Avi Lewis is the new leader of Canada's New Democratic Party — and the most radical, most extreme, and most dangerous person ever to hold that office.
He is a third-generation NDP insider. He is a graduate of the most expensive private school in Canada. He is a former CBC and Al Jazeera host. He owns homes in two of the most expensive cities in the country. He pulls a six-figure salary from a public university for a job he is not academically qualified to hold. And he is married to Naomi Klein, the celebrity anti-capitalist activist who has built a global career attacking the very economic system that pays her bills.
Avi Lewis calls himself a man of the working class. The truth is that he has never lived a single day of working-class life. He is a champagne socialist from a family of socialist royalty, and the policies he wants to impose on Canada would hurt every working family in the country — while leaving him and his friends untouched.
This is what Canadians need to know about him.
The Family Dynasty
Avi Lewis did not earn his way to the top of the NDP. He inherited the throne.
His grandfather, David Lewis, was leader of the federal NDP in the 1970s. His father, Stephen Lewis, was leader of the Ontario NDP and later served as Canada's ambassador to the United Nations. Now Avi Lewis makes it three generations in a row of Lewises running the same political party.
That is not a political party. That is a family business.
The NDP claims to fight for the working class against entrenched privilege. Yet at the very top of that party sits the same family, generation after generation, like a left-wing royal house. Other parties get accused of nepotism and dynastic politics. The NDP has the real thing — and somehow no one in the legacy media seems willing to mention it.
The Champagne Socialist Upbringing
Avi Lewis was sent to Upper Canada College in Toronto — the most expensive and elite private school in the entire country. UCC is Canada's version of Eton: a grooming ground for the boys who go on to run the banks, the law firms, and the corporate boardrooms.
Avi was one of those boys.
In a 1990 essay published in the alumni collection Old Boys: The Powerful Legacy of Upper Canada College, Lewis describes his classmates as future masters of the universe who would "run this world in their purest state." He recounts personally escorting Prince Philip during the school's 150th anniversary. He admits being a "gifted" child, fawned over by teachers, plucked from public school by his parents and dropped into a world of wealth and power most Canadians will never even glimpse.
And then — with no apparent sense of irony — he insists he is not a "champagne socialist."
That is exactly what he is. He is a man who personally rubbed shoulders with British royalty as a teenager, lecturing Canadian truck drivers and farmers about their privilege.
The UBC Sweetheart Job
Avi Lewis lives in the Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver and works as a sessional instructor at the University of British Columbia. In the year ending April 2025, UBC paid him $92,000 for a part-time teaching role — despite the fact that he holds only a bachelor's degree, while a PhD is normally required to teach at that university.
His wife, Naomi Klein, who has no university degree at all, was given full tenure at UBC and was paid $277,000 in the same year. The course Avi last taught, in winter 2024, was titled "Climate Justice."
The Lewis-Klein household owns homes in both Toronto and Vancouver. They are, by any reasonable definition, members of the top one per cent.
This is the man who tells Canadian working families that the rich need to pay more.
The Career: CBC and Al Jazeera
Before politics, Avi Lewis built his name as a left-wing television host. He worked at the CBC — the taxpayer-funded state broadcaster — before moving to Al Jazeera, the Qatar-funded network notorious for its sympathetic coverage of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
That career path tells you everything you need to know about Avi Lewis's worldview. The CBC and Al Jazeera are not journalism. They are activism with cameras attached. And Avi Lewis fit in at both of them perfectly.
The LEAP Manifesto
In 2015, Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein co-authored a document called the LEAP Manifesto. It is the closest thing Avi has to a personal political platform — and it is genuinely radical.
The LEAP Manifesto demands:
— "No federal approvals for new pipelines, offshore oil projects or liquified natural gas terminals."
— A "rapid decarbonization" of the entire Canadian economy.
— A massive federal-build "coast-to-coast-to-coast clean energy grid."
— Public ownership of energy infrastructure.
The document was so extreme that even Alberta's then-NDP premier Rachel Notley publicly denounced it. The federal NDP's own membership was split. But Avi Lewis never backed down. The LEAP Manifesto is still his blueprint — and now it is the blueprint for the entire NDP.
War on Canadian Energy
Avi Lewis is not just opposed to the oil sands. He is opposed to the entire Canadian energy industry.
He has called Canada's use of fossil fuels an "addiction" — and dismissed federal and provincial royalty revenues from oil and gas as part of that addiction. He signed a 350 Canada pledge calling for an "immediate moratorium" on new fossil fuel approvals and a freeze on every fossil fuel expansion project currently under construction.
And then he went further. At the NDP's leaders' debate, Avi Lewis claimed that major resource projects are a conduit for "rape and murder," because they involve "big, manly things with huge work camps." In other words, he smeared every Canadian pipeline worker, every roughneck, every welder and pipefitter, as a danger to women and Indigenous girls.
The men and women who heat your home, fuel your car, and keep the lights on across this country — that is who Avi Lewis went on national television to call rapists.
Open Borders Radicalism
On immigration, Avi Lewis is well to the left of the Liberal Party.
He has called for restoring annual immigration numbers to their post-COVID highs of 500,000 per year. He wants Canada to "follow Spain's example" and grant mass amnesty to over a million illegal migrants currently living in the country. He wants "many more" international students brought in on top of that.
Most dramatically, Avi Lewis wants to scrap the Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States — the treaty that prevents asylum-shopping across the Canada-U.S. border. If Lewis got his way, anyone in the United States could simply walk across at Roxham Road and claim refugee status in Canada the moment they arrived.
"Immigrants are part of the solution, not the cause of problems," he told New Canadian Media. Working Canadians who can no longer afford a home or a family doctor might disagree.
Legal Heroin and Fentanyl
On drugs, Avi Lewis backs the most extreme harm-reduction position imaginable: a fully legal, government-funded "safe supply" of heroin, fentanyl and crystal meth.
"We need legal safe supply. NOW," he posted on X in 2021. He has accused politicians who oppose drug decriminalization of "standing on a stack of corpses to try and reach high office," and dismissed concerns about the disastrous decriminalization experiment in British Columbia as right-wing scare-mongering.
Avi Lewis lives in Kitsilano. He does not live in the Downtown Eastside, where his preferred drug policy plays out every day in needles, overdoses and shattered families.
Anti-Israel Activism
Avi Lewis is one of the most aggressive anti-Israel activists in Canadian public life — and one of the most prominent figures in the so-called "anti-Zionist Jewish" movement.
He calls Israel's defensive war against Hamas a "genocide." He has demanded that Canada cease all weapons sales to the Jewish state. He supports South Africa's case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of war crimes. And he describes Zionism — the simple belief that Jews are entitled to a homeland in their ancestral land — as "linked inextricably to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine."
It gets uglier. In a paper attacking the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Avi Lewis described Jewish Canadians as "cartoonish narcissists," "perpetrators," "supremacists" and "crybullies" who "urgently" must be made uncomfortable. He has dismissed Canadian antisemitism as a "narrative" forced on the country by an "Israel lobby," and has worked to silence Jewish community organizations that defend Israel.
This is the man now leading the NDP. He is not just anti-Israel. He has crossed into territory that would get any other public figure in Canada labelled an antisemite — and the legacy media will not say a word about it.
The Peron Connection
In 2004, Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein produced a documentary called The Take, exploring worker takeovers of factories in Argentina. The film was widely criticized for offering a sympathetic, romanticized portrayal of Argentine strongman Juan Peron — the fascist-adjacent populist whose government openly sheltered fleeing Nazi war criminals after the Second World War.
Even left-wing reviewers noted the whitewash. Avi Lewis simply moved on, never apologizing for any of it.
The First-Ballot Victory
On Sunday, May 3, 2026, Avi Lewis won the NDP leadership on the first ballot with 56 per cent of the vote — 39,734 ballots to runner-up Heather McPherson's 20,899. Turnout was 70.6 per cent.
The federal NDP holds just seven seats in the House of Commons today. It has lost official party status. It is in the worst electoral shape of its modern existence. And the answer the membership chose to that crisis was to elect the most extreme leader in the party's history.
Avi Lewis is not a moderate trying to drag the NDP back to the centre. He is a radical who openly demands the public ownership of the means of production, the rapid decarbonization of the entire Canadian economy, the dismantling of Canada's border with the United States, the legalization of hard drugs, and the diplomatic isolation of the only Jewish state on earth.
That is the man Canadian voters now need to know.
That is the man Rebel News is going to keep documenting — right here at www.AviLewis.com.