Note: opinion column. Summary and short attributed excerpts preserved for reference; full text at the source link above.
National Post national politics columnist Tasha Kheiriddin uses recent U.S. Democratic primary wins by “democratic socialist” candidates to ask whether a comparable hard-left wave could take hold in Canada, and frames Avi Lewis’s new leadership of the federal NDP as the vehicle.
Kheiriddin argues young voters are “ripe for a disruptive story,” citing pollster David Coletto and Léger data on the left-leaning tilt of women aged 18–24. She contrasts earlier NDP eras — Ed Broadbent’s 1970s bank-nationalization proposals, Stephen Lewis’s provincial championing of rent control and public ownership, Thomas Mulcair’s balanced budgets, and Jagmeet Singh’s wealth taxes — with what she casts as a sharper turn under the new leader.
She describes Avi Lewis, son of Stephen Lewis, as having “styled himself as Mamdani light, calling for state-run grocery stores and a moratorium on fossil fuel extraction,” and quotes his statement that “five per cent of GDP (on military spending) is a destructive and nihilistic fantasy, pouring fuel on the climate fire.”
The column then links the NDP to what Kheiriddin characterizes as the American left’s anti-Israel turn, referencing Lewis describing himself at the 2026 leadership convention as an “anti-Zionist Jewish person,” former MP Libby Davies’s 2010 comments, and Laurier-Sainte-Marie byelection candidate Nima Machouf’s 2025 participation in a Gaza flotilla. She concludes that if the NDP “apes the American hard left to win over young voters, they will entrench its hate, division and antisemitism,” and that “if Lewis truly cares about the future of Canada, he will not take his party down that path.”