A review of A NEW Democratic Party: The Comeback of the Left (Breach Media), a collection of interviews with figures long associated with the NDP’s democratic-socialist wing, framing Avi Lewis’s leadership as an attempt to refound the federal party as a vehicle for transformative democratic socialism.
Evans situates the book in the optimism generated by Lewis’s leadership win and poses the central question the collection raises: does the turn to a bold democratic socialism mark a genuine “comeback of the Left,” or will the party’s centrist provincial wings, a fragmented working class, and countermobilization by business and the right stop the experiment? He invokes Tommy Douglas’s “Courage, my friends, ‘tis not too late to build a better world.”
The argument
In his introduction, Martin Lukacs frames the challenge as not just rebuilding the party but reimagining its purpose, practice, and goals — championing movements, trade unions, and a multiracial working class over consultant-driven electoralism, and anchoring the party in an explicit critique of the established order.
Historian Ian McKay sets out a program reaching beyond electoralism: learning the Canadian left’s own history of victories won against long odds; studying comparable experiments abroad (Syriza, Podemos, La France Insoumise, Corbyn, Sanders); building social and cultural movements that “surround” the party; mounting a sharp critique of property against free-market “possessive individualism”; and developing an alternative to the “liberal order.”
MP Matthew Green offers a pointed diagnosis of past missteps, attributing disconnection to the highly centralized model under Jack Layton:
by overcentralizing decision-making, by overcentralizing control and reducing the democratic distribution across membership, I think people did not feel the connection to the party.
Green criticizes a culture fixated on “brokering power,” in which former staffers rotated into government-relations and lobbying firms.
Judy Rebick recounts initially refusing to get involved before being persuaded that Lewis’s campaign uniquely combined a leadership bid with a grassroots transformational campaign, and that the NDP establishment was unusually weak. Leah Gazan, one of the five remaining NDP MPs, places the defeat in historical perspective — “Movements ebb and flow” — and frames the moment against what she calls a “growing corporate dictatorship.”
The volume closes with an interview of Lewis by Luke Savage. Lewis likens the moment to a geological transition — “There’s a grinding of the plates as we pass out of one era into another” — and argues that Trump’s pressure on Canada drove a realignment that obscured how far right Mark Carney’s Liberals have shifted, citing increased military spending, looser environmental regulation, public-sector austerity, and an anti-immigration turn. His alternative program reprises his campaign themes: a Green New Deal, a wealth tax, and public options for groceries, banking, and telecommunications, alongside a reimagining of the party’s relationship to social movements and its membership.
Evans concludes that, though it is early, Lewis’s experiment in refounding the NDP is well underway, and the book makes the case that the party’s future is far from settled — with its rank and file potentially holding the key to rebuilding it.