe that capitalism concentrates wealth and power in the fewest hands, and we need policies and a response that actually responds to the needs of the 99 per cent.
In obvious ways, such an agenda creates clear openings for the populist left. “Left-wing populists believe that capitalism concentrates wealth and power in the fewest hands, and we need policies and a response that actually responds to the needs of the 99 per cent,” Lewis told reporters at his first press conference after winning the leadership. “I hope there is some curiosity…in Canada about what left-wing populism can offer, because we’ve had a lot of those ideas from the right, and we’re coming with a completely different set of ideas that are populist and popular.”
There is little doubt that Lewis’s nascent leadership signals a significant change of direction for the NDP. The question now is whether the party’s newly populist orientation can help it rebuild on the scale necessary to bring about meaningful change throughout the country.
