In an opinion column tied to the federal Green Party’s 2026 leadership race, author and podcaster Mark Leiren-Young argues that Avi Lewis’s NDP has effectively absorbed the political space the Greens once occupied. He traces the Greens’ decline from their 2021 high under Annamie Paul — when they ran 252 candidates and elected Mike Morrice in Kitchener — to a 2025 result he calls the party’s worst-ever vote share, with Elizabeth May’s return failing to halt the slide and co-leader Jonathan Pedneault placing fifth in Outremont.
Leiren-Young contends that with Mark Carney’s government softening climate commitments, the Greens’ best opening should be on the environment, yet the “newly carbon-neutral NDP” under Lewis now out-greens them. He calls Lewis “arguably Greener than Ms. May,” fonder of theory than pragmatism, and points to Lewis’s role in crafting the 2015 Leap Manifesto as evidence the NDP has annexed the Green policy playbook. He cites May’s husband John Kidder suggesting Lewis’s “emotional home turf is green.”
The column is skeptical that Lewis can rescue the NDP — Leiren-Young suggests only a less polarizing Conservative leader than Pierre Poilievre could do that, by returning lent Liberal votes — but concludes that Lewis is “the green kryptonite that ends the Green Party.”
Source: The Globe and Mail. Reproduced for reference under fair dealing (Copyright Act, s. 29).