Avi Lewis as NDP Leader

 

The Canadian NDP has just selected Avi Lewis as their new leader. All the pundits, predictably, are calling this a big mistake. He was the furthest left of the available candidates. They say he cannot possibly expand their voting base.

This is their idee fixe, that everyone should run to the middle. This does not work in a time when people are genuinely upset with government. This does not work in a revolutionary period. Consider Ronald Reagan—he was the farthest right candidate for the Republicans in 1980. And he swept the electoral college. 

Right now, voters everywhere are demanding change. Consider the relative success recently of parties of the far left and far right. The Greens, Reform, and Restore in the UK. Trump, Sanders and Mamdani in the US. Meloni, Takaichi, Milei and the like. Granted, the surge is stronger on the far right than the far left, but both are surging. It might even be true that without appealing to the moderate middle the NDP can never win a majority, or enough support to form a government. But that was never a realistic goal for the NDP. Their reason d’etre is to be a protest party.

If the NDP moves to the middle, they simply overlap the Liberals. Why would a moderate then vote NDP, who have no history of ever winning government, over the Liberals, Canada’s “natural governing party”? If the policy proposals are more or less the same, it makes no sense.

Moreover, that is the very strategy recently pursued by Jagmeet Singh; we see the results. The NDP becomes irrelevant.