Avi Lewis is the most ideologically extreme major-party leader in modern Canadian history. While politicians on the Canadian left typically describe themselves as social democrats or progressives, Lewis openly advocates for the public ownership of the means of production — the defining demand of Marxist-Leninist economics.
The LEAP Manifesto, the political document Lewis co-authored with Naomi Klein in 2015, calls for state ownership of Canadian energy infrastructure, the construction of a federal-build "coast-to-coast-to-coast clean energy grid," and the imposition of state-directed "rapid decarbonization" of the entire Canadian economy. Lewis's own leadership campaign platform reaffirmed every one of these planks.
This is not Scandinavian-style social democracy. Norway and Sweden have private energy markets, private banks, and competitive private industries. Lewis's proposals go further — to state ownership of productive industry. That is not a pattern observed in functioning Western democracies. It is the pattern of command economies.
The communist sympathies are not a recent development. The Take (2004), the documentary Lewis co-directed with Naomi Klein, sympathetically depicted Argentine strongman Juan Peron and the seizure of private factories by activist worker collectives. As critic Daniel Morduchowicz wrote at the time, the film glossed over Peron's history — including his government's open sheltering of fleeing Nazi war criminals after the Second World War — in service of a romanticized portrait of expropriation.
Even Zoran Mamdani, the self-described "radical socialist" mayor of New York City, has not gone as far rhetorically as Avi Lewis. Mamdani still calls himself a "democratic socialist." Lewis simply demands the public ownership of the means of production.