After months of campaigning, the federal NDP is currently choosing a new leader and will announce the winner of its contest on March 29.
Our newsroom interviewed the five candidates currently in the race.
Read on to learn more about NDP leadership candidate Avi Lewis:
Avi Lewis is a journalist and activist from Toronto who currently lives in Vancouver.
Lewis has familial connections to the NDP, as his grandfather David Lewis once led the federal NDP, and his father Stephen Lewis once led the Ontario NDP.
For most of the race, Lewis has led the field in fundraising, with more than one million dollars raised — more than double that of Heather McPherson, who has raised the second most.
Lewis believes his affordability-focused message is the reason for his success, saying his campaign is “staying laser-focused on the cost of living crisis,” which he brands “the everyday emergency of just trying to get by in an impossible economy.”
Much of the Lewis campaign is directed towards public options for essential services, including public grocers, internet and cell providers, homebuilders, and pharmaceutical manufacturers, as well as public banking through “postal banking” with Canada Post.
He suggests that private interests have become too influential, leading to powerful oligopolies.
“We’ve got five big grocery chains controlling 80 percent of the market. Six big banks, five big oil companies, three telecommunication companies: Rogers Telus and Bell, with the highest prices almost anywhere,” says Lewis.
His holds a system-wide critique of the economy, believing that the NDP should distinguish itself from the Liberals and Conservatives with a willingness to criticize capitalism.
“There is a country here that is awash in wealth, but those resources are not being directed at you, your families, your weekly bills and monthly bills, your mortgage payments and rent payments,” he says.
While his public option plan will certainly raise questions about costs, Lewis pushes back on this notion.
He says his public grocery plan would cost about $300 million annually, “which is half of one percent of our current defence budget, before we double it and double it again in the next decade as Prime Minister Carney wants to.”
Lewis also champions a Green New Deal, which “would create more than a million good unionized, family-supporting jobs.”
He agrees with the idea of ambitious nation-building projects, but argues that the Liberals and Conservatives would both take the wrong approach.
He says the federal Government is “doubling down on what we’ve always done, which is huge extraction projects that turn nature into money and export raw commodities to other countries.”
Lewis says that with a resource extraction model, most of the benefits are not felt by local communities.
“Our political imagination has been conditioned in this country towards companies and towards the private sector and towards the things that are most profitable for them, instead of the things that are most practical for us,” he remarks.
