Avi Lewis won the NDP leadership race yesterday in a decisive first-ballot victory, taking 56 per cent of the vote to become the party's new federal leader.

Lewis topped a field of five candidates that included Alberta MP Heather McPherson, union leader Rob Ashton, farmer Tony McQuail, and municipal councillor Tanille Johnston.

The new leader is no stranger to NDP politics. His grandfather, David Lewis, led the party from 1971 to 1975, and his father Stephen Lewis led the Ontario NDP. Avi Lewis is a filmmaker and activist who now inherits a party at a historic low: six MPs, weak polling, and roughly $13 million in debt.

A new equilibrium

This result will change the current equilibrium of Canadian politics. The deepest cut: this hurts the Green Party and Elizabeth May. Longtime rivals of the NDP, the Green Party has built its modern base around radical environmentalism and antizionism. Lewis has embraced both positions and was an original agitant of the LEAP Manifesto, a sweeping policy document he organized with his wife Naomi Klein in 2015. (A bit of trivia: Klein actually wrote the initial draft of the manifesto before convening a summit of activists in Toronto; Lewis organized the launch at TIFF alongside his documentary This Changes Everything, based on Klein's book of the same name. It was very much Klein's intellectual project that Lewis brought to political life.) The manifesto called for a rapid transition off fossil fuels, massive public investment in green infrastructure, and a wholesale reordering of the Canadian economy around climate justice and Indigenous rights. It was endorsed by David Suzuki, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and thousands of activists, but NDP leader Tom Mulcair kept it at arm's length during the 2015 campaign. Now its principal author leads the party. There is little daylight left between Lewis's NDP and the Greens on the issues that define the Green brand.

Liberal leader Mark Carney occupies the centre and centre-right of the political spectrum in Canada. He enjoyed no real challenge on the left. Jagmeet Singh was left without much room to build his party when Justin Trudeau made a strategic decision in 2015 to run toward the left, telling Canadian voters that his government wouldn't balance the budget and would run deficits by design. Trudeau ran to the left of then-leader Thomas Mulcair, who — assured by the general political consensus of the day — was convinced that running deficits was political suicide for the NDP. Now that Trudeau has left the stage, there is no such impediment to an NDP leader claiming the left of the political spectrum; Lewis can just walk in. This means lost ground for Carney on the left. He can't count on those votes as much as his predecessor could with Singh at the helm of Canada's socialist party.

This will cause Carney to more naturally occupy the centre and even challenge the Conservatives on the centre-right. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has an opportunity to instead squeeze Carney from the right and centre-right with effective wedges. Carney will likely respond in kind. Carney's announcement on March 26th that Canada has reached the NATO 2% of GDP defence spending benchmark — the first time since 1990 — is a particular signal that should cause Poilievre to worry about his flank of the political spectrum. But Carney will be judged by his deeds, not his words. If the Canadian economy doesn't get better, if we don't get things built, if Canada fails to get a good trade agreement with the United States, these are all factors which will harm Carney's tenure more than a handful of Parliamentary motions.

So, in sum: Lewis' rebalancing of the Canadian spectrum poses risk for Poilievre too.

Lewis' opportunity

Canadians are very much focused on US politics and are very much aware of its excesses. Only Lewis is now in a position to embrace them. Poilievre cannot embrace the bombastic nature of Trump and the MAGA Republicans (not that he'd want to), and Carney cannot credibly interface with the American political sphere except adversarially. Lewis is in a unique position to amplify his influence via US progressive political figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Zohran Mamdani. As the activist US political left jockeys for its 2028 nominee for President through what will soon be a contentious primary season, the Lewis NDP has the ability to be unfazed cheerleaders of the process — capturing Canadian leftist attention in the process. Neither Poilievre nor Carney can similarly take advantage of such passionate Canadian political attention focused on the United States. Poilievre did go on the Joe Rogan podcast to relieve tension that existed among his base when he missed doing so during the election. He is not building his case with Canadian voters by exciting US conservatives, but he is doing what he can to meet the expectations of his base at home.

But for Lewis, plugging into an established US progressive infrastructure may prove more reliable than some of the underbaked activist movements at home.

Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein is Avi Lewis' wife. And a more prominent figure than Lewis in her own right. This is a unique factor in Canadian politics where a politician's spouse is an established political player. Used strategically, she'll be an asset for Lewis in building that US progressive political attention (for the purpose of exciting the centre-left in Canada). This also puts Klein in play as a political topic, which is something Canadian political people have been loath to do with political spouses. Klein seems different there and may indeed embrace this role.

The radical reshift of the NDP

There has been a radical reshift in Canadian politics on the left. The NDP has always had a history of favouring America's enemies as a counterbalance to the western imperialism they perceive. So, embracing Venezuelan and Cuban socialism has been a litmus test for leftists in the NDP for decades now. There is now an embrace of Islamism that is also prevalent even as Islamism in the Middle East is being reoriented with the containment of Iran and abandonment of Islamist power projection via Iran's proxies against Israel. Now the Canadian left stands against a growing alliance in the Middle East against Iranian aggression: even Qatar is recalculating its allegiance, while Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia join the UAE against Khomeinism. We may see the last supporters of the Iranian regime, not in Iran, but in progressive bastions in Canada.

A fractured party

Lewis also faces division within his own ranks. Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi said that the direction of the federal party under Lewis "is not in the interests of Alberta," reaffirming that his provincial party believes in Canadian energy and more pipelines. Saskatchewan NDP leader Carla Beck went further, turning down Lewis's invitation to meet and calling his positions on natural resource development "ideological and unrealistic." Opposition to resource development is a political third rail in the prairie provinces, and Lewis's history of agitating against the fossil fuel sector — including cheering for the defeat of the Alberta NDP government — puts him at odds with the provincial leaders who actually have to win seats in western Canada.

We saw the Palestinian and Venezuelan flags flying behind Avi Lewis as he took the stage to give his victory speech. This will do more to alienate Canadians looking for an alternative to Carney than build bridges. Lewis will have to move on quickly from steeping himself among the activists to putting himself on a mainstream footing. Given his background of activism, his path to doing that isn't all that clear.