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naomi klein
Progressive Activist Avi Lewis Launches Bid for NDP Leadership in Canada
Lewis said NDP must “fling the doors wide open, and build a party for the 99%.”
Sep 25, 2025
The longtime progressive activist Avi Lewis officially launched his bid for leadership of Canada's New Democratic Party, which he aims to revitalize with a platform of economic populism.
Lewis, a journalist and documentarian whose grandfather helped to found the NDP in 1961, says the way to bring the party back to relevance amid an electoral low point is to “fling the doors wide open, and build a party for the 99%.”
At a kickoff party in Toronto on Wednesday, the former parliamentary candidate from Vancouver railed against the “Liberal-Conservative alliance” that dominates Canadian politics. The two major parties' leaders, Lewis said, "compete fiercely in public, while behind the scenes, they collude to boost corporate profits."
"In the name of protecting the country, the government is rapidly passing and proposing legislation that will change the culture and character of Canada," Lewis said. "From sweeping aside Indigenous rights and environmental protections for so-called nation-building projects, to rolling back higher taxes on the uberwealthy and digital giants, to the generational austerity of 15% cuts to public spending, to the $9 billion that materialized in an instant for the military this year, ramping up to $150 billion a year a decade from now—the changes afoot are extreme."
Lewis pledged to “build a government that is an instrument for the people, not for corporate Canada.”
The NDP—once Canada's third-largest national political party—has been ailing of late after a dismal showing in the nation's most recent parliamentary elections. The party, which held over 100 seats 14 years ago, dropped to a new low of just seven seats in 2025, not enough to even be recognized for committee assignments or federal funding.
The humiliating showing resulted in the resignation of Jagmeet Singh, who'd led the party for eight years, but was widely criticized by those on the left for his coziness with the establishment of the dominant Liberal Party and his failure to keep the NDP competitive. It is in this state of "political wilderness" that Lewis has emerged with an ambitious change agenda.
(Video: Avi Lewis for NDP Leader)
"Life in Canada today feels on the edge," Lewis said in a video released last week announcing his leadership run. "Everyone seeking a little stability, everyone being told 'You're all on your own.'"
He identified several causes of that precarity. One was the "economic attack" from US President Donald Trump, whom Lewis described as sending "disruption grenades" in the form of steep tariffs and annexation threats. But Lewis said that Trump merely "magnifies... the everyday emergency of trying to get by in an impossible economy."
According to one survey conducted in July, 57% of Canadians said their current incomes did not allow them to afford basic necessities like housing, groceries, energy, and cell phone plans.
"Working hard doesn't earn you a living," Lewis said.
"These days, every politician claims to be shocked by the costs," he continued. "What they don't talk about is why: The billions in profits for the tiny group of corporations that control every part of our economy. Three phone providers, three grocery giants, five oil companies, and the five big banks that fund them."
Lewis' plan to confront corporate power is years in the making. Alongside his wife, the acclaimed journalist and author Naomi Klein, Lewis rolled out the Leap Manifesto in 2015 as an agenda for the NDP. Leap focused on confronting the climate crisis, but its contents formed the basis of what he now refers to as a "Green New Deal." The accelerating climate emergency remains at the center of his agenda in 2025.
"Oil and gas CEOs," he said in the video, are "not just hoarding extreme wealth," but "foreclosing on our shared future."
Lewis has never held a parliamentary office, though he has run for a federal Vancouver-area seat twice before and achieved two third-place finishes, receiving 26% of the vote in 2021 and 12.5% in 2025.
In his bid to lead NDP, he has so far leaned heavily into his family legacy and his reputation as a lifelong activist who has "butted heads with the powerful," over issues like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the privatization of healthcare and public transit.
"For four decades," he said, "I have stood with workers, telling stories of working-class heroes and organizing for dignity in factories and fields, classrooms and care homes, shop floors and fishing fleets."
Lewis, who also identified free trade deals as job killers, proposed a "Green New Deal" as a means to revive Canadian industry and create "millions of good-paying jobs."
He has also proposed a wealth tax, a national cap on rent increases, a public option for groceries, and expanded universal healthcare that covers "medication to mental health."
During his speech Wednesday night, Lewis described NDP as "the only party that can accurately diagnose the cause of our everyday emergency, and offer solutions as big as the crises we face."
"The federal government has the power, the resources, and the responsibility to ensure the fundamentals of a good life—healthy food, truly affordable housing, functioning public transit, and hey, maybe a proper vacation once in a while," he said. "But we won’t get it if we don’t fight for it. And that’s where the NDP comes in. After all, the NDP is the original party of workers’ struggle. And in this moment of epic change and uncertainty, the party is needed as never before."
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Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor on Building a Movement to Fight 'End Times Fascism'
"We are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world—on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species."
Apr 16, 2025
In a "must-read" piece published Sunday by The Guardian, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor laid out in over 5,000 words the "powerful possibilities for resistance" against the global rise of what they term "end times fascism."
Klein and Taylor began with "the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters ('seasteading') or pro-business 'freedom cities' such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island."
"The first sign that fortunes were shifting came in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 'freedom cities' on federal lands," they noted. After winning the U.S. presidential contest last November, Trump returned to the Oval Office in January.
As Klein and Taylor detailed:
One might assume that it is contradictory for Trump, elected on a flag-waving "America first" platform, to lend credence to this vision of sovereign territories ruled over by billionaire god-kings. And much has been made of the colorful flame wars between the MAGA mouth-piece Steve Bannon, a proud nationalist and populist, and the Trump-allied billionaires he has attacked as "technofeudalists" who "don't give a flying fuck about the human being"—let alone the nation state. And conflicts inside Trump's awkward, jerry-rigged coalition certainly exist, most recently reaching a boiling point over tariffs. Still, the underlying visions might not be as incompatible as they first appear.
The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity, and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.
That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: In a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers.
One of Trump's primary campaign promises was "mass deportations," which he has begun delivering on by having plainclothes immigration agents yank foreign students critical of U.S. policy off the streets and sending hundreds of immigrants—many of them seemingly innocent of any crimes—to a mega-prison in El Salvador. The president has pursued this agenda despite expert warnings about the human and economic impacts, and it's not just his anti-migrant effort expected to cause harm on both fronts.
This is an era of climate breakdown, rising risk of nuclear war, skyrocketing inequality, and unregulated artificial intelligence, and "Trump 2.0's economic project is a Frankenstein's monster of the industries driving all of these threats—fossil fuels, weapons, and resource-ravenous cryptocurrency and AI," Klein and Taylor stressed. "Everyone involved in these sectors knows that there is no way to build the artificial mirror world that AI promises to construct without sacrificing this world—these technologies consume too much energy, too many critical minerals, and too much water for the two to coexist in any kind of equilibrium."
While reclaiming the most powerful post in the world, Trump has surrounded himself with billionaires, putting tech leaders willing to give big donations in prominent seats at his inauguration and installing ultrarich individuals—including Elon Musk, the wealthiest person on Earth and the leader of companies including SpaceX—in key positions within his second administration.
"For Musk, Mars has become a secular ark, which he claims is key to the survival of human civilization, perhaps via uploaded consciousnesses to an artificial general intelligence," Klein and Taylor wrote. "Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm, Musk's drive for humanity to become 'multiplanetary' is made possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of our only home."
This is the most powerful thing The Guardian has published in years. “In order to make earthly planetary survival possible, some versions of this world need to end.”
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— Vivian Blaxell ( @vivianblaxell.bsky.social) April 13, 2025 at 9:44 AM
That rejection of protecting Earth and its myriad species is key. As Klein and Taylor argued, "The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism."
"To bet against the future on this scale—to bank on your bunker—is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home," the pair wrote. "This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line."
"Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions," they continued. "Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet."
Klein and Taylor also offered a solution for how to "break this apocalyptic fever." According to them:
First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: We are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world—on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.
Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.
"To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of 'ordered love,'" the pair asserted, "we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures, and to the possibility of a livable future for us all."
The essay has been met with high praise from academics, activists, advocacy groups, journalists, and more, many of whom described it as "essential reading" and "terrifying but ultimately hopeful."
Climate campaigner and writer Bill McKibbencalled it "the darkest—and in some ways most light-filled—take on our dire moment."
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor offer hope through understanding, allowing us to counter their narratives with a far better story. @naomiaklein.bsky.social @astra.bsky.social
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— The Sanders Institute (@sandersinstitute.bsky.social) April 15, 2025 at 3:25 PM
J. Mijin Cha, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said: "This piece by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor is so sharp in its diagnosis of what we are facing and the way we fight back. We don't fight fascism with fascism-lite."
"What I mean by fascism-lite is the way the Dems have seen migrants, trans people, people of color, and other marginalized people as disposable in this call for 'moderation,'" she added. "You don't get ahead by leaving people behind. We need to have a positive vision. Not just—we aren't as bad as the other side."
Professor Deborah Lupton, leader of the Vitalities Lab at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, wrote on social media, "Read, weep, and then take action."
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Critics Ask If Trump and Musk Are 'Intentionally Crashing the Economy'
"If you think back at the last economic crashes... the rich were able to buy up assets on the cheap and emerged even wealthier and more powerful than before," noted one progressive commentator.
Mar 05, 2025
Are U.S. President Donald Trump, top adviser Elon Musk, and allied oligarchs deliberately trying to tank the economy in order to line their own gilded pockets?
More and more observers from both sides of the political aisle are asking the question this week as the U.S. president implemented steep tariffs on some of the country's biggest trade partners, threatened a global trade war, and is taking chainsaw to government spending and programs—policies that, while inflicting economic pain upon nearly everyone else, could dramatically boost their already stratospheric wealth.
Numerous observers have likened it to the " disaster capitalism" examined in Naomi Klein's seminal 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism—politicians and plutocrats exploit the chaos of natural or human-caused crises to push through unpopular policies like privatization and deregulation that harm the masses while boosting the wealth and power of the ruling class.
Economic alarm bells were already ringing before Trump's 25% tariffs on most products from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% on China—for a total of 20%—took effect on Tuesday, prompting retaliatory measures and threats of more to come.
Then, during his rambling joint address to Congress on Tuesday night, Trump threatened to impose reciprocal tariffs on every nation on Earth starting April 2 (because he "didn't want to be accused of April Fools' Day") if those countries did not lower barriers to trade with the United States.
@jamellebouie Replying to @C. Stetzer ♬ original sound - b-boy bouiebaisse
New York Times economic policy reporters Alan Rappeport and Ana Swanson called Trump's sweeping tariffs "one of the biggest gambles of his presidency," and a move "that risks undermining the United States economy."
But what if that's the whole point?
"I've been entertaining this theory a little bit more lately, because [Trump's] economic moves seem so stupid and terrible and counterproductive without thinking that he is intentionally trying to cause harm," progressive political commentator Krystal Ball—who also has a degree in economics and is a certified public accountant— said Tuesday on the social media site X.
Ball cited an X
post by Saikat Chakrabarti, a progressive Democrat running for Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) House seat who worked on Wall Street for six years and helped found the online payment processing company Stripe, in which he accused Trump of "manufacturing a recession."
"But it makes sense when you realize his goal is to create something like Russia where the economy is run by a few oligarchs loyal to him," Chakrabarti added. "Creating that state is hard in a large, dynamic, powerful economy with too many actors who can oppose him. So he's accelerating concentrating money and power into the hands of his loyalists while he crashes the rest out."
Responding to this, Ball asserted that "at this point, until proven otherwise, the primary actor in the government and the economy is actually Elon, so I think it makes sense to think of Elon's incentives here and what he may actually want to accomplish."
"If you think back at the last economic crashes—both in Covid and in the 2008 financial crash—while initially everyone suffered, including the rich, out of both, the rich were able to buy up assets on the cheap and emerged even wealthier and more powerful than before," she noted.
"So in 2008, not only did they get their own custom bailout, but they were able to buy housing stock at absurdly low prices," Ball recalled. "The rich got richer than ever, inequality skyrocketed, and the big banks got bigger than ever."
"Same deal with the Covid-era recession," she continued. "So, while again, everyone suffered initially, there was a huge bailout package which, yes, did benefit ordinary people, but if you look at who came out really on top... you could see people like Elon Musk, people like Jeff Bezos, people like Mark Zuckerberg getting far wealthier. Their net worths, which were already very high, skyrocketed beyond anyone's wildest dreams."
Indeed, as Common Dreams reported, 700 billionaires got $1.7 trillion richer during two years of pandemic. Between March 2020 and April 2022, Musk got 10 times richer, while Zuckerberg's net worth more than tripled and Bezos' grew by nearly $80 billion, according to Forbes.
"Here's the other piece that's worth thinking about as well," Ball added. "Crash and crisis leads to governments and authoritarian leaders claiming more power for themselves. They can use the crisis and the emergency as a justification for taking on extraordinary powers and for taking extraordinary measures... measures that can be custom fit to primarily benefit oligarchs like Elon Musk."
"So I don't know guys, while we're running around here going... 'can't they understand how this is going to be devastating for the economy,' maybe they do understand," she concluded, "and maybe that's kind of the point."
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