Avi Lewis wins - prepare to fight the NDP's right wing

Avi Lewis won the NDP leadership race on the first ballot, cleanly beating the second place finisher, Edmonton MP Heather McPherson.

 

It was a decisive win that pushed against the party establishment who were largely championing McPherson. Other candidates represented the pull of the status quo of “respectable” politics. This vote was a clear rejection of that.

 

The leadership vote followed another upset as the continuity slate, championed by the union bureaucrats, for the officers of the federal party council came up short to a new slate closely tied to the Lewis campaign. This is another sign of how out of touch union leaders are from their members - both left and right members.

 

Lewis was able to build momentum by relating to the politics of the movements against the war on Iran and against the genocide in Palestine and by building platform planks on a green new deal style politics. He tapped into the anger bubbling up against the bosses calling for a public grocery option and to tax the rich to pay for social programs.

 

The left should applaud the victory as a chance to push for a left pole of attraction that can begin to go after Mark Carney and the Liberals who are enacting hard right neo-liberal policies — attacking immigrants, gutting social services and massively increasing military spending.

 

The NDP and particularly the federal leadership paid a high price for propping up the Trudeau government as it attacked workers rights and trampled Indigenous sovereignty. That support made the NDP look irrelevant to the political scene in Canada.

 

The right in the party is not happy with the victory. 

 

Even before the convention, NDP knives were out for Lewis. Provincial leaders who are in bed with oil and gas corporations have started sewing divisions in the party by attacking Lewis for being divisive. Back in February, Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi told reporters that he had met with Lewis, McPherson and Ashton to warn them not to get in the way of his campaign against the Alberta Conservatives. In an interview with the CBC he said “We don’t have the lux­ury in Alberta to get caught up in ideo­lo­gical battles … within our own party.”

 

Immediately after Lewis’s win, Nenshi told CBC that the direction of the federal NDP is “not in the interests of Alberta.”

 

Similarly Carla Beck, leader of the Saskatchewan NDP refused to meet with Lewis during the leadership campaign, and said, “it’s impossible to support — and respect — working people without respecting the jobs they have, not the ones you think they should have.... The positions you have expressed publicly... are antithetical to the values of a party built with and for working people.”

 

Of course, it’s impossible to respect working people if you place the need for oil and gas profits above the lives of the 600 people who died in the 2021 BC heat dome that also created the wildfire that destroyed Lytton BC. This reverence for fossil fuel profits is also responsible for the wildfires that destroyed much of Fort McMurray and Jasper.

 

British Columbia NDP Premier David Eby, and Nova Scotia NDP leader Claudia Chender refused to even attend the national NDP convention.

 

The greatest danger for the federal NDP right now is the party’s old guard who have successfully turned the NDP into a neoliberal party that looks after the interests of the 1%.

 

Lewis sounds different. It remains to be seen if he will moderate his tone as so many have before him. If he does not, then it will be up to the membership of the NDP to save him from the NDP apparatus. We saw with the campaigns of Corbyn in the UK Labour Party and Sanders in the US Democratic party (which is not a social democratic party) that the right wing will organize to lose an election rather than see a left candidate win.

 

The prospects for the membership of the NDP being able to control their own party are not good. In BC, NDP Premier Eby has accelerated the slide to the right that has been necessitated by his government’s support for massive increases in fracked gas extraction and export.

 

Eby has stolen planks from the “freedom convoy” inspired by BC conservatives. He supports making it harder for accused to be released on bail and he has a plan to replace mental health care with incarceration. After the historic land claims win for the Quw’utsun (Cowichan) Nation he joined the racist right in denouncing the decision and says that the province will amend its own UNDRIP legislation so that it doesn’t apply to provincial laws.

 

After all this, he won 83% of delegates against calling for a leadership review. This shows how obedient the membership has become to a party that doesn’t answer to them.

 

In order for Avi Lewis to succeed he needs to empower the membership of the NDP to control the direction of the party. This will not be easy.

 

He will be faced with choosing building outside parliamentary channels or succumbing to the logic of parliamentary politics.

 

Speed is of the essence - they should launch socialist renewal forums in cities across the country to build up and prepare to defeat the right in the party and build opposition fights in the unions.