In his introduction, Martin Lukacs succinctly captures the challenges facing the Lewis-led NDP as it not only seeks to rebuild the party but reimagine its purpose, practice, and goals. Lukacs writes:

Imagine: instead of cautious politics most attuned to Ottawa pundits and pollsters, the party unapologetically champions the causes of movements, trade unions, and a diverse and multi-racial working class. Instead of a fixation on a leader’s personality and a single-minded electoralism, it broadens its focus to include year-round education and campaigning. Instead of being controlled top-down by a consultant class that rotates between party headquarters and corporate lobbying firms, it empowers and unleashes the energy of a grassroots base. And instead of accepting and aspiring to be better administrators of the established order, it is anchored in an explicit critique of it and the guiding vision of an alternative.

For those unfamiliar with the Canadian left, or at least that component associated with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the NDP, one needs to dig deep back in history to the years of the 1930s Great Depression to find anything of this nature. In that decade, the future of capitalism seemed much less certain than it does today.

The past forty years have constituted a depression of a different sort, albeit one moving in slow motion. Over that period, the policies and institutions that underpinned the post-1945 “golden age of capitalism” — built in response to the Great Depression and World War II — have been dismantled or, at best, weakened. The implications have been deeply serious, not just in terms of obscene economic inequality as private sector unions shrank and governments pursued policies that redistributed wealth upward, but also culturally and ideologically. Forty-plus years of neoliberal restructuring has given rise to a free-market “common sense.”

As Lukacs notes, rebuilding a radical left alternative will require “a significant program of popular education, develop[ing] a wide base of organizers, and creat[ing] new political institutions to advance this struggle.” If the experiment gains traction among Canadians, “the elite attacks are sure to escalate” as we have seen in other examples such as those of Jeremy Corbyn, Zohran Mamdani, and Bernie Sanders. Yet such attacks have not always achieved their intended effect and have often backfired and energized countermobilization. Further, the conservative business coalition that Prime Minister Mark Carney has assembled leaves a tremendous space on the left to be retaken.

Ian McKay, a prominent historian of the Canadian left, underlines the necessity for the new NDP to engage in a diverse range of activities that reach beyond a single-minded focus on electoralism. McKay advises the party to pursue a program and practice entailing the following: First, “develop a strong sense of what, for over a century, the Canadian left has accomplished against enormous odds.” In other words, for the Canadian left to learn its own history. Previous generations, under much more politically and legally oppressive conditions, at various times and through various means, offered not just effective resistance, but achieved victories.

Second, the Canadian left should learn about “experiments in contexts similar to Canada.” McKay here refers to Greece’s Syriza, Spain’s Podemos, France’s La France Insoumise, the experiences of Corbyn and Sanders, as well as other case studies that offer “cautionary tales as well as inspiring examples.” Third, develop social and cultural movements that “surround” the party with a cadre of activists rooted in broader anti-capitalist social movements. Fourth, a sharp critique of property is necessary to counter the prevailing “possessive individualism” at the center of free-market triumphalism. And fifth, McKay counsels the Left to develop an analysis of, and an alternative to, the “liberal order.”

While Lukacs’s introduction outlines the strategic challenges the party faces, MP Matthew Green offers one of the volume’s more pointed diagnoses of where the party has made missteps. Echoing themes raised in the introduction, Green reflects on what he sees as the consequences of the party’s highly centralized model under Jack Layton’s leadership from 2003 to 2011. His critique is blunt: “by overcentralizing decision-making, by overcentralizing control and reducing the democratic distribution across membership, I think people did not feel the connection to the party.”

Green further argues that an excessive focus on leadership was another strategic mistake. Green says past party professionals — whom Green refers to as “James Carville–bowtie–New Democrats” — “believed that if we had the right focus group, the right product as a leader, that we could somehow break through.” A cadre of “party stalwarts” controlled the playbook, believing they had a superior read of the political landscape and popular mood. This assortment of HQ staffers moved on to become the “talking heads for the party. . . .  connected to government relations firms.”

To illustrate the point, Green notes that a former principal secretary of the party later joined a lobby firm founded by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s former campaign manager. These were not people moved by a vision of social and economic transformation or a vision of greater party democracy and democratizing the Canadian state. For Green, they emblematize a party culture that was fixated on “brokering power.”

A different perspective on the journey to party renewal comes from longtime feminist and socialist activist Judy Rebick. Rebick recalls initially rejecting Lewis’s request for support, telling him that after years of political involvement she had little interest in engaging yet another internal party battle. “I’ve had it Avi, I’ve tried too many times. . . .  there’s no way I’m getting involved in this” she recalls saying when Lewis’s team approached her.

Yet Rebick ultimately became a supporter of the campaign and appeared onstage alongside Lewis at the launch of his leadership bid in Toronto on September 25, 2025. She identifies two reasons for her change of heart. First, she says “we had never tried to combine a leadership campaign with a grassroots transformational campaign” and she sees Lewis’s campaign as accomplishing exactly that. Second, Lewis supporters convinced her that the NDP establishment was in an unusually weak position and vulnerable to challenge. These factors clinched it for Rebick, who now feels that genuine transformation of the party may be possible.

The next interview features Leah Gazan, one of the five remaining NDP MPs in the House of Commons. The discussion opens with a question about how she has processed the scale of the party’s recent defeat. Gazan places the setback within a broader historical perspective: “Movements ebb and flow. And if you look at history, some of the greatest defeats on the Left have become our strongest movements rising up again. I believe we’re in one of these moments.”

Gazan sees the party’s challenges as existing within the larger political context of what she calls “growing corporate dictatorship.” She points to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s connections to the corporate world and argues that people “know that the system is rigged to lift up the corporate elite.” As a result, she feels that the current political settlement may have greater weaknesses than its custodians realize.

The volume concludes with “Reviving Democratic Socialism,” an interview with Avi Lewis conducted by Luke Savage, a shorter version of which originally appeared in Jacobin. The conversation is wide-ranging in scope, touching on Lewis’s career as an activist, his family’s long association with social democracy (Lewis’ father was leader of the Ontario NDP from 1971 to 1978, and his grandfather leader of the federal NDP from 1971 to 1975), the current moment in Canadian political economy, public ownership, party democratization, relations with organized labor, the challenge of building back working-class support, and the relationship between the federal party and its more centrist provincial counterparts.

It’s a lot of ground to cover in a short interview. Nevertheless, the conversation provides a valuable introduction to Lewis’s political outlook and the intellectual and historical traditions that inform it. Readers unfamiliar with Lewis, the history of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the NDP, and the context in which his leadership bid emerged will find much of value here.

Lewis likens the present moment in Canadian history to a geological transition: “There’s a grinding of the plates as we pass out of one era into another.” Central to this analysis are the economic and political pressures exerted by the Trump administration, which Lewis sees as unprecedented in the wake of four decades of deep economic integration with the United States through successive trade agreements beginning in 1988. These were agreements, he notes, that the Left, trade unions, and a range of social movements vigorously opposed.

Donald Trump’s attacks on the Canadian economy and sovereignty, however, resulted in a political realignment, causing many traditional NDP supporters to back Mark Carney’s Liberals. Lewis contends that this realignment has obscured the extent to which the Carney government has embraced a conservative agenda. Canadians, he suggests, may not yet fully realize how far to the right the Carney government has shifted. Lewis points to his increased military spending, loosening of environmental regulation in the interest of huge mining and fossil fuels extraction projects, public sector austerity, and an anti-immigration turn. For Lewis, these bleak developments also create “huge possibilities for the Left.”

The alternative political program Lewis advocates reprises many of the themes of his leadership campaign. These include a Green New Deal, a wealth tax, public options for groceries, banking, and telecommunications. And, of course, a radical reimagining of the party’s relationship to social movements and its own rank-and-file membership. Taken in total, these proposals represent a profound retooling and rethinking of both the party’s policy positions and its organizational culture.

It’s early days, but Lewis’s experiment in refounding the NDP is well underway. A NEW Democratic Party shows his leadership has already shaken things up. It has prompted serious discussions about the party’s future from many of its prominent socialist thinkers and activists. The volume is both a reflection of the current moment and a contribution to the discussion of where the party is headed. Alongside a sober reckoning with the party’s recent setbacks, it succeeds in making the case that the NDP’s future is far from settled and that its rank and file may hold the key to rebuilding it into an effective vehicle for working-class Canadians.