As Mark Carney’s deceptive centrism pushes the country to the right, Lewis offers a compelling alternative.
Avi Lewis.(YouTube)
After his much-celebrated speech at Davos in January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney won global applause for offering what seemed like a ringing declaration of independence from Trumpism. Carney both acutely diagnosed the hypocrisy of the liberal international order (noting that it had always held adversaries to a standard that the US and its preferred allies were exempt from) and offered an alternative vision where middle-powers such as Canada would chart their own way.
On paper, Carney offered an alluring vision, but the reality of his policies is much more muddled, as his response to the current Iran war makes clear. Over the last two weeks, Carney has issued a series of contradictory and confusing statements on Iran, making clear that his supposed resistance to Trumpism disguises a deeper complicity with the autocratic president.
As the BBC notes, “Carney expressed strong support for the initial strikes when they launched a week ago, arguing for the value of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. According to Carney, the war was necessary to prevent Iran ‘from further threatening international peace and security.’” A few days later, Carney said he supported the war “with regret” because the bombing of Iran seemed “inconsistent with international law.” On Friday, in the wake of reports that a Canadian military base in Kuwait had been hit, Carney stated, “We are not engaged in these actions of the U.S. and Israel. We’re not engaged in offensive actions, and we will not be engaged in those actions.”
Carney’s shifting response to the crisis is in keeping with the dithering of other US allies such as Germany and France, which have also tried to stay on Donald Trump’s good side by providing rhetorical support for the conflict while avoiding any tangible commitments of their own. The core problem with these obfuscatory policies is that they betray a fundamental principle of international law: the prohibition of wars of choice. Or, to put it another way, they violate the need for governments to be “principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights.” The person who said that? Mark Carney, at Davos.
Writing in The Toronto Star, Lloyd Axworthy, who served as Foreign Minister of Canada in a Liberal government from 1996 to 2000, contrasted Carney’s initial support for the Iran War with the Liberal government’s much stronger opposition to George W. Bush’s equally illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. Carney, Axworthy argued, had abandoned a core Canadian commitment to building a world “constrained by rules.”
The Iran War is not the only example of Carney’s shape-shifting and abandonment of progressive principles. As I argued in a recent profile of the Canadian prime minister, Carney has always been a two-faced figure. His signature move has been to combine progressive rhetoric with right-wing policies.
The Carney that Canadians encounter on the campaign trail, or in his 2021 book Value(s), often sounds like a left-liberal or even Bernie Sanders-style social democrat, upbraiding neoliberalism for corroding social solidarity and failing to deal with pressing problems such as pandemic preparedness and climate change. But his policy solutions are almost always an intensification of the neoliberalism that he claims to reject. In office, Carney has pushed for austerity on social policy, much greater military spending, and new trade agreements to shore up globalization.
Writing in Spring last December, Alex Hunsberger accurately noted that “the new Liberal government is effectively a Conservative government under different branding. Tax cuts, austerity, and a huge increase in military spending are the hallmarks of an agenda that looks far more like imitating US President Donald Trump than standing up to him.” Carney has also abandoned previous Liberal Party commitments to the environment by cancelling a carbon tax and pushing for new pipelines.
It would be easy to dismiss Carney as a fraud, a politician who uses anti-Trump rhetoric to push a Trumpist agenda, but his deceptive posture has proven politically successful – and represents a real challenge to the Canadian left.
The Liberal Party of Canada had been in serious political trouble when Trump won the White House for a second time in 2024. Under the leadership of Justin Trudeau, the Liberals lagged badly in the polls, earning public anger over a cost-of-living crisis that metastasized under Covid. Facing an electoral catastrophe, the Liberals replaced Trudeau with Carney, who had no political experience—or even a seat in Parliament—but boasted a formidable resume that included being Governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.
Carney successfully sold himself to the public as a sober and experienced technocrat with international experience, the perfect leader to take on Donald Trump. This pitch was especially effective thanks to Trump’s frequent and very serious declarations that he wanted Canada to become the 51st US state. Faced with such an existential threat, Canadian voters embraced Carney as their national savior.
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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Carney’s political victory came at the expense of Canada’s major social democratic party, the New Democratic Party (NDP). In 2021, the NDP won 17.82 per cent of the vote, which garnered them 25 seats in Parliament. In 2025, this was reduced to 6.29 per cent of the vote and 7 seats.
This hemorrhaging of votes was due to two overlapping factors. The first was the decision by then-NDP leader Jagmeet Singh to align the party closely with Trudeau’s Liberals, who had a minority in Parliament. In exchange for NDP votes, the Liberals adopted some NDP policies, notably an extension of universal health care to cover dental care for children under 12, working-class families, and the elderly. While nobody could deny the significance of these victories, they cost the NDP its distinct identity; for many voters, the party turned into just another wing of the Liberal government. Once Trump emerged as a threat to national sovereignty, these voters decided to unite under Carney rather than have a split government.
That instinct has lasted throughout Carney’s tenure. He remains a highly popular leader, in no small part because the threat from Trump has not gone away. A poll released on Sunday by Abacus Data shows Carney has 56 per cent approval and 28 per cent disapproval, which would put the Liberals in a strong position to win a majority in a new election. In 2025, the Liberals won 169 seats, just shy of the 172 seats they needed to win a majority. But the Liberals have been bolstered by members of multiple opposition parties crossing the aisle: three Conservatives and one NDP member have become newly minted Liberals. Canada’s Parliament remains in flux but these defections and upcoming byelections could combine to give Carney a working majority.
So can the Canadian left find a way to defeat Carney’s duplicitous mixture of progressive rhetoric and right-wing policies?
Singh resigned as NDP leader last year after the party’s catastrophe at the polls (in which Singh lost his own seat). The NDP is currently holding a leadership race, which will conclude this week. The frontrunner in the race is Avi Lewis, who is presenting a bold program of socialism to revive the Party. Like Carney, Lewis is coming to politics from an unusual angle. A documentary filmmaker, Lewis’s family has been prominent on the Canadian left for more than a century. He’s also married to the author Naomi Klein, a former Nation columnist. Lewis has twice run for parliament, without success. But as Carney’s own career shows, a time of crisis can allow an outside figure to rise.
One way to understand Lewis is as someone actually matching Carney’s radical analysis of the world with equally radical policies. He has been at the forefront of efforts to make climate the cornerstone of NDP politics. In the current race, Lewis has proposed dealing with affordability with a Zohran Mamdani-style pitch to create publicly-owned grocery stores.
Writing on Substack, the journalist Luke Savage offered a compelling case for Lewis:
From the beginning of his campaign, through policies like his potentially revolutionary plan for publicly-owned grocery stores, Lewis has made a full-throated case for the public sector. Here, and in similar proposals (like those listed below), he has spoken eloquently about the need for non-market and community-led alternatives to the private monopolies that have come to dominate our economy. He refuses to triangulate on natural resource issues, and pairs his ambitious case for a green industrial transition with an environmental plan that refreshingly puts jobs at its centre. Needless to say, Lewis has long been a principled voice on Palestine as well and, in the face of rising militarism throughout the globe, can be counted on to show Canadians there’s a different way.
To be sure, Lewis is a gamble. The fact that he’s never held elective office is a black mark, although the Canadian Parliamentary system has always had room for outsiders to rise quickly. Like Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Lewis is likely to face resistance from party professionals, who prefer more mainstream policies that poll well. Another bulwark of conservatism is the successful NDP provincial parties, which govern in British Columbia and Manitoba while also being competitive in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Located in resource-rich provinces, these parties tend to be skeptical of any large-scale environmental agenda.
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But the potential strength of a Lewis-led party is also real. He’s leading in the race because he’s proven, like Mamdani, to have an ability to mobilize passionate young left-wing voters. Further, although Carney is polling well now, there is also evidence that progressive voters are developing buyer’s remorse.
In February I talked to veteran Canadian pollster Frank Graves of EKOS Politics, who often advises the Liberal Party. Graves noted that his polling showed that the type of voters who elected Mamdani exist in Canada with the “same kind of force, even probably larger, but politically orphaned in Canada right now, because Mr. Carney’s been very successful in building up this connection with the status quo or traditional progressive conservatives.” A left populist Canada who can reach those “orphaned” voters could potentially break the spell of Carneyism.
The project of left-populism is all the more urgent because right-wing populism remains a force in Canada, as elsewhere. In 2025, the Conservative Party of Canada fell short of victory but made considerable gains on the back of the slogan “Canada is broken.” This pitch appealed not just to traditional conservatives but also many people who normally don’t vote for the Conservative Party but are squeezed by the affordability crisis, particularly young men and immigrants.
Given the dangers of right-wing populism, Lewis’s bid for leadership of the NDP is not just promising but essential. Only a revitalized Canadian left can offer a future away from the confused morass of Carney’s politics, which promise progressivism while delivering austerity.
Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.