Can Avi Lewis reinvent socialism, or is he doomed to fail?

A socialist won and will destroy the NDP and probably the fabric of our society

Prepare yourself for the next few weeks of headlines that say this. The mainstream media has already started freaking out. Personally, I'm going to see what happens and analyse things as they happen instead of freaking out in one direction or another.

Avi Lewis won. We all knew he would. I said as much in my last article on the NDP. The question now is what comes next.

This is opinion and analysis. I hope you will bear with me as we hypothesize without reaching firm conclusions; none of us can see the future. Instead of offering a hard-edged "hot take" designed to surprise or delight, I am going to speculate on where the party might go and the future of the Canadian left.

The election of Avi Lewis is a reaction against the last 25 years of what we should call the "liberalizing" of the NDP. The party moved toward the center under Jack Layton, a shift further cemented by Thomas Mulcair.

Jack Layton (RIP) the Liberal

Jack Layton has become a saint to the NDP voter base, yet it was through his strategic moves that the party became the entity it was under Mulcair and Singh. He transformed the NDP from an overt socialist party into a leftist liberal party. Saint Layton and his neoliberal beliefs are the beginning of what many of the base now hate, despite every single person invoking his name with a hail Mary and the sign of the cross.

He was clearly taking a cue from the successful provincial wings of the party, which have historically enjoyed much more electoral success than the federal branch. The NDP has seen dominant performances in the West for sixty years by essentially becoming the Western centrist party. Not originally, mind you, but they’ve become the Liberals of the west since the 90s, similar to how the Parti Quebecois became identical to the Liberals in Quebec. 

In 1933, the Regina Manifesto called for the eradication of capitalism, and the NDP constitution once used "socialism" as an explicit descriptor. Jack Layton and Thomas Mulcair wanted it removed; following Layton's death, it was officially purged in 2013.

The NDP has long been perceived as a left-leaning Liberal party. It was Lester B. Pearson who famously called the NDP "Liberals in a hurry," and the same label could apply to the party under Layton, Mulcair, and Jagmeet Singh. It is a testament to how far right the political spectrum has shifted since the 1960s that Pearson and Tommy Douglas were not divided by a massive gap. It is difficult to consider the Liberals or the NDP of 2000–2025 as being anywhere near as socially minded as those previous leaders. If a single-payer healthcare system were not already in place, the modern Liberals would have no interest in creating it, and the NDP would likely be only marginally interested in supporting it. (If libraries didn’t exist already, it would be a for-profit rental system)

Until today.