Juno News - March 31, 2026


NDP select Avi Lewis as leader, what does it mean for Canada？


Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

195.34612

Word count

333

Sentence count

21

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Abby Lewis has been elected as the new leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada. Hamish and I talk about what this means for the party and what it says about the future of the country's next leader.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Okay, so the big event happened over the weekend, and the NDP now has what I would say is a serious
00:00:06.900 leader. Avi Lewis is a national figure. He is well known to Canadians, especially of an older
00:00:11.800 generation. I think boomers probably remember him fondly from his time on the CBC. He used to host
00:00:17.440 a political show called Counterspin, and he's a prominent figure, a prominent Canadian. And so
00:00:22.520 the fact that the NDP now has what you would call a serious leader does that change. Avi Lewis won
00:00:28.260 handily. He got 56% of the votes on the first ballot. There was some 100,000 members who voted
00:00:35.660 in this party. So this is a serious segment of the Canadian population. Keep in mind that most
00:00:40.240 people aren't members of a party, right? So 100,000 members. You had about, what, 68,000 of
00:00:46.560 them voting online, 1,200 by phone, and the rest were in person at the convention. So again,
00:00:51.360 Abby Lewis got 56%. NDP MP Heather McPherson came in second place with 29%. Abby's not a member
00:00:58.120 parliament. He does not hold a seat. He ran in the last election in West Vancouver, but he lost. So
00:01:03.760 he doesn't have a seat. So, Hamish, what do you make of all this? Well, look, I think it's, frankly,
00:01:10.140 a lot of people are saying it's bad for the NDP. I think it's actually quite good for the NDP
00:01:13.160 to have a leader who will bring some energy to things and will also be, he's a doctrinaire
00:01:19.720 leftist. This guy is, you know, if you come up with a left-wing stereotype, you're going to find
00:01:24.600 whatever you believe a left-wing stereotype is it's abby lewis this guy believes on every single
00:01:29.320 issue he will take the most left-wing thing imaginable they're going to have government
00:01:33.080 run grocery stores it's going to be you know they'll probably de-recognize israel and recognize 0.52
00:01:38.520 palestine i mean you name it that's what that's what this guy's for