The very title of A NEW Democratic Party: The Comeback of the Left reflects the optimism and enthusiasm generated by Avi Lewis’s successful bid to become leader of Canada’s federal New Democratic Party (NDP). Lewis’s policy statements throughout the campaign expressed a clear-minded, even courageous, vision to effectively refound the NDP as a vehicle for a transformative democratic socialism. The tepid, uncreative approaches that have long characterized the party’s political practice, whether the poverty of internal party democracy or an overriding fear of any policy proposals that might draw controversy, had proven not to be up to meeting the everyday challenges of working-class Canadians. The contributions to this book capture the spirit of the first leader of the NDP, Tommy Douglas, who declared in the 1960s: “Courage, my friends, ’tis not too late to build a better world.”

This collection is unabashedly ambitious and enthusiastic in its vision for the party’s future. Lewis himself has characterized the party’s left turn as an “experiment.” Experiments seek to prove or disprove a hypothesis. For the new NDP, the question is this: does a turn to a bold democratic socialism mark the “comeback of the Left”? Or will the party’s centrist provincial wings, a more fragmented working class, and the inevitable countermobilization of business and the Right combine to stop this experiment dead in its tracks?

The book is organized as a collection of interviews with prominent individuals long associated with the party and its democratic socialist left wing. The interviewers pose a range of questions that allow the interviewees to reflect on their experiences, both personal and political, frame their critiques of the NDPs longtime embrace of the status quo, and articulate their political hopes and vision for the new NDP.