A Walrus feature (republished to the magazine’s Substack after originally appearing on thewalrus.ca) argues that Avi Lewis’s climate platform — an end to new fossil fuel development paired with a “Green Jobs Transfer” front-loaded to protect workers in oil-and-gas-reliant provinces — has provoked unusually swift and public hostility from provincial NDP leaders in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Within about an hour of Lewis’s March 29 win, Saskatchewan NDP leader Carla Beck released a letter declining to meet the new federal leader unless he disowned essentially all of his prior climate positions, invoking Tommy Douglas’s historic support for a pipeline that became Enbridge Line 5. Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi called Lewis’s election “not in the interests” of the province, restating a “more pipelines and reducing emissions” line.
The piece reads the speed and vehemence of those rebukes less as principled ideological disagreement than as desperation from two unpopular opposition leaders — citing an April Angus Reid poll putting Beck’s approval at 32% (to Premier Scott Moe’s 52%) and showing Nenshi in steep decline against UCP Premier Danielle Smith, who leads by double digits even amid a looming secession referendum. It notes Nenshi’s post-partisan history, his late 2024 entry into the NDP to run for the Alberta leadership, and his successful push to make federal party membership optional for Alberta members.
The author positions Lewis as closer to Douglas’s nation-building, public-ownership tradition (public companies in telecom, pharmaceuticals, and groceries) than his critics allow, and argues that past NDP provincial governments in Alberta (Notley, 2015–19) and Saskatchewan (1991–2007) saw emissions rise anyway. The through-line: the Beck/Nenshi split illustrates the Anthropocene’s core political problem — leaders who accept the science but won’t act on it — with wildfire season framed as the starkest Canadian symbol of the cost.