Avi Lewis is a journalist, documentary filmmaker and climate activist who has deep family connections to left-wing politics in Canada and is married to author Naomi Klein.
This is his second try to be elected as an NDP member of Parliament; he previously ran in West Vancouver-Sea to Sky during the 2021 federal election, a riding that has never been won by an NDP candidate.
This time around, Lewis is going up against another Liberal stronghold, Vancouver Centre — a group of dense downtown neighbourhoods that includes many renters and a wide range of incomes. He has his work cut out for him: the incumbent MP, Hedy Fry, has held the riding since unseating Conservative candidate and short-lived prime minister Kim Campbell.
Lewis hasn’t wasted any time: even though the election has not yet been officially called, he’s mobilized a group of 300 volunteers and has been door knocking for several months.
“I chose this riding because I live here, we moved here in the spring. Naomi [Klein] and I have been teaching at UBC since 2021 and we’ve been living on the Sunshine Coast, and we just needed to move into the city instead of passing through,” Lewis told The Tyee.
“I definitely think this riding is winnable from the left. Absolutely.
“I think the Liberals are in free fall, I think that it's a change election, and I think that people in Vancouver don't want what [Conservative Leader Pierre] Poilievre is selling — like, this city recognizes we are aware of more than two genders.”
The Tyee caught up with Lewis to talk about trade tariff threats, misinformation, grocery and housing costs, and whether voters even want to talk about climate policies this election.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tyee: What do you think the response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada should be?
Avi Lewis: We’ve been thrust into a historic turning point. When Trump first threatened the tariffs, I saw it as the bellow of the bully, and I think there’s a measure of that. But actually, the more this actual political crisis unfolds, the more I'm realizing the most revealing thing that's happened in [the week leading up to tariffs being imposed] was DeepSeek.
China has been the primary target of American tariffs for a generation. The limit of those superchips to China and the extreme tariffs in the superchip war between the United States and China meant that China was deeply affected by tariffs, and what was China's response? China's response was to take that constraint, turn inward with ingenuity, and in a profound revelation, open-source co-operativism, rather than competition, develop a much more nimble, much cheaper version.
Canada has an absolutely golden opportunity to say, “Look at the world that free trade has brought us,” and actually chart a completely different pathway. We need local, clean manufacturing to make goods in Canada closer to where they're consumed — for reasons of economic sovereignty, and also to cut down on the climate-bashing emissions of transportation.
I feel like with all this talk of the Canadian economy being threatened, politicians are really focused on oil and gas right now as one of our chief exports. And along with backing off from the carbon tax, it feels like there isn't a lot of space right now in the national conversation to talk about climate change policies.
How do you navigate that when your whole history is about talking about climate policy?
Well, this is the moment we've been waiting for. I mean, this is another Shock Doctrine moment. [Editor’s note: 'The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism' is a 2007 book written by Lewis’s wife, Naomi Klein.] It's not a coincidence that Trump threatens tariffs and makes a big deal about his puerile understanding of trade deficits to propose more oil and gas. And it's no coincidence that the oil and gas industry in Canada seizes on any economic crisis to pull the same plans off the same shelf that they always pull off after every invented crisis, and start re-proposing the Northern Gateway pipeline. I mean, come on, we've seen this movie so many times. What we need to do is actually embrace the Shock Doctrine moment, a book, by the way, which is climbing the charts again, as people try to understand what the hell is going on here, and recognize it's not the first time.
Last week the federal election foreign interference report came out, and in response NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was talking about the problem of misinformation and disinformation, especially on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter). Have you encountered this in your online life?
I was chased off Twitter by aggressive trolling and just the toxicity of that environment. That's hardly breaking news. But if you say something or post something, or take a position and then just get flooded with all, you know, all the same vile takes. You know, it could be a Russian troll farm. It could be a Conservative party troll farm. It could be [Israel's] Mossad. It could be the [U.S.] State Department. One just doesn't know.
After I took a really strong position against genocide as a Jewish person, I was called a Kapo — a Jewish person in the concentration camps who worked for the Nazis in order to save their own skin. I was called that [online] dozens of times every single day. After that happened for six months, I reached a new level of epidermal callousness.
In 2015 when the Liberals came in, they really had a specific policy on housing that was a pretty big deal, getting the federal government back into funding and building rental and non-market housing. Then 2020 hit, housing prices went up, and I’ve seen especially young people gravitate towards the Conservatives who are also giving a vision for fixing housing costs that is focused on the private market. So what is the NDP’s promise to voters on housing?
We have a dominant story about why housing prices are too high, coming from the guy who's in the lead in the polls, and I don't think anyone's done a decent job yet of just explaining how absurd it is.
[Poilievre is saying] if we just clear away all the regulation and the gatekeepers, then the market's going to build so much more housing that the price will come down. When did the market ever voluntarily reduce profitability for a commodity it’s selling? Developers in this city are not going to be like, “Hey, I've got an idea: now that there's no red tape, let's build too much so there's a glut and the price comes down.” It's not going to happen.
We need to build non-market housing on public lands. We have to protect rental housing. We have to reinstate rent control, which is not specifically a federal responsibility, but I think it needs to be. I don't understand why there can't be a federal backstop for rent control — in the way that the federal government uses the power of its funding position... [with] the health-care system.
Unlike the high cost of housing, grocery prices were not a big issue until just recently. I think people have been really shocked because this is not something we’re used to, this giant inflation on groceries. What is the NDP promising to voters on the cost of food?
You need to have an accurate diagnosis for why grocery prices are still high and still going up, because inflation is down to 1.8 per cent, so it’s not inflation driving the price of food anymore. It's greed — it's clearly greed. And the scandals [have ranged] from colluding to price-fix tater tots to the Loblaws [underweight meat] scandal.
It is price fixing, it is price gouging. And the solution to that is price caps, which is something that was tried in France. The NDP supports price caps on the French model: the government did a study in collaboration with producers and distributors of food, and came up with a fair price of 5,000 different food items, and they just legislated it.
There's this real era of unreality online right now: we get all our information online, but you can never trust which comments are genuine and which are not. You want to engage, but then you're like, “Is there a person on the other side of this?” On the other hand, if you're suspecting that real people are bots, that’s another level of dehumanization as well.
I think you said the exact right word, dehumanization. It is the great danger of this moment in history. It's being weaponized. It's being used daily by lots of these political forces we've been talking about.
We have to really guard against it on the left, to not dehumanize our opponents. The antidote for me has been knocking on doors. It's been an incredibly grounding and refreshing experience to be talking to people in real life.
I agree with you that it’s a change election, but the change voters seem to be leaning toward is Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives. But I have seen people like [NDP MP] Charlie Angus go out there and make a really big impact on social media with a more populist, emotional kind of message. Is that something you want to emulate?
Populism, to me, is not a right-wing phenomenon. It is a type of politics that recognizes that there's a small elite which is screwing everybody else. I call that [having a critique of] capitalism. The right wing calls that the “woke mob,” but we don't mean the same things at all. It's the same diagnosis.
I think that on the left, we have a correct structural diagnosis of why butter is $10 and rents are unhinged in the city, and we know and we have solutions about what to do about them, and they speak to a vision of government that actually confronts power rather than serving it.
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