{"id":253562,"date":"2021-05-19T17:47:17","date_gmt":"2021-05-19T14:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/avi-lewis-you-mean-this-isnt-how-to-kill-the-ndp\/"},"modified":"2021-05-19T17:47:17","modified_gmt":"2021-05-19T14:47:17","slug":"avi-lewis-you-mean-this-isnt-how-to-kill-the-ndp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/avi-lewis-you-mean-this-isnt-how-to-kill-the-ndp\/","title":{"rendered":"#Avi Lewis: You mean this isn’t how to kill the NDP?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Avi Lewis: You mean this isn’t how to kill the NDP?<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Something there is about the pundit\u2019s life that doesn\u2019t mind a fight, so when I heard that Avi Lewis (kids: ask your parents!) will be running for the NDP in the next federal election, I called Anne McGrath.<\/p>\n

I suppose I could have called Avi Lewis, but (a) Campbell Clark over at the Globe<\/em> already did that<\/a> and (b) as expected, Avi Lewis thinks Avi Lewis\u2019s entry into electoral politics is a great<\/em> idea. What Anne McGrath thinks about it, I could only guess. So I had to ask.<\/p>\n

McGrath is the national director of the NDP and is, to some extent, the living repository of the party\u2019s memory of what it felt like to be on a roll. She was, with Brad Lavigne and Jamey Heath and Brian Topp and a few others, part of the small group who worked with Jack Layton through that first, terribly disapp<\/a>ointing election of 2004, and then the barely less disappointing election of 2006, and the only slightly more encouraging election of 2008. Finally McGrath and Layton and most of the others basked in what everybody else called the amazing overnight success of the 2011 \u201cOrange Wave\u201d election, which saw the federal party win an unprecedented\u2014and, to say the least, since unmatched\u2014103 seats.<\/p>\n

But I wanted to ask her about Lewis because of what came next: McGrath played a key role in Rachel Notley\u2019s 2015 Alberta provincial NDP victory. Also unprecedented, also since unmatched. McGrath was still Notley\u2019s deputy chief of staff in 2016, when the federal NDP gathered in Edmonton for a national convention.<\/p>\n

Two big things happened at that convention. One, the national leader, Tom Mulcair, faced a leadership review vote from party members, and damned if he didn\u2019t lose it outright. Two, a bunch of left activists, many not particularly affiliated with the NDP, showed up to discuss their vision of a future Canada, the so-called Leap Manifesto. The manifesto had been unveiled by its proponents during the 2015 election. Mulcair had greeted it the way your vegan cousin might greet a gift of lamb shanks, except the analogy doesn\u2019t really work because there\u2019s no way Mulcair was the vegan in this scenario. After the NDP lost seats and votes in that election, the Leapers were ready to try again at the 2016 campaign.<\/p>\n

The Leap manifesto\u2019s proponents call it, in a website that still operates<\/a> six years later, \u201cA Call for a Canada Based on Caring For the Earth and One Another.\u201d You\u2019re right: Sounds like social<\/a>ism<\/em>. When delegates to the Edmonton convention voted to debate the manifesto, at the riding level, over the next two years, Maclean\u2019s<\/em> took it well. Here was our next cover:<\/p>\n

\"\"I tell you, it never stops being a fun place to work. The \u201ctwo eco-activists\u201d in the photo are author Naomi Klein and her husband, Avi Lewis. She wrote some noteworthy books, including the global bestseller No Logo<\/em>. His dad is a former leader of the Ontario NDP. Surely this was some kind of coup.<\/p>\n

Lewis patiently explained that he intended no coup. (\u201cI wasn\u2019t really engaged in the leadership question, and like everyone else, I was stunned by the result.\u201d) And then again a few months later. Was he interested in being a candidate? \u201cNot in the slightest.\u201d<\/p>\n

The central schism in Edmonton was between Notley\u2019s provincial NDP, who were trying to sell oil to pay for the rest of their agenda, and the Leapers, who wrote that there was \u201cno longer an excuse for building new infrastructure projects that lock us into increased extraction decades into the future.\u201d That meant no new pipelines.<\/p>\n

Cranky exchanges ensued. Notley called the Leapers naive, ill-considered and tone-deaf<\/a>. Fully two years later, Lewis tweeted<\/a> that Notley\u2019s government was \u201crelentlessly hostile\u201d to Leap because it had been \u201ccompletely captured by the oil industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what of Anne McGrath, who\u2019s working full-time on a national campaign whose candidate in West Vancouver\u2014Sunshine Coast\u2014Sea to Sky is half of that half-decade-old slanging match?<\/p>\n

Are you comfortable speaking on the record, I asked? \u201cSure,\u201d she said. A refreshingly old-fashioned answer. There really were sharp divisions over Leap, she said. \u201cThe NDP [provincial] government was working really hard to get a better price for resources. I think acknowledging that a transition [i.e. a long-term global transition away from fossil fuels] has to happen, but also that as long as there were still oil and gas resources, that they should at least be paid a fair price. And we were hampered by the lack of market access.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s with the Lewis candidacy? \u201cI would say that there is a lot more that unites us\u2014I mean, it\u2019s a truism, but it\u2019s because it\u2019s true\u2014there is a lot more that unites us than divides us,\u201d McGrath said. \u201cBut people have different approaches to how to deal with natural resources. And I believe there has to be a way of dealing with transition that doesn\u2019t leave all those energy workers behind, and that is real. And that actually talks about how we transition to more renewables, more clean tech, all those kinds of things. And I\u2019ve had conversations with Avi about that and he\u2019s very much in agreement with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

I sensed that McGrath was making some effort to put ideas into words that had not yet been neatly tucked into talking points. \u201cIt sounds like there\u2019s still a tension there,\u201d I said. \u201cAt least a conceptual tension.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah,\u201d she said readily. \u201cMm-hmm. Mm-hmm.\u201d Again, refreshingly old-fashioned. And a bit disorienting. I mean, I work in Justin Trudeau\u2019s Ottawa. I\u2019m not used to hearing people acknowledge conflict.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things I\u2019ve been thinking about a lot, actually, over the last few years is how we reconcile some of the differences we have,\u201d McGrath said. \u201cIt has always been the case\u2014I\u2019ve talked to Rachel about this as well\u2014that there are some regional differences in the country.\u201d She mentioned the constitutional debates of the 1990s, and uranium in Saskatchewan: How can you be anti-nuclear in a place with uranium mines? Sometimes, the NDP found, you can\u2019t<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One way to handle a potentially problematic candidate, I suggested, is to let him run in a riding the NDP has never won. Of course McGrath wasn\u2019t buying that. \u201cHe is very rooted in that community. That\u2019s the riding he wanted to run in. And looking at his activism over the last few years, you can see how significant place is in his politics. He\u2019s very committed to that riding and I think he\u2019s committed over the long haul.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other thing that\u2019s happened, and it\u2019s important to acknowledge this, is that the centre of gravity on some of these debates has shifted markedly. The line in Leap that set Notley off was this idea that there should be no new natural-resource infrastructure. Well, Notley\u2019s government, and then Jason Kenney\u2019s, have continued to work hard to ignore that edict, and pipeline<\/a> after pipeline<\/a> keeps running into almost surreal levels<\/a> of practical difficulty. And on Tuesday, the head of the International Energy Agency made headlines worldwide<\/a> by calling for an immediate end to new oil and gas projects if the world is to have any hope of meeting net-zero emissions targets for 2050.<\/p>\n

Re-reading Leap, in fact, one finds very little that today\u2019s Trudeau Liberal cabinet ministers would even blink at, if instructed to send out excerpt after excerpt on their Twitter and Instagram accounts.<\/p>\n

I mean: \u201cWe want a universal program to build energy efficient homes, and retrofit existing housing, ensuring that the lowest income communities and neighbourhoods will benefit first\u2026 High-speed rail powered by renewables and affordable public transit can unite every community in this country.\u201d Insert flag emojis randomly and the tweets practically write themselves.<\/p>\n

Finding Leap a bit de trop<\/em> is no longer a realistic option for the NDP: this is a moment where electoral and ideological, or at least idealistic, imperatives converge. The NDP has lost seats against Trudeau\u2019s Liberals two elections in a row, first because he ran to Mulcair\u2019s left and then because he was able to persuade Jagmeet Singh\u2019s target voters that they couldn\u2019t risk handing power to the Conservatives by accident. He will certainly repeat that pitch next time. Twitter legions warning of a CPC-NDP-media complex to wreck Canada\u2019s one hope of escaping the abyss, the Liberals, will do the same.<\/p>\n

The NDP\u2019s rebuttal will be that Trudeau is at best a shaky steward of his purported values. Lewis and Leap co-author Martin Lukacs<\/a> have been rehearsing this rebuttal for years, not least in Lukacs\u2019 sharp and underrated book The Trudeau Formula<\/em><\/a>. This corner offers no prediction of their success or the NDP\u2019s. It\u2019s not even easy any more to find video of the cable-TV debate show Lewis used to host. Probably few Canadians under 60 have a clear idea who he even is. But the impulse to reach out to him, rather than letting old divisions fester, is probably healthy.
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