Tammy Robert: Avi Lewis is the best chance the NDP have to matter

The party’s safe strategy failed spectacularly. Why not take a risk?

By: Tammy Robert

After the annihilation of last April’s election left the federal NDP clinging to a humiliating seven seats, the vultures weren’t just circling — they were already cleaning off the bones.

The party clearly needs a rebuild. But how? We’ve spent months listening to the same tired post-mortems about “losing the working class” and “identity politics, ” blah blah blah. Nothing new there.

But something interesting is happening in the leadership race to replace Jagmeet Singh, who according to Instagram, anyway, is now living his best life.

Amidst the debris, people are starting to whisper a different “J” word.

Jack.

As in Layton.

I know, I know. Comparing anyone to Saint Jack is usually political blasphemy, especially when the person in question is Avi Lewis — the co-author of the Leap Manifesto, the guy who supposedly wanted to shut down every pipeline in western Canada before lunch, a polished scion of Canada’s socialist dynasty.

Like many, I admit I rolled my eyes when Avi Lewis announced his run for leader. Just what the party needs when it’s on life support: a Toronto documentarian telling coal miners in Estevan that they need to learn to code.

But recently my phone beeped. It was a message from an insider — someone who has spent decades in the trenches, a leftist who hates the “woke” culture wars, someone who I expected to hate Avi Lewis with the fire of a thousand suns.

That’s not what the message I read had to say.

“I thought I wouldn’t like him. I’m not really into things like the Leap Manifesto etc. and I thought he would be too radical for me. But ... I think he is the most Jack-like. I could see him slinging beer at the neighbourhood pub. He’s way more relatable than I thought he would be.”*

Hold on. Slinging beer at the pub? Avi Lewis?

“I spent about half an hour with him,” my source added. “He’s polished. His French sounds decent to me. I think his ideas are a bit out there but what could be worse than what we’ve had?”

And there it is. The question that should haunt every New Democrat terrified of a “radical” leader: What could be possibly be worse than what they’ve had lately You’re sitting at seven seats. You aren’t the conscience of parliament; you’re a minivan carpool. The “safe” strategy — the strategy of trying to be the Liberals, but more warm and fuzzy — has failed spectacularly.

This brings us to the competition.

For all the high-minded talk about “movement politics,” this race has also turned into a straight-up test of who can keep the lights on. According to the latest filings and campaign leaks, Avi Lewis is lapping the field, while Heather McPherson and Rob Ashton are doing what New Democrats have always done best: scraping together just enough money at the last possible minute to avoid being bounced from the ballot.

I have a lot of time for McPherson. She’s an Alberta MP, which means she knows how to win in enemy territory. She’s smart, she’s competent, and she’s kept the orange lights on in Edmonton Strathcona while the rest of the map turned blue. Another insider described her as “dull, but electable.”

In a normal year, “dull but electable” is a winning bumper sticker. But when you are running to lead a party that’s polling within the margin of error of the Green party, “dull” is a death sentence.

On the money front, McPherson has quietly pulled in close to six figures, respectable but hardly earth-shattering in a race where the entry fee alone is designed to weed out the faint of heart.

Then there’s Rob Ashton. The union boss. The real deal — a guy who actually punches a clock and fights for workers. He’s reportedly growing on people.

What he has not grown, at least compared to Lewis, is a war chest; Ashton’s people talk confidently about “momentum,” but they have yet to show numbers that suggest anything more than a solid, old-school labour campaign grinding its way from deadline to death.

Let’s be real about the political landscape we are living in right now.

Recently — at the federal Liberal Christmas Party in Ottawa to be exact — Prime Minister Mark Carney stood up and included a line in his speech about how his party would be creating “thousands of good-paying union jobs.” The crowd went wild.

If only the party of labour was just as committed to unions. The Liberals under Carney are eating the NDP’s lunch on labour rhetoric. A union leader like Rob Ashton is great, but against the slick, corporate-labour hybrid of Carney, he risks looking like a relic. The NDP doesn’t need a “labour guy” who sounds like the 1970s. They need a communicator who can cut through the noise, right now.

Which brings us back to Lewis.

The “Jack Layton” factor wasn’t about policy. Let’s not forget that Jack was a downtown Toronto academic with a PhD. He wasn’t a mill worker. But he had an energy — a kind of infectious joy — that made you want to believe in him.

He made the radical feel reasonable. He made you feel like he was on your side, even if you didn’t understand cap-and-trade — or vote NDP at all.

Lewis has spent his life in front of a camera. He knows how to talk to people, not at them. In just over 100 days, his campaign says it has hauled in more than $750,000, from roughly 5,500 donors and with nearly $8,000 a day still rolling in as the final deadline looms. That is a staggering figure in a leadership race for a party sitting on seven lonely seats, and it blows past the early-quarter records Jagmeet Singh set in a much healthier era for the NDP. It proves that there is energy out there waiting to be tapped, but it isn’t waiting for “safe.” It’s waiting for a vision.

Is the Leap Manifesto scary to voters in Saskatchewan and Alberta? You bet. But is Avi Lewis himself scary? In Quebec and Ontario, where it actually matters?

That’s the gamble. If he can do what Jack did — if he can walk into a legion hall, buy a round, and explain a wealth tax in a way that makes a guy in a truck cap nod his head — then the actual policy details matter less than the vibe.

The problem for Lewis is that the vibe sometimes veers from Jack-style hopeful to faculty-lounge abstract at the worst possible moments. When Donald Trump’s White House stunned the world by snatching Nicolás Maduro out of Caracas in a predawn military operation and openly boasting about seizing Venezuela’s oil, Lewis responded with a clumsy, almost knee-jerk defence that read like a Facebook post from 2019 rather than a would-be prime minister in 2026. He thundered that “the US has attacked a country, kidnapped its head of state, and is seizing its oil,” invoking the Monroe Doctrine and international law, yet did not come close to acknowledging that Maduro is a brutal authoritarian whose victims might actually welcome seeing him in handcuffs.

That kind of stuff helps fuel the refrain of fear coming from opposing camps that Lewis is too extreme and will destroy the party.

Destroy it to what, exactly? You have seven seats! You are already destroyed! You can’t fall off the floor.

If the NDP picks Heather McPherson, they might claw back to 15 seats and feel very responsible. If they pick Rob Ashton, they might solidify their base but never grow beyond it.

But if they pick Avi Lewis, they draw a line in the sand. They become an actual alternative, not just Liberal Lite.

Will Avi Lewis ever be prime minister? Probably not. But let’s face it: neither will Heather McPherson or Rob Ashton.

The goal for the federal NDP right now isn’t 24 Sussex; the goal is survival. The goal is relevance. The goal is to be a party that matters enough for people to hate it again, rather than just pity it.

Lewis brings the fight. He brings the money. And surprisingly, he brings the beer-hall relatability that the party has been missing since 2011.

If he’s evoking the “J” word, maybe the NDP should stop worrying about the ghost of the past and start worrying about having a future. Because right now, “radical” looks a hell of a lot better than “extinct.”

Tammy Robert is a Saskatchewan-based public relations expert, political blogger, and commentator known for her analysis of Saskatchewan politics and governance. She is the author of Our Sask and has contributed commentary to CBC, Maclean’s, and various media and publications.

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