Can Avi Lewis Rebuild Jack Layton’s NDP?

Former NDP MP Kennedy Stewart believes Avi Lewis has inherited a recognizable and valuable political brand—but unless he professionalizes the party and reconnects it with the economic concerns of working families, the NDP’s decline may continue.

Kennedy Stewart does not speak about the federal NDP as an outside observer. He served seven years as an NDP member of Parliament, was recruited by Jack Layton and later worked on a transition plan when Jagmeet Singh became leader.

His assessment of the party’s condition is therefore unusually direct: the NDP has lost touch with too many of the people it was created to represent.

Stewart remembers joining a caucus with 103 MPs after the Orange Wave under Layton. Today, he sees a diminished party that has struggled to persuade Canadians it understands their most immediate concerns.

The lesson, he argues, is visible in the election results.

“If people aren’t coming into your store, you can’t blame them,” Stewart said. “You have to blame yourself for it.”

Asked what he thinks of Avi Lewis, Stewart began with a blunt assessment: “He’s got his work cut out for him.”

Stewart supported Jagmeet Singh’s leadership and helped develop a transition plan that examined the party’s structure, finances and internal operations. According to Stewart, much of that work was abandoned, while the party continued to decline.

“The NDP just didn’t embrace professional kind of management, accounting, that type of thing,” he said. “I really think Avi Lewis’s main challenge will be to professionalize the NDP.”

This is an important criticism because it is not primarily ideological. Stewart is not saying the NDP’s foundational values are obsolete. He believes the party still possesses a strong and recognizable identity.

Canadians understand that the NDP is supposed to stand up for people with less power. The party has historically defended workers, low-income families and marginalized communities, often taking positions long before they became widely accepted.

That legacy still has meaning. But a political brand cannot survive on moral intention alone. It must be organized well enough to raise money, recruit credible candidates, communicate clearly and translate its principles into proposals voters believe will improve their lives.

Jack Layton understood that politics had to reach people emotionally and materially. He could speak about inequality and social justice while making voters feel that the NDP was focused on their jobs, families and communities.

Stewart’s own connection to the party began with Layton. His childhood family had fallen from a comfortable life into rural poverty after his father lost his job. The family went bankrupt, lost its home and moved into an unfinished hunting cabin in Nova Scotia.

After arriving in Vancouver, Stewart sometimes shared a one-bedroom apartment with four other people. His political outlook grew from that experience and from his belief that government programs—health care, employment insurance and student loans—had helped him rebuild his life.

“The party for me—I was recruited by Jack Layton—and then trying to have a social conscience and give it a bigger voice in Parliament is what has driven everything I do,” Stewart explained.

Layton’s success was not simply that he was likable. He connected progressive values to the practical challenges facing ordinary people. Voters did not have to agree with the NDP on every issue to understand whose side Layton believed he was on.

Stewart thinks Avi Lewis must rediscover that connection.

“The challenge for Avi Lewis is: can he pivot to a point where Canadians are nodding their head and saying, ‘That’s going to be good for me. That’s going to help my family’?” Stewart said. “That’s what the NDP used to do. Layton certainly did it.”

Stewart’s criticism extends to the substance of the NDP’s agenda. A party seeking to govern cannot merely oppose pipelines, projects, corporations or decisions made by Liberals and Conservatives. It must offer a credible vision of what it would build.

“It can’t just be no all the time,” he said. “There has to be yes.”

That principle shapes Stewart’s own complicated position on energy. Although he was arrested while opposing the Trans Mountain expansion, he says he was never categorically against pipelines. His objection was to exporting Canadian resources without capturing enough domestic value.

He wants Canada to think more seriously about energy security, refining and industrial employment. Instead of shipping raw oil to the United States and purchasing refined products back, he argues that Canada should ask whether more processing can occur here.

This is where Stewart believes the NDP has an opportunity. It can support climate action while also talking about jobs, domestic production, affordability and economic security. But climate policy cannot become so dominant that every other concern disappears behind it.

When Canadians are struggling with housing costs, groceries and economic insecurity, they need to hear how a party’s agenda will improve their daily lives. Values matter, but those values must be translated into tangible results.

Stewart believes the NDP’s greatest asset is that Canadians still know what it is supposed to represent.

“I think Canadians know what the NDP is,” he said. “I think they know that it’s a party that stands up for the little guy and is willing to take on very tough challenges, unpopular positions.”

Its problem is that voters have become less certain that the party can deliver economic security. The NDP may speak powerfully about injustice while failing to answer the immediate question many families are asking: How will this help us afford our lives?

Avi Lewis therefore inherits two interconnected challenges. He must rebuild the party as a professional national organization, and he must restore its economic credibility without abandoning its social conscience.

Jack Layton showed that those objectives are not incompatible. He expanded the party by making people feel seen rather than lectured. He offered an optimistic political project rooted in the concerns of working Canadians.

The NDP does not need to abandon its identity. It needs to make that identity useful again.

That is the test Stewart has set for Avi Lewis: can he move the party from protest to possibility, from telling Canadians what it opposes to showing them what it is prepared to build?