I was mentioning that we know you as a researcher, an activist, a brilliant journalist for many, many decades. Today, I imagine that there are some different things that we want to talk to you about as the partner of the man who just took over the leadership of the NDP. How are you feeling right now?
Um, yeah, overwhelmed and so grateful. This has been such a um this campaign’s just been so positive and um you know it’s it’s just grown and grown and it has felt more like a movement than a campaign which all the best political you know election campaigns do. You know I’ve been lucky enough to be um have been part of Bernie’s campaign in 2020 and done some work for Zoron uh Mani and you know the there these moments are rare you know in in left history. we um we often aren’t able to go all the way. Um and so we really have to savor them and uh so yeah, I feel great. I feel so proud of Avi. Um I think he just gave a dynamite speech. Uh I think it’s a complex political territory that that he’s navigating. Um but there’s really a feeling that he’s not doing it alone, that this is something that was built by a huge and amazing team. Um that’s just growing all the time. Yeah. You mentioned Bernie Sanders in the United States of America and definitely the similarities in messaging between a movement and a campaign like that and this one are quite clear. Particularly drawing the distinction between the 99% of people and the billionaire class who have increasing control every day in our lives. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. That movement did catch fire for a while in the United States and there was a time when it looked like Bernie Sanders was going to be the nominee for the Democratic party. He wasn’t quite able to make it, but he did build a real grassroots movement. And a lot of us who were part of that campaign thought that he could have defeated Trump precisely because so many workingclass people um are going over to these right-wing so-called populists who recog who who are willing to talk about the pain of their lives, right? um who really recognize that the cost of living, you know, is unbearable, who that the system feels really rigged and they echo all of that. But as Ebie just said in that speech, what they won’t say, right, is that it’s actually capitalism. It’s a system of corporations um and and governments working together to rig it. Um it’s working for some people, right? And so we really haven’t had that um for a long time of politicians who are really able to name the system itself. And I honestly think it’s the only way we can bring people back. You know, it’s not going to be everyone. There are people who, you know, are part of that, you know, far-right movement because they’re racist and, you know, that’s that’s why they’re there. A lot of people and it’s increasingly becoming a diverse movement, right? It’s a, you know, I often quote Steve Bannon talking about the the populist international, right? Or the um, you know, it’s and and it’s getting more and more diverse, right? the more that these corporate centrist parties act like everything’s okay, right? Um so it’s critical that there be a true left alternative um and that’s willing to name the system that that that is willing to talk about how the fact that it doesn’t affect everybody equally by any means. Um and you know I think we’re moving towards that in Canada. I think this is a breakthrough for us and we we haven’t had it for a long time and we’ll see. I mean, I you know, I think I think I hope that that AI is able to bring some people from the Conservative party um as well as the Liberal Party who are, you know, NDP voters but went liberal in the last election because they were afraid of Trump. I mean, that’s going to be a big part of the challenge for the NDP going forward. Now, um, public ownership, public ownership of grocery stores, public ownership of of banks, public ownership of goods that the public needs, a huge part of this now successful leadership campaign that’s going to be pitched to the Canadian public. There is, I think, a very common line of skepticism about public ownership. The faith in government is at a point in this country and in the western world where people don’t know if they can look to government for big solutions. How is he going to sell these big transformative ideas that he’s pitched in this leadership race? You know, I think one of the things that um that that we can learn from Zoran Mdani is is he has this sort of um uh he moonlights as a history professor. you know, like he he he he sees part of his work, whether he was campaigning or now that he’s mayor, is actually educating people about radical history. Um, because we don’t learn it in school. It’s not it’s not part of our of our of our traditional education. So, people in Canada generally don’t know the history of public ownership in Canada, right? Which, you know, during during the Second World War, all you know, so many crown corporations were created because it was a moment that the market could not address. And we are in all of these sort of so-called market failures. the market is fine happy to fail right because it that just means um you know it just means that people will fall and we are in this time where we’ve all been kind of accustomed to mass death and I think the genocide and gossa one of the roles that it played was sort of like kind of testing how much will people put up with right how much can people get used to right during co um there was this kind of war about like are we going to protect people right um are we going to have an attitude that everybody deserves to live through this or can’t we just kind triage here, right? And and then I think what we saw with Gaza, and this is why, you know, Gustavo Petro, the the president of Colombia said that the the the poor of the world see their future in Gaza, right? Is that what we saw from liberal elites around the world, including in Canada, was a chilling willingness to live with mass death, to live with genocide. And so that’s what market failure means in this moment. You know, I call it end times fascism. I think that that’s what we’re up against. Um, and only a willingness to tell the truth can face that. And I think, you know, I think there’s such a deep desire for truth telling right now. And because our centrists and liberals have failed so spectacularly, we see people slipping into conspiracy land in all kinds of ways, right? All these right-wing grifters stepping up. Oh, suddenly they care about genocide, right? Um because there’s energy there because there’s so much silence there, right? So that’s my hope for for for Aby’s leadership. I think he can do that. I think he has a you know a long track record as a as a communicator, right? Being working in media. Um thinking about how do you distill ideas down to um you know their essence uh on television and also debate. You know I used to host a debate show four nights a week. It was the hardest time in our lives because he was never ever home. But one of the things I think we learned in that debate format was that it was that we perform best when we actually have to fight for our ideas, right? Like it’s easy to kind of get mushy when no one’s challenging us. Um, so there’s going to be a lot of debate, including inside the NDP. Canada is this society where like, oh my god, people are disagreeing. The world is ending. We cannot like there’s so much panic in media culture when like it’s treated as a crisis. It’s politics. We have disagreements. when you have a clear vision um people will disagree. It’s okay. That’s how democracy should function. People should be able to air out their ideas. So there’s going now that there is somebody out there going like I believe in something. Okay. Um I believe that we are late in to the climate crisis. You know, we’ve been talking about this for decades and now we are out of time. We need to transition off of fossil fuels. And it is that it’s his conviction that they’re afraid of, right? cuz everyone says it, but they know he means it. And so [clears throat] there’ll be some freakouts. Everyone stay calm. Um, we’re going to get through this. It’s good sign. It means that we’re standing for something. Finally, I want to ask you about what is perceived to be an opportunity right now, particularly on the international scene. We’re witnessing Trump’s debacle in Iran. Going there without any reason, vision, plan, without the backing of most of the international community believe in international law. They when they abducted Maduro, there was a coordinated messaging campaign on the right to say that international law is fake. Um, and we heard it in in symphony, you know, we we heard a chorus of it. um you know all the way from Steven Miller and Donald Trump you know down to like pundits like Joe Walsh right um and so what you know and then you have Trump creating a parallel UN so-called board of peace right so it is a very explicit campaign to destroy the whole international postworld war II um infrastructure of humanitarian law uh uh international humanitarian law because they’re afraid of it they are afraid of it and you can see it in the way they treat Franchesca Albanz today in the way they have sanctioned the ICC judges that um you know have have issued arrest warrants for crimes against humanity for Netanyahu and Yo Galant. They and the day after Franchesca Albanz put out her economy of genocide um report that named the tech companies they slapped her with sanctions. I mean Franchesco can’t book a hotel room right now. all these people like they’ve lost their Gmail like it’s they under and and and I think on the left we we have to really pay attention to this because international humanitarian law has been such a failure it’s so weak right and it’s so weak because of the lack of faith in it it’s only as strong as the moral force behind it and and and and governments acting like it matters right but the fact that it’s such a priority for these criminals to destroy every vestage of international law shows that actually this is something that needs to be defended and we need to live up to the promise that has never been realized because the system was always rigged with vetos, exemp exemptions. The security [snorts] council meant that the UN was never the democracy. Um the security council vetos meant that the the the UN was never the the democracy that it was supposed to be. Um but I believe that we cannot give up on that on on on the promise of of of general genuine universalism which has never been a reality. But just because it’s never been a reality doesn’t mean we can afford to throw it out at the very moment when these criminals have such a top priority of destroying it. And that’s another reason why I think it’s really important um that AI has been elected NEP leader because he’s going to use the megaphone that comes with that to really be a voice um for international law because you know people responded to Carney in the way that they did at Davos because they kind of thought he was saying something he wasn’t saying right because it sort of sounded like oh yeah you know we’re going to we’re going to we’re going to go our own way with middle countries um and people thought oh they’re going to actually do [laughter] ethical international law, but that just he actually just meant we’re going to do a trade deal with Modi. Um, we could talk all afternoon. Um, just really quickly, you said that when you know Avi was on Counter Spin, your life was very different. I imagine it’s going to be even more of a a change for you now. Yeah, I I mean, I have no idea. I I um I’ve just been staying busy and not thinking about the future. Well, enjoy the moment for right now and thank you so much for uh joining us today, Naomi. Nice to see you. Take care.