After Avi Lewis was selected as the new leader of the NDP, I gave a long interview with a journalist assessing his strengths and weaknesses. That interview was then posted onto a left-wing online group. I found it, and readied myself for the inevitable avalanche of criticism and insults.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/69ecbb304c014.image.png\")
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Photo credit \u2014 Avi Lewis Facebook<\/p>\n
To my surprise, the comments were generally positive, with one praising me for being reasonable and fair in my assessment of Lewis.<\/p>\n
It’s not often that I receive positive feedback from this crowd. So I’ll take it!<\/p>\n
But the response led me to realize two things.<\/p>\n
First, we often hear about the anti-Conservative bias of the central Canadian media. It’s easy to find examples of journalists giving Pierre Poilievre a rough ride while letting Mark Carney skate past broken promises and inconsistencies with no accountability whatsoever.<\/p>\n
But after Lewis was elected, those same journalists dismissed him as a left-wing kook who had no chance of ever improving the NDP’s standing.<\/p>\n
What this made me think was that the pro-Liberal establishment media is, above all, a defender of the Canadian establishment. Poilievre threatens the establishment, so the media attacks him. Lewis, who also challenges the Liberal order in Ottawa, gets the same treatment.<\/p>\n
That was my first thought. The second was that the media had failed to give us an honest look at Lewis. There were attacks and dismissals, but not a serious examination.<\/p>\n
That’s too bad because Lewis is an interesting politician, and his arrival in federal politics could lead to major changes in Canadian politics.<\/p>\n
So who is Avi Lewis?<\/p>\n
First and most importantly, he’s not Jagmeet Singh.<\/p>\n
Singh, more than any other public figure, is responsible for the current sad state of Canadian politics. Under his leadership, the NDP propped up Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government even as the former PM’s popularity collapsed. The Liberal Party, it seemed, was down for the count.<\/p>\n
But Singh never found the courage to defeat the Liberals and force an election. If he had, he might well be leader of the opposition today, with the Liberal Party reduced to a parliamentary rump and the country far better off as a result.<\/p>\n
Instead, Singh gave the Liberals time to push out Trudeau and bring in Carney. The rest is history.<\/p>\n
Singh appeared in countless TikTok videos and failed to put forward serious left-wing ideas that would make the NDP a real alternative to the Liberals. The result was the worst showing in the modern history of the party in the 2025 election.<\/p>\n
In winning the NDP leadership, Lewis took possession of a broken party.<\/p>\n
Lewis differs from Singh in that he seems to be both principled and daring. Throughout the leadership race, he put forward attention-grabbing policy proposals that raised eyebrows and had Liberals and their media allies clutching their pearls.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most talked-about example was his idea to open a chain of public grocery stores to help keep costs low. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani famously promised this in his successful election campaign. And Toronto mayor Olivia Chow is rolling out her own public chain.<\/p>\n
This is the left’s answer to massive food inflation in Canada, which cruelly deprives low-income families of basic groceries and sends them to food banks looking for assistance. That is a genuine scandal, and the Carney government\u2019s failure to address it a major problem.<\/p>\n
Are public grocery stores a good idea? Of course not. What the grocery sector needs is genuine competition, which would let the market drive prices down. A giant, expensive government-run grocery chain would likely just find new ways to waste taxpayer money.<\/p>\n
So it’s a bad idea.<\/p>\n
But at least it’s an idea.<\/p>\n
And when compared to the jumbled mix of \u201csolutions\u201d Carney has served up on food inflation, we might be surprised by how many Canadians are drawn to Lewis’ proposal.<\/p>\n
Lewis has rolled out several other ideas since then. The most notable is a proposal to ban surveillance pricing, a shadowy practice used by giant grocery corporations. Again, this was an attention-grabbing proposal that received significant media coverage.<\/p>\n
What this all suggests is Lewis knows something the NDP seemed to forget under Singh: to win as a left-wing party, you have to respect Canadians enough to give them real left-wing policy ideas to sink their teeth into. And Lewis has the communication skills to push those ideas into the public conversation.<\/p>\n
Can Lewis resurrect the NDP? I don’t know.<\/p>\n
But I do know that dismissing his chances would be foolish.<\/p>\n
\u2014Royce Koop is a panellist on Inside Politics<\/a>, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Manitoba, and a political columnist for Klein Media.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After Avi Lewis was selected as the new leader of the NDP, I gave a long interview with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629848,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194296],"tags":[218912,49,48,15148,235839,235838,235840,22073],"class_list":{"0":"post-629847","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-winnipeg","8":"tag-avi-lewis","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-canadian-politics","12":"tag-media-bias","13":"tag-ndp-leadership","14":"tag-public-grocery-stores","15":"tag-winnipeg"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}