Lewis vs. the Waffle

The Waffle was a short-lived but influential caucus within the federal NDP that advocated for democratic socialism and Canada’s economic and military independence from the United States. According to cofounder Mel Watkins, “the members’ choice of name was self-consciously ironic,” perhaps reflecting the movement’s irreverent and antiestablishment ethos.

Funny names notwithstanding, the Waffle’s ideology was serious, sympathetic to the liberation struggles of the 1960s and ’70s. They supported women’s liberation as much as independent labor and Quebec’s desire for self-determination. They argued for Canadian public ownership to replace private American control of key industries, as well as for leaving NATO. The Waffle Manifesto was prescient, anticipating the likely long-term and deleterious effects of American corporate control of Canada’s economy, let alone its political sovereignty. The manifesto took aim at the distortion of Canada’s development by US-based corporate interests.

“To be fair, the youthful leaders of the Waffle movement were brash and arrogant,” says High, author of The Left in Power: Bob Rae’s NDP and the Working Class.

They rubbed many people the wrong way. Most were university educated and middle class in a party that was still anchored in the labor movement with a large working-class base. The Waffle’s own intolerance of international trade unionism — US-based unions that continued to dominate the Canadian labor movement — was the issue that drove Stephen Lewis to expel them. It was an intolerable situation.

When, in 1971, the Waffle made a concerted effort to win top positions in the party’s governing bodies at that year’s federal leadership convention, they had approximately 2,000 members out of the NDP’s 90,000. The leadership contest was between Waffle cofounder James Laxer and labor lawyer and one of the NDP’s founders David Lewis (father and grandfather to Stephen and Avi, respectively). Though David Lewis won on the fourth ballot with strong union support, the Waffle movement had proven itself competent and capable. Newspapers began calling the Waffle a “party within a party,” and the leadership felt threatened by its “radical” ideology at a time when the NDP was moving into the political mainstream.

At a June 1972 Ontario NDP Provincial Council meeting, these tensions reached a head. Stephen Lewis obtained a resolution ordering the Waffle’s members to either disband or leave the party. The resolution passed with strong union support. The Waffle became a separate political group after that, before being voluntarily dissolved by its members in 1974.

“The decision closed off the party to a new generation of activists and contributed to the party increasingly closing in on itself,” High says. “It scarred the party and contributed to the lingering intolerance of internal dissent that was still present in the late 1980s.”

The Lewis Legacy

Ironically, despite being the heir to the Lewis political dynasty, Avi Lewis was the antiestablishment candidate in the recent leadership convention. On two crucial issues — Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Canada’s leading role in accelerating climate change — Lewis stuck to his guns, condemning both in equal measure. Despite being the only Jewish leader of a federal political party in Canada, a columnist at Canada’s centrist Globe and Mail newspaper performed incredible feats of mental gymnastics to explain how Lewis’s election was apparently proof of the NDP’s “antisemitism problem.”

On climate change, Lewis’s staunch opposition to continued fossil fuel consumption and production led to immediate rebukes from the leadership of two provincial NDP wings, those of Saskatchewan and Alberta. Those statements were loaded with fossil fuel industry–approved talking points far removed from reality (including the absurd claim the oil and gas sector employs 900,000 Canadians — the actual number is, by some estimates, under 180,000 and falling).

But perhaps Lewis’s real break with recent party orthodoxy is less his opposition to fossil fuels than his standing firm for the decommodification of essential goods. Lewis’s campaign revolved around a suite of public options — from groceries to telecoms to housing to “head-to-toe” health care.

His embrace of decommodification is the most explicit from an NDP leader in decades, and while it may not replicate the Waffle movement, it does recall its advocacy for public ownership and economic sovereignty.

Where Avi Lewis and the Waffle align ideologically may be where a resurgent federal NDP can make the most gains. The Waffle recognized Canada’s unequal economic relationship with the United States as a source of vulnerability. This diagnosis still stands today — perhaps even more so, given the frostier relations between the two countries. Canada is still very much vulnerable to Washington’s whims, and its resource-heavy economy has few defenses to external shocks and internal cost pressures.

The Waffle took pains to highlight Canada’s foreign ownership. Lewis emphasizes the problem of affordability and fossil fuel dependence. If he ties these issues to a broader case for economic sovereignty, he may further connect to the politics of the Waffle — politics the party discarded decades ago.

Steven High argues that, in making the decision to break with the Waffle, Stephen Lewis was “probably on the ‘right’ side of the issue but the ‘wrong’ side of the expulsion decision” because it did long-term damage to the Ontario NDP.

“It was all so unfortunate, as Stephen Lewis was otherwise an inspiring leader who had real vision,” says High.

This leadership and vision was perhaps best demonstrated after Lewis left politics. “Just as Jimmy Carter is often referred to as the best ex-president the United States ever had — given his subsequent work with Habitat for Humanity — so too Stephen Lewis, who went on to become a global leader at the United Nations on important issues like HIV/AIDS in Africa,” says High.

“He continued to fight the good fight right up to the end, condemning Israel’s ongoing slaughter of civilians in Gaza and elsewhere.”

Canadian leftists have good reason to be hopeful the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.