Juno News - March 30, 2026


Who is the NDP’s newest leader, Avi Lewis？


Episode Stats

Length

2 minutes

Words per Minute

144.34782

Word Count

332

Sentence Count

16


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 You've probably already heard about Avi Lewis by now, this guy right here.
00:00:04.320 He just won the federal NDP leadership at the party's convention this weekend.
00:00:09.740 But who exactly is he and what does he stand for?
00:00:12.740 That's what my colleague Clayton and I tried to figure out in our latest piece for Juno News.
00:00:18.540 Because if you read legacy media, you hear him described as a former journalist, a climate activist, and an advocate.
00:00:26.660 But that's not the whole story.
00:00:27.960 Avi Lewis was born in 1967 in Toronto, but his family traces several generations of socialist organizing.
00:00:36.600 His great-grandfather, Moishi Lewis, was part of the General Jewish Labor Bund, this group right here.
00:00:44.600 Now, the Bund was a radical socialist organizing unit that also blended Jewish identity.
00:00:51.580 In fact, the Bund was so significant, it caught the attention of some like Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, and the man who would eventually become in charge of the Soviet Union for a short while before Stalin took over.
00:01:09.120 Now this fella beside me here is David Lewis, and he's actually Avi's grandfather, and he set up the predecessor of the modern-day NDP while in Canada.
00:01:21.200 But it doesn't end there because Avi Lewis's own father, Stephen Lewis, was the leader of the Ontario NDP from 1970 to 1977.
00:01:31.600 So as you can see, quite a few generations involved.
00:01:34.800 Now as for Avi Lewis himself, he pursued a career in journalism working for the CBC and eventually Al Jazeera.
00:01:41.720 and he also worked at the University of British Columbia with his wife Naomi Klein whom you might
00:01:49.080 know as a Canadian climate activist. Financial disclosures by the UBC from 2025 showed that
00:01:57.340 Avi and Klein made well over $300,000 as associate professors in the Department of Geography but
00:02:06.520 today, Avi presents himself as a man of the working class in his newfound role leading the
00:02:13.060 federal NDP. If you want to dive deeper, check out Juno News, read our article.