Catherine Cullen: Now let’s get back to my tour of West Block, home of the House of Commons, with Avi Lewis. At the beginning of the show, we heard the NDP leader going through security. Unlike MPs who have a seat in Parliament, he doesn’t have a pass to just get in through the front doors. So we’ve brought him to the visitor’s entrance.
[At the security entrance]
Catherine Cullen: OK, so right now, Avi Lewis is in line next to a school group to get access to West Block. So we just have to wait for him to go through the security scanners. We can keep this tour going. OK, here he comes. Today, I’m going to show him around and ask him about his plans for this place and his party.
Avi Lewis: That went really smoothly.
Catherine Cullen: OK, we’re going to go by here. Parliament Hill gift shop. Enter through the gift shop.
Avi Lewis: Enter through the gift shop. I like that we do things differently in Canada. On the way out, if you need to get any like…
Catherine Cullen: Chachkas. There are actually — this is a true story — there are now Parliament Hill pickleball rackets in there. Like they have everything.
Avi Lewis: Catherine, I thought you were going to say there were Parliament Hill pickles, which I would have been very excited about.
Catherine Cullen: Personally, me too.
Avi Lewis: I think I’d enjoy that a little bit more. Ottawa has a better pickle market than most Canadian cities. I’d say Ottawa, Winnipeg.
Catherine Cullen: Where do you go for your pickles?
Avi Lewis: I mean, I’m very specific about a full sour dill. And it really relies on the deli culture. Toronto is slipping. I don’t want to talk smack about the centre of the universe, but it is harder to get a real dill.
Catherine Cullen: I will say talking smack about the centre of the universe does tend to go over well in Ottawa.
Avi Lewis: Right.
Catherine Cullen: So we’re just going to head up a few flights of stairs here. And we’re not allowed to record in the chamber in the House of Commons. But you and I will pop in and we’ll just take a little look.
Avi Lewis: You know what? I haven’t been in the chamber. I have been adjacent, but I haven’t been in.
Catherine Cullen: Fantastic. So this is going to be a new experience for you.
Avi Lewis: You know, I’m actually feeling it. I have my own ideas right now about when and where I’ll run and by-elections and how important it is to get in the House. All of that aside, it’s moving to be here. There’s a sense of consequence in just realizing what we’re here to do. It’s big.
Catherine Cullen: What you’re here to do, right? I mean, the People’s House — there’s a lot of people in there who are supposed to be doing the people’s business, much of which we don’t see on TV. Is that about the business not making it onto TV, or that the business isn’t getting done?
Avi Lewis: Yeah, I absolutely feel as a Canadian that we are losing touch with a kind of politics that corresponds both to our daily reality and also to a sense of elevated purpose in politics. And that’s where I feel like an outsider-insider, old school kind of person growing up in the politics of the 1970s with my dad and my grandpa and politics of that time.
My dad was friends with Brian Mulroney until Brian passed. Prime Minister Mulroney, excuse me, who called him a week before and they reminisced about the work that they did together fighting apartheid in the 1980s. I don’t know. I try to imagine that with today’s political figures and it’s harder.
Catherine Cullen: I read that, in fact, when former Prime Minister Mulroney knew he was dying and he called your dad, he said, I love you. He did. And that your dad said it back. And I just found that breathtaking, particularly when you think about the political environment right now. It’s hard to imagine those kinds of exchanges.
Avi Lewis: Exactly. Well, I mean, I tease my dad relentlessly for decades about being friends with Brian Mulroney, you know, playing the more ideological spawn. But I think it’s really touching. And it wasn’t just a bromance. What Prime Minister Mulroney said in that last conversation, what Dad passed on, was that the work that they did together fighting apartheid in South Africa was the most meaningful of his life. That’s what Mulroney said. That’s the kind of sense of purpose which is available to politics and which we so rarely see today.
Catherine Cullen: What is interesting about that is that your dad, of course, didn’t work in this place. Obviously, he was the leader of the Ontario NDP. But that relationship with Brian Mulroney — it happened outside of this place. You decided to get the work done in this place, which wasn’t where your dad was getting that work done. So just before we go in — what does this place mean to you?
Avi Lewis: Well, I think it’s 55 years since my grandfather was in this place. And I’ve always been more focused on federal politics. And I think it has to do — if I’m really honest, and this is going to be super geeky, so apologies in advance — but I think it has to do with what I think politics is for. I think that there are a lot of people who think that they could be better managers of the status quo, that the system is largely stable and working in a country like this, and that their party or their philosophy, or they personally could be better at steering the ship. I think things are so deeply, grindingly unfair and bad and getting worse that we need fundamental structural changes. And I’m interested in trying that. It’s an experiment to see if politics can accommodate that kind of worldview, but it can only happen at the federal level. The federal government is the only level of government that has the resources and the capacity and the levers to change the field of play for politics in the country writ large. Of course, all levels are important, but the federal government is the government that can change how the system works.
Catherine Cullen: So you’re conducting an experiment?
Avi Lewis: Absolutely. Yeah, this is an experiment. All right. This is also a tour, so let’s go see what’s happening in the chamber.
[Catherine Cullen and Avi Lewis leave the microphones and enter the chamber to observe proceedings. The session resumes in the foyer.]
Avi Lewis: The space is beautiful. It’s actually gorgeous. I wish people watching Question Period could get a sense of the actual room, because it’s far more interesting than much of what is said. But no, seriously, thank you for pointing out the corner where the NDP sits.
Catherine Cullen: Okay, we’re just going to walk over to this side. And you can see all along the walls — Lester B. Pearson, Dieffenbaker. A young Joe Clark.
Avi Lewis: That’s a fetching portrait.
Catherine Cullen: Pierre Trudeau.
Avi Lewis: Yep.
Catherine Cullen: As we’re talking right now, you have a meeting coming up this afternoon with Prime Minister Mark Carney. On the topic of prime ministers — what kind of relationship do you want to have with him?
Avi Lewis: Well, I do think that Prime Minister Carney offers — and I think his Davos speech was a kind of ringing echo through the years of a kind of loftier politics. And I think everyone misses that. It’s been pretty slugged-out politics for the past few administrations.
And I do think — I think we’re in a democratic crisis. I actually think our first past the post system has really alienated people from their own vote. People vote defensively, people vote strategically. We actually have a phrase in this country: I held my nose and voted for X. I think that’s really damaging. And when there’s a rise of authoritarianism around the world, we need to restore some faith in institutions and our democracy itself. And so I think the tone part is important, but the structural part is even more important. Like we need proportional representation so desperately so that people can vote for something that they really believe in and have positive votes rather than strategic and defensive and sort of distanced from their own franchise.
[Liberal MP Vince Gasparro approaches in the foyer]
Vince Gasparro: We just met yesterday.
Avi Lewis: Yeah, how are you, man? Good to see you.
Catherine Cullen: Do you have any tips for your new Democratic friend, Liberal MP?
Vince Gasparro: Yeah. Do I have some advice? Well, I’ve only been elected a year. It’s a little awkward. It’s the newbie club here.
Avi Lewis: Yeah, very much.
Vince Gasparro: Look, I have a lot of respect for my colleague, of course, and we’re just getting to know each other. We disagree on probably…
Avi Lewis: Everything?
Vince Gasparro: No, I don’t know about everything. A few big things? Most things, but not everything, and I wish him well.
Catherine Cullen: But not too much luck.
Vince Gasparro: He doesn’t want me to have success.
Avi Lewis: We’ll beat you later, Vince.
Vince Gasparro: Bye, guys.
Catherine Cullen: You’re making new friends.
Avi Lewis: Yeah.
Catherine Cullen: After recently losing Nunavut MP Laurie Idlout to the Liberals and provincial NDP MPP Dolly Begum switching to Carney’s party too, I ask whether Lewis might hope for floor-crossers of his own.
Avi Lewis: No, we don’t believe in floor-crossers. We think people should resign and get another mandate if they want to change parties. But no, I think it does represent… I mean, I would say this is the biggest, stretchiest tent in all of Canadian political history, from Marilyn Gladue to Dolly Begum. Good luck to Prime Minister Carney in holding it together.
Catherine Cullen: Are you confident there will not be any more NDP floor-crossers, like we saw with Laurie Idlout?
Avi Lewis: Well, what are my alternatives here? I have met with the caucus a couple of times. We had our first three-hour caucus meeting in person this week. And I think they’re absolutely rock solid. And every one of them has looked me in the eye and said, I’m not going anywhere. Including Alexandre Boulerice, the Quebec MP who might go to provincial politics.
Catherine Cullen: That wouldn’t be a floor-crossing. That would be a shifting of jurisdiction, which we have seen many times in Canadian politics.
Avi Lewis: And I sympathize with Alexandre’s impulse to fight in Quebec right now. It’s a pivotal moment in the political history of that province. We saw the PQ looking like Poilievre, you know, a year and a half ago, coasting towards an obvious majority. Now everything is upended. It’s a two-horse race. There’s a new premier. And there is a sovereignist Social Democratic Party in Quebec. And there isn’t a provincial NDP. So I see that quite differently, to be honest.
Catherine Cullen: You mentioned Dolly Begum, and I do want to ask you about her. She said she was the former deputy leader of the Ontario New Democrats. She said she ran for the Liberals because Canada is facing a moment of crisis like never before. And Mark Carney, she said, has the vision to fight for this country. She put years of her life into the NDP movement. She wants to be a Liberal now. If the NDP can’t keep her in the movement, what does that tell you about how hard it’s going to be to convince other Canadians?
Avi Lewis: I honestly don’t feel this is a crisis for our party. These are individual decisions. I think Dolly has broken a lot of hearts, and she knows it. I think it would have been a very heavy personal decision to make. I think people feel the magnetic pull of power and influence. And I think that’s not how we build power and build change in Canada. You need a mandate. You need to be part of a movement that is built for change. And individuals slipping into the structures of power and thinking that they can change the course, I think it’s a little naive. Even Elizabeth May, one of the most veteran politicians in this place, lined up for the budget and was immediately betrayed. So I think people maybe get a little confused about what it means to build power. It is a collective process. It is not an individual process.
Catherine Cullen: One of the important things that happens here — perhaps not the most glamorous — is parliamentary committee. So let’s continue on our tour. I’m going to take you downstairs to the committee room, Avi Lewis, and we’ll talk a little bit more about substantive policy issues.
Avi Lewis: You think they’re going to give us seats on committee in the new majority?
Catherine Cullen: We’re just going to go down this way.
Catherine Cullen: So we’re outside a couple of the committee rooms where some of the deeper policy work takes place. One thing I want to ask you about: you have not shied away from using the word socialism. When you talk about your vision for the NDP, for the country, you call yourself a democratic socialist. You had signs during your leadership that say socialism is the big tent. Why is it important for you to use that word?
Avi Lewis: It’s not. It’s just accurate. And I don’t foreground ideology in the way that I talk about politics. I just know what I am, and I don’t see any need to hide it. I also think socialism is really having a comeback in North America. And I think it’s time. I think the political conditions of our day are why. And if you look at the really exciting things that are going on in the left side of politics globally — you have Zack Polanski in the UK, you’ve got Zohran Mamdani, Bernie, AOC, many other exciting political figures. And in the last ten years of my life and work, there’s been what I would cheekily describe as free trade in ideas on the democratic socialist left between Canada and the United States.
Catherine Cullen: So I want to dig in to help people understand what exactly it is you’re talking about. You and Mamdani, you’re both keen on the idea of public grocery stores. Toronto, New York, among the places trying this idea out — a lot of different ways that a public grocery store could work. You have said $350 million out of the gate in Canada, then about $300 million a year after that to run a series of public grocery stores, 50 warehouse-style stores across the country. I’d like to understand, would you be subsidizing just the basics? Mamdani talks about eggs, bread. Or is this like cheaper groceries across the board at the expense of the Canadian government?
Avi Lewis: The subsidy, the public subsidy, is for what’s called the gross margin of the stores. So it is — and in this case it includes labour — so it’s like the land, the buildings, the refrigeration, the lights, the unionized staff. And I would like to see it, of course, be the United Food and Commercial Workers, who are the dominant union in the retail and grocery space. The goal is to maximize the national procurement. The secret to this model — and it’s why Zohran’s policy people, some of whom have worked on our proposal, are happier about our model than his — a pilot doesn’t make a ton of sense. We’re talking about an alternative national procurement network where the federal government uses its truly national reach, federal institutions, the school food program, to really reach wide and be able to do volume bulk buying that would compete with the big five grocers and would also benefit, by the way, Canadian farmers and food producers, because they’re getting squeezed, forced to sell their products for the lowest possible price to these monoliths who then charge us at the other end the highest possible price.
Catherine Cullen: But you are making a case for bang for our buck, essentially.
Avi Lewis: For sure.
Catherine Cullen: You have groups like the Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto who are questioning whether we would be better off focusing on fundamentals like income and housing affordability. We have to make decisions about where to spend public money. Why public grocery stores?
Avi Lewis: Not at all mutually exclusive. Then you need the tax dollars to pay for it. But we’re talking about $300 million a year, which is one half of 1% of our current defence budget, before we spend — according to the prime minister’s plan — another half a trillion dollars in the next decade on weapons and war, on the military.
It is a politics about choices. This is a country awash in wealth. There is revenue galore, which is undertaxed in this economy. And we are talking about taxing that revenue. We’re talking about wealth taxes. We’re talking about windfall profit taxes for oil and gas companies that are projected to make — even just this year, the first year of the oil shock from the immoral, reprehensible, illegal war against Iran — Canadian oil companies are forecasting $90 billion in revenue. They’re going to make tens of billions of dollars in profits when people are sobbing at the pump, paying almost two bucks a litre for gas. We need to go after that money and tax it appropriately to pay for things like public groceries, functioning public transit, a public cell phone provider so that people aren’t paying 100 bucks a month for a basic digital essential service. We need to re-harness the wealth of this country in the service of making Canadians’ lives affordable.
Catherine Cullen: These are dramatic changes you’re calling for. And I would just ask you, how can you be convinced that that’s what Canadians are going to buy into right now, when the NDP was squeezed out so badly in the last election?
Avi Lewis: Because the NDP wasn’t proposing these things before. Because we’re in a new era where the cost of living was already an emergency for people who are just getting ground to dust by the difficulty of feeding their families. This was not the offer when the Liberals and Tories were voting together about things that have nothing to do with addressing the cost of living. And the Liberals and Tories only have one solution, which is to cut taxes. Look — being in this building, we’re in a country which has never been wealthier, and yet life has never been harder for Canadians. How do we make sense of this, Catherine? What do we do about this? It’s completely irrational. We are providing solutions that would actually solve these problems.
Catherine Cullen: Okay, so I think you’ve seen most of the highlights, Avi Lewis. We did the chamber.
Avi Lewis: It does start to look the same a bit, Catherine.
Catherine Cullen: This is true. So thank you for taking the time. But before I let you go, I do first of all want to express my sincere condolences about the passing of your father.
Avi Lewis: Thank you so much. Yeah.
Catherine Cullen: I know having you lead the federal NDP meant a lot to him.
Avi Lewis: I mean, I guess I told him I was running — I wanted to run for leader — about a year ago. I think it was during the last election campaign. So it was a little more than a year ago. And you know, there wasn’t a leadership race on and I didn’t anticipate Jagmeet resigning on election night. So I thought there’d be a longer timeline. But I remember telling him, and after he got through saying, “What took you so long?” — the usual parent stuff — he said, “I’m gonna stay alive and see you win.”
He just had incredible willpower. So like, when there were times in the last couple of weeks of the leadership campaign — well, right before the debate in Vancouver, in the Lower Mainland, he collapsed. They took him into the hospital, ended up being for the last time. I jumped on a red eye that night, my wife and son came the next day, we all said our goodbyes. And it got better again.
He lived long enough to hear the news. He was absolutely determined. And I think — you know, I called the palliative care room where my family was gathered at his bedside shortly after getting off the stage in Winnipeg. And it was… it was a moment. You know, my mom put me on speaker, and he’d had his eyes closed for a lot of the morning. He had opened them and seen the results. But frustratingly, there wasn’t a lot of analysis offered, Catherine. My dad loved the numbers and the meaning, the analysis of politics. So I was saying, Dad, look, I know you’ve seen the numbers. Let me tell you what they mean. This was like our largest ever turnout, higher margin of victory than Jack, than Jagmeet, the highest margin of victory in the one member, one vote era. I was giving him like the excited pundit thing, right? And my mom said, “Steven, can you hear him? Can you hear what he’s saying?” And he opened his eyes and he said yes. And that was the last thing he said.
Catherine Cullen: That must mean so much to you.
Avi Lewis: I can’t believe it. I don’t even know what to say about it because it almost seems like, if you pitched it as a screenplay, the producers would be like, come on, this is cliche. Come back when you have something that feels real. So I don’t even know what to say about it all. But I got the torch handed to me in Winnipeg on that day. I lost my dad. And now the mission is even clearer and more powerful than it ever was.
This is a rich country. Life doesn’t have to be this hard. My dad and my grandpa spent their lives trying to make life a little bit more reasonable for Canadians. And now it’s my turn.
Catherine Cullen: Thank you for taking the time, Avi Lewis.
Avi Lewis: I appreciate it. I really love this. Thank you.