Avi Lewis Elected NDP Leader After Party's Worst Election Loss

Avi Lewis won the NDP's leadership Sunday in Winnipeg on a decisive first ballot, capturing 56 per cent of roughly 71,000 votes cast and becoming the third member of his family to lead Canada's left-wing party. He arrives tasked with rebuilding a caucus that has fallen out of official status in the House of Commons, armed with a platform that includes ending all new federal pipeline approvals and imposing an export tax on oil and gas shipped to the United States, a combination of positions that creates immediate friction with Alberta's provincial government and puts the NDP sharply at odds with Ottawa's energy-trade calculus.

Lewis defeated four rivals including Alberta MP Heather McPherson, who placed second with just shy of 21,000 votes, followed by social worker Tanille Johnston, union leader Rob Ashton, and farmer Tony McQuail. His margin was not a surprise. By the end of January 2026, his campaign had raised more than $1 million in donations, and his organization had grown, by his own account during a CBC Power & Politics interview, larger than NDP headquarters staff in Ottawa. He launched his campaign on September 19, 2025, the first candidate approved to run, and held his kickoff event in Toronto.

The policy framework Lewis ran on will read to American eyes as a northern cousin of the Green New Deal that U.S. progressive legislators have championed over the past decade. His platform calls for ending federal approvals for new pipelines and offshore oil projects, building a coast-to-coast clean energy grid, and funding the transition through a windfall profits tax on fossil fuel companies. An Avi-led NDP would also push back against Trump's tariffs with a tax on oil and gas exports to the U.S. That combination, hawkish on fossil fuels and explicitly confrontational toward Washington, will resonate with U.S. climate and labor progressives watching the alignment of left-wing forces across North America.

Lewis is a Canadian politician, journalist, and activist who co-directed the documentaries "The Take" and "This Changes Everything" with his wife, author Naomi Klein, and helped launch the Leap Manifesto in 2015. He hosted programs for CBC News and Al Jazeera English including CounterSpin, On the Map with Avi Lewis, and Fault Lines, and held academic posts at both the University of British Columbia and Rutgers University. That combination of media fluency, intellectual credibility in climate circles, and cross-border progressive branding gives the NDP a leader equipped to operate in the populist conversation that has defined left politics in both countries since 2016.

Lewis comes from a long line of New Democrats. His grandfather David Lewis was a founding member and former federal leader; his father Stephen Lewis served as Ontario NDP leader. Stephen Lewis was present in Winnipeg despite serious illness. Days before the vote, Avi Lewis told CBC's Power & Politics that his father was "in his last days" but "sticking around to see the next chapter of democratic socialism written in this country."

What Lewis inherits is ambitious in scope but fragile in institutional terms. The NDP's caucus has fallen out of official party status in the House of Commons, stripping the party of research budgets and restricting its parliamentary speaking rights. Lewis has said he is not in a rush to enter the House of Commons and plans to start his leadership by strengthening the grassroots.

Provincial NDP leaders have already expressed concern about his oil and gas policies, and his no-pipelines stance will test any coalition-building that extends beyond the party's urban, coastal base. Whether his version of democratic socialism can hold a genuinely national constituency together is the central question his leadership opens for Canadian progressives and, increasingly, for anyone in the U.S. watching what a resurgent left flank does to Ottawa's governing room.