s the NDP leadership race began to take shape last fall, I observed Avi Lewis’ rise with what I would consider to be a healthy dose of skepticism. His initial announcement video was sleek and professional. Its style quickly drew comparisons to the recently successful campaign of New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The policies quickly followed, with all-caps titles like Green New Deal, Tax The Rich, and Public Option For Groceries. The puzzle pieces fit together almost too neatly.
Seeing the Lewis name under an NDP banner is not an unusual sight. Avi is the son of former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis, and the grandson of former federal NDP leader David Lewis. The family tree is rooted in Canada’s progressive politics for almost a century, and the family’s stories appear in both of Canada’s premiere biographical TV series: Life and Times (2001) and Who Do You Think You Are (2008). Add all of this up, and his first run for MP in 2021 was recognized by some as almost predestined.
A former documentarian himself, Avi Lewis recognizes himself in that story and acknowledges that, for the men in his family, politics had been the avenue where they connected.
“I think [Stephen’s] relationship with his dad [David] was never very close, because when my dad was growing up, his dad was on the road or on trains as the General Secretary of the CCF,” Lewis spoke of his family’s paternal side. “Like for decades, David was just gone, and so it wasn’t until they were both in politics at the same time, when I was like 4-8 years old, they kind of got close and started talking at the end of every day.”
Lewis, however, was also quick to credit the maternal side of his lineage for shaping his career path. “Actually, I went into my mom’s profession as a journalist… her feminism was the real frame that shaped my sense of social justice, the fundamental injustice of that second-wave feminism of the 60s and 70s, of half the population being structurally disempowered and disenfranchised by the economic system, by the culture, by patriarchy,” Lewis told me. “That was the frame that I went into my life as a political human being with, so the dads and sons story, that tired trope, that’s less than half of it for me, or maybe it’s 50/50.”
I pressed him about the concept of political dynasty in a democracy. “On the left, we inherit struggle.” Lewis continued to explain that “we inherit a sense of mission and of resistance to a status quo that punishes most working people, just as a matter of course, and is deeply unfair and needs to be overturned so on the right, they get wealth and power and position, and on the left, we pass down this struggle from generation to generation.”
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Struggle came up repeatedly in our conversation, as he spoke of struggles alongside the friends, mentors, and allies that he has collected through decades of relationships. It helps that Lewis has spent much of his life outside of electoral politics, which was a different path from his father and grandfather. “The version of democratic socialism that I grew up in was that the electoral system is where change happens,” Lewis explained. “My parents were of the 60s generation, but they were a little bit older.. they were coexisting with the hippie generation, but they weren’t social movement people, they were party people, and the party was the struggle.”
Lewis told me that most of his work over the past 30 years has been around social movements, and that his documentary work was “storytelling in support of struggles around the world – love letters to social movements.” Lewis said that he and his wife, writer and journalist Naomi Klein, would argue about the potential of political change through protest with his parents. Lewis said they would chide, “‘sure kids, you’re getting millions of people in the streets, in this or that movement, but how is that going to change anything?’” while Lewis would respond that “the political system is corrupt, it’s captured by corporations. We need a counter power!”
So what inspired the change from social movements to electoral politics? “It’s pretty simple… …we cannot abdicate this space, whether or not we believe that electoral politics is the best venue for changing the actual conditions of people’s lives. That’s what we’re talking about doing – we’re not talking about making a statement, or moving the Overton window, or moving what’s politically possible. All of that is necessary and extremely urgent too, but what we are talking about is what my parents were arguing about for those decades.”
Lewis’ frustration with many politicians was plain: “The electoral system is too big a part of that dynamic to just leave to the people who are narcissists and lawyers and careerists and cynical power seekers. We can’t leave it to them. Things are too dire,” he said. “We have an all of the above crisis that we’re living through, and we need all-of-the-above change, and that means that we have to use every tool at our disposal.”
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Even if you haven’t seen any of Lewis’ documentaries, like This Changes Everything (2015) or The Take (2004), his affinity for movement makers is clear. My lasting impression of Lewis was of someone who has been thoroughly enmeshed with his community — many of whom are activists, pundits, or academics — in a way that feels relevant and important. To be fully integrated with all of the different components of the progressive movement — environmentalists and socialists, policy wonks and community builders — is a genuine asset that can’t be easily reconstructed.
Take Avi Lewis’ thoughts on climate policy. When he talks about the need for Canada to pivot from being a petrostate to an electrostate, he isn’t just saying it because he happened to read Bill McKibben’s new book on the subject – it’s because he has known Bill for “many, many years.”
He resisted my request to triage his climate priorities — to highlight which planks might be carrying the carbon load. Instead, he wanted to talk about the economic opportunities that other nations were seizing by “converting to an electro-state model, where the energy inputs are free forever, and they will never be controlled by a small number of companies, and it will never be as profitable as digging things up and burning them for energy.”
It is impossible to discuss Lewis’ climate policy without mentioning his wife, journalist Naomi Klein, or the Leap Manifesto, a decade-old document authored by a coalition of Indigenous, environmentalist and labour activists. It’s hard to reconcile it with the state of climate policy in Canada today, but it presaged the global Green New Deal with its comprehensive approach, highlighting the fundamental ties between the environment and the economy.
Regarding the climate platform in his 2026 campaign, Lewis stresses the same all-encompassing design. “It’s not a single policy: when we talk about a 21st century electricity grid, when we talk about an electric bus revolution, when we talk about EVs that are built in Canada with Canadian labour and materials with public ownership, they’re all pieces of it.”
Lewis’ climate platform also echoes the Leap Manifesto in its economic messaging: “we are laser focused on the cost of living emergency… Every climate solution in the platform basically addresses the cost of living emergency, because they all lower people’s costs at a time when people are drowning under the pressure of paying so much for everything. Connecting those two things is fundamental to building the political power for climate action, which we’ve lost in Canada.”
Lewis candidly recognized that Canada is further away from addressing the climate crisis today than over a decade ago. It was one of multiple bracing reminders that progress is neither linear nor guaranteed. Over the course of our talk, we discussed the gains made by Ontario in rent control in the 70s under his father, which was pared back by Mike Harris in the 90s and are under threat today by Doug Ford.
One more signal of decline we discussed was the contemporary rise in fascism. “Fascism takes root when people are scared and desperate and insecure and there are forces in society that give them a way to punch down, blame immigrants, blame indigenous communities, blame trans kids,” Lewis said. “The amount of hate that is being unleashed in this moment is because of the economic situation and the insecurity of everyone.”
Lewis’ family background again provides critical context to these views, this time the struggle of his great-grandfather and family patriarch, Moishe Losz. Originally a tanner in a shtetl in what is now Belarus in the 1890s, Losz also worked for the Jewish Labour Bund and watched wave after wave of war wash over the town until he fled and brought his family to Montreal in 1921. Once in Canada, the man now sometimes called Morris Lewis continued to organize in Jewish worker spaces, specifically in opposition to the rising Nazi movement within North America. Over a century later, Canada is facing the same waves of anger and hostility, and the same family is still a part of the conversation.
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When I asked Avi Lewis who his first calls were when deciding to run for leader, he mentioned Chief Rueben George of the Tsleil-Waututh nation, who invited Lewis to join him in a sweat lodge “to prepare himself.” Chief George is not only another one of those people who Lewis has been in struggle with for decades, he is also the grandson of Chief Dan George, who worked with David Lewis in the 1960s.
Regarding the sweat lodge, Lewis said “it was really hard, but really beautiful, a powerful experience, and in the sweat with Rueben, he said that when it got hard, we should think of our ancestors…I started focusing on each of my grandparents, in turn, my parents, then back, and back, another generation, as much as I know from the family stories.” As they reached the end of their first round of the sweat, “the guys who were supporting the sweat gave me a task, which was to brush the ash off of the big stones that have been heating in the fire, and say ‘All my relations’ for each one. So they carried the first stone, and I knocked the cedar branch against it, and I said ‘All my relations’, and it hit me that, as many times as I’ve heard that phrase and said it in different contexts, I suddenly felt it – all the generations of people that led up to this life going back…I just burst into tears.”
Lewis paused for a moment. “That’s not dynasty. That’s something else…what I feel in this work, it’s not an inheritance, but a connectedness, to all the people that brought us here.”
After our interview, I reflected back on my instinctive skepticism of Avi Lewis. I think it is natural for progressive-minded folks to be leery of people with generational advantages, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are advantages. Lewis’ ability to call on his lifetime of relationships is an asset that shouldn’t be dismissed. Furthermore, while scrutiny is warranted, we should judge people by how they choose to use their privilege — and by that standard, Avi Lewis has put in the work. More than that, he has stayed in the struggle.
Editor’s Note: This article appears in a series of interviews with NDP candidates by The Leveller.
Editor’s Note (2026-02-27): An earlier version of this article incorrectly named Hailey Asquin as Avi Lewis’ campaign video director.
