Avi Lewis has driven his supporters down an authoritarian, anti-socialist, path. The NDP leadership candidate’s role in assisting the party establishment’s bid to crush an insurgent campaign doesn’t portend well for an individual whose family’s history is steeped in crushing the left.
NDP leadership candidate Heather McPherson has applauded an individual who fought for Hitler and supported Ottawapaying $35 billion for the Trans Mountain pipeline. She has also repeatedly spoken alongside and praised leading Zionist Irwin Cotler, attended a CIA-influenced Trilateral Commission meeting in 2022 and is a member of the NATO Parliamentary Association.
But Lewis has repeatedly applauded McPherson. He describes her as one of the “magnificent seven” NDP MPs in Parliament and treats McPherson with respect. The Upper Canada College alumnus — whose name is listed between those of David Thomson and Galen Weston Jr among the elite high school’s “notable alumni” — has never suggested McPherson should be excluded from the race.
Lewis and many of his supporters’ reaction to my campaign is far different. Incredibly, Lewis justified the party brass blocking me and my three-year-old from an NDP social the night before the party’s first official debate in Montreal. The video of his support for my exclusion from an event open to the public went viral.
Lewis was also the only leadership candidate willing to tell the Globe and Mail that we should (effectively) be excluded from the race. Conversely, Tony McQuail told the Globe we should be allowed into the race and Heather McPherson previously suggested as much to the National Post. (Afterwards our campaign communications lead Mike Palacek emailed Avi to clarify his position. He failed to respond as with other requests we’ve made to Avi to express himself in favour of our participation in the race.) Five days after it was reported that we were blocked from the race Lewis responded to a question about this attack on party democracy by (effectively) justifying it. Pressed on the matter, Lewis said his campaign would release a statement on vetting in a few days but he’s yet to do so.
When they were simultaneously leader of the national and Ontario NDP Avi’s grandfather, David Lewis, and father, Stephen Lewis, expelled the leftist Waffle from the party in 1972. While he regularly cites his grandfather and father’s record, Avi hasn’t distanced himself from their expulsion of the Waffle.
In his bid for power, Lewis and his campaign have driven a sizable segment of leftish NDPers to articulate morally unconscionable positions. One of his high-profile backers, Judy Rebick, was asked directly on Facebook if she thought it was ok for the unelected three person NDP vetting committee to block members from having a right to select a socialist campaign with substantial support. Rebick responded “I don’t know”. Over the past three months Rebick has repeatedly smeared me. In that Facebook thread she noted, “all Yves has ever done is promote himself” and then “the only thing I’ve ever seen Yves Engler do besides his writing is to harass politicians and disrupt meetings.”
Like most Avi supporters, Rebick isn’t worked up about McPherson applauding a Nazi, supporting buying a tar sands pipeline, engaging with a CIA talk shop, sitting on a NATO parliamentary body or praising Canada’s leading proponent of a state that’s committed a holocaust.
In another example of the punch left attitude elicited by the NDP brass/Lewis, Rabble.ca editor Kim Eliott joined Rebick in the smear stating that the NDP vetters’ “intimidation and harassment concerns” should have been “sufficient to disqualify a potential leadership candidate”. In the same Facebook conversation, Eliott denies that “the concerns about intimidation and harassment were simply for haranguing politicians as many activists would do”, suggesting the vetters had some unstated — non-political — ‘harassment’ justification for excluding me from the race. I’ve probably written 200 columns for Rabble over the past 25 years.
The Lewis campaign has been smearing me for months. Two months ago Avi’s longtime “advisor” Martin Lukacs engaged in a ten-minute smear claiming I was a “grifter” breaking NDP and Elections Canada rules (NDP vetters did not cite any rule violation in excluding me from the race, which didn’t stop Lukacs’ The Breach sidekick, Desmond Cole, from simply moving on to new procedural criticism of my campaign).
The leftists who have joined the brass’s bid to suppress an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist campaign are ignoring the role the NDP leadership race should play in pushing the “Overton window” in the direction of social and economic justice. Additionally, how will a victorious Lewis defeat the neoliberal, imperialist, power structure within the NDP if he drives out/alienates socialists from the party?
As Dock Currie recently noted, “In this calamitously anti-democratic NDP ‘leadership race,’ Avi Lewis is not the villain… With that said, what Avi is running on is ‘democratic renewal’, ‘taking back control of the party’, ‘real democracy’, etc., and that really doesn’t jive with being placid and indifferent to one’s own ‘social democratic’ party procedurally excluding, and demonizing, a passionate and committed anti-war activist. Those things juxtapose as jarring and incongruous.”
Please email the NDP Federal Council to urge councillors to them to investigate the deeply flawed vetting decision and defend members’ right to decide.
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