AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

I’m in Toronto, Canada, today, where special elections were held earlier this month, delivering a slim majority in the House of Commons to the Liberal Party and Prime Minister Mark Carney, who will now have more latitude to advance his political agenda. Last year, Canada’s Liberal Party soared in popularity as President Trump intensified his threats to make Canada the 51st state and impose tariffs. This is a video message released by Prime Minister Carney last week.

PRIME MINISTER MARK CARNEY: Security can’t be achieved by ignoring the obvious or downplaying the very real threats that we Canadians face. … So, here’s the current situation. The world, as I said earlier, is more dangerous and divided. The U.S. has fundamentally changed its approach to trade, raising its tariffs to levels last seen during the Great Depression. Many of our former strengths, based on our close ties to America, have become our weaknesses, weaknesses that we must correct. Workers in our industries most affected by U.S. tariffs — in autos, in steel, in lumber — are under threat. Businesses are holding back investments, restrained by the pall of uncertainty that’s hanging over all of us. The U.S. has changed, and we must respond. … Canada Strong is our plan to build Canada by Canadians for Canadians.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Canada’s main progressive party, the National Democratic Party, or NDP, recently elected socialist activist, documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis as its new party leader. The NDP was once the main opposition [party in] Canada but now holds just five seats in the House of Commons. Lewis campaigned on a platform of affordability, equity and higher wealth taxes. The NDP will now have to rebuild.

Avi Lewis comes from a prominent political family. His grandfather, David Lewis, helped found the NDP and led the party. And Avi Lewis’s father, Stephen Lewis, led the Ontario NDP in the '70s. Stephen Lewis was also a human rights advocate, broadcaster, former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations and special U.N. envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa. Stephen Lewis died of cancer at the age of 88, just two days after Avi's election victory. This is Avi Lewis speaking at his father’s memorial on Sunday.

AVI LEWIS: Many of you know that the final months of Dad’s journey coincided with my campaign for the leadership of Canada’s NDP, our lifelong political home. And for those of you watching from around the world, it is a miracle to be able to tell you that the last thing he saw with open eyes in this life was our victory in that race and the passing of the political torch.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk about his election, his father and more, we’re joined now by Avi Lewis in Ottawa.

First of all, Avi, our condolences on the death of your father, Stephen Lewis, a man we interviewed a number of times over the years. If you can talk about the trajectory of your family and what has brought you to this point as the new leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, the NDP?

AVI LEWIS: Good morning, Amy. Thank you so much for those kind words. It has been — obviously, the last month of my life has been just an extraordinary experience. I’m at a loss for words, which, as you know, in my family, doesn’t happen very often.

Yeah, I grew up in the NDP of the 1970s and, in a way, the sort of last moment in the postwar boom of public ownership and build-out in Canada of our social safety net, our universal healthcare system, which the NDP was the founding force in bringing it, from Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan, to the national level. It’s our pride and joy. It’s one of the main things that makes us different from the United States. You don’t have to be rich to get sick in Canada, although the privatization efforts have accelerated and our healthcare system is not what it used to be. It’s really these kinds of accomplishments, and that period of the 1970s was when I was — yeah, I was a kid, but I grew up in the party.

My life, as you know, because we’ve talked many times over the years, has been devoted to activism, came up in the globalization movement when we were fighting these free trade deals that would integrate Canada’s economy so tightly with the United States. That now we’re in an era of Trump stomping around the world, acting with impunity, shredding international norms and attacking Canada, threatening to annex us, and levying these massive economic attacks in the form of tariffs, we are — you know, we were always right to say that we should never integrate our economy so deeply with the United States. But now we have to figure out how to Trump-proof our economy, how to create an independent economy.

And this is a very — it’s a unique and historic moment for me. I’ve been running for office for a few years, unsuccessfully, but I won the leadership of the NDP at the low point in the electoral cycle, but at a pivotal moment in Canada’s history, when we need concrete proposals for how to make our economy more independent and how to protect the basic social safety net and the values of solidarity and community that are, you know, our storied Canadian difference. So, it’s a very — it’s a momentous time. The NDP has a lot of rebuilding to do. But, you know, we ran a campaign that was really forthright.

As the Carney government was elected — and Carney is a central banker, and so, you know, his first job was at Goldman Sachs, but he was elected as a kind of — Canadians felt that he would be the progressive protector of Canada in the Trump era. He’s moved very fast to the right. He’s advanced a project of doubling down on resource extraction, of oil and gas pipelines and of massive infrastructure projects that will largely benefit foreign corporations, fast-tracking them, sidelining Indigenous rights, sidelining environmental consultation. And the Conservatives, under Pierre Poilievre, have voted with him on many of these — on many of these big, big items.

And so, the NDP has wide-open political space now to advance real solutions for a cost-of-living crisis in a country where a handful of corporations dominate every sector of our economy, and they’re jacking up prices, and rents and mortgages are completely out of control and unaffordable. I think the affordability crisis is even worse in Canada than the United States, because there’s such tight control of a handful of corporations over groceries, cellphones and telecommunications, the oil sector, big banks in Canada. You know, so, we have advanced a really populist left agenda — a heat pump in every home, an east-west electricity grid, an electric bus revolution, a public option for groceries and public ownership in telecoms and many sectors of the economy, and a huge build-out of public housing. We need nonmarket solutions to a time of market failure. And we’ve struck a chord. Our base is growing fast. And now we’ve got to reach out to the whole country and grow a political movement in a time of crisis.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Avi, could you talk about how your party, the NDP, fits into this broader political and ideological landscape, especially given the fact that the party in recent elections suffered big defeats?

AVI LEWIS: Yeah, you know, we have — we had a high point about 15 years ago, when Jack Layton was our leader, and we broke through, especially in Quebec, and became the official opposition for the first time. And over the last 15 years, we’ve been going down and down in the NDP. We have failed to connect with working-class voters in Canada, who have been — you know, like in the United States and around the world, have been — you know, there’s a lot of successful rage harvesting on the political right, punching down and blaming immigrants and, you know, trans folks for society’s problems, which have obviously been created by the incredible extraction of wealth by the 0.01%, who now dominate our economy as working-class life gets impossible. And so, we have to get those folks back.

And we’re at the low point of the electoral cycle, as I said, but the space for us to move is enormous. And I think young people in particular are really responding to a vision where life just doesn’t have to be so grindingly unfair, and, you know, in a rich country, a country awash in wealth. But we need a party that’s going to say, “We need wealth taxes. We need to go and get all that wealth, or at least a significant chunk of it, that is stuck at the top of society, and actually put it behind things that will improve the daily life of Canadians” — public transit that actually works, public housing that is beautiful and affordable and not governed by speculation. And we got to — we got to take on the tech bros, who dominate our economy like they dominate the global economy. So, we came out right away, when I was first leader and came to Ottawa for the first time, with a call for the government to ban surveillance pricing, which is happening now in states across the country. We’ve got a human-first AI policy, where we’re calling for a moratorium on data centers, much as Bernie Sanders is doing in the States.

And I think there is a common surge in democratic socialist politics, which is really speaking to people’s everyday emergencies of just trying to get by in an economy that is completely impossible and rigged in favor of the rich. And I’m very optimistic about our chances in Canada. Right now I don’t have proof points, you know, in the polls. We’ve got five seats in the House of Commons. But I can feel something shifting in politics. It is underneath the mainstream radar. The corporate media wants to declare us on life support, in a death spiral. Every day is another story about how the NDP is toast. And yet, in the leadership campaign, we signed up tens of thousands of new members in every single part of this country. We set fundraising records for the NDP in the leadership race. And we won, on the first ballot in a ranked-ballot system, with the largest margin and the largest absolute votes of any of NDP leadership campaign in history, including Jack Layton when he was first elected leader. So, there’s something going on here, up here in Canada. Don’t romanticize it, as Americans too often do. But we are building, like Zohran Mamdani is building, like Bernie and others are building. And we’re very optimistic.

AMY GOODMAN: Avi Lewis, I want to turn to the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney speaking in Davos at the World Economic Forum in January.

PRIME MINISTER MARK CARNEY: We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So we placed the sign in the window, we participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works.

AMY GOODMAN: The former banker, the Canadian prime minister, sounds like he could be you, Avi Lewis. What does he actually mean? I mean, this is a speech that caught the world’s attention. And what are you countering it with at the NDP?

AVI LEWIS: Well, you know, that Davos speech, I think rightly, got a lot of attention. It was nice to hear a grown-up in the room. He’s an urbane, intelligent guy, Mark Carney. But there’s been a stark gap between those words and the reality. Canada’s Liberal government has utterly failed to condemn the genocide in Gaza. The NDP has been really clear on the moral rupture, the tearing at the fabric of humanity that represents the human experience for all of us and a huge majority of Canadians watching a live-streamed genocide. The Liberals have claimed they have an arms embargo on Israel, and yet there’s vast loopholes where we sell arms to the United States and they’re arms-washed and delivered to Israel. When Israel and United States started the reprehensible, illegal attack on Iran, that has destabilized the entire world, Mark Carney, in the first hours, praised that attack and played up the Iran nuclear threat, which we know there’s not a shred of evidence for. And so, there’s a really harsh contrast between the Davos speech, which really did speak to a desire for a more level and clear political perspective, and the actual actions of the Canadian government.

So, you know, the other thing is, like, yesterday, Carney announced a sovereign wealth fund as a way to fund these major projects. We are in the mood to do big things in Canada. But these huge extractive projects, with this new sovereign wealth fund, which is going to be unlike Norway’s, which, as you know, was — is now over $2 trillion worth, because they harvested — through public ownership in the oil industry, they harvested royalties and profits and saved them and redistributed them to build their social safety net. Canada has done the exact opposite. We ship 97% of our oil and gas straight to the United States — it’s come down a tiny bit, but that’s been the historic figure — and foreign corporations. Our oil industry is still 60% U.S.-owned. And a lot of these extractive projects, the profits are going to go straight to U.S. and other foreign corporations. But that’s what we’re doubling down on under Carney. This sovereign wealth fund is a great example of the Liberal doublespeak. He references Norway. It’s a completely different model. It’s another public-private partnership where they’re going to put $25 billion of public money into a fund that’s supposed to attract massive amounts of private capital. But what they’re really doing is de-risking these big projects, like a new oil and gas pipeline, which has no private sector proponent in Canada. They’re going to do it anyway to achieve political peace with Alberta, which has never actually been achieved, despite the fact that we already bought them a $40 billion pipeline at public expense. They’re going to do it all over again. They’re going to put public money behind it. And this is the direction.

We’re saying we need a new direction for the Canadian economy. We have been connecting climate action with addressing the cost-of-living emergency. So, we’ve been advancing a whole bunch of concrete solutions, like a heat pump in every home, a whole new industry, manufacturing jobs, using Canadian steel that we can’t sell to the United States because of Trump’s tariffs, in order to slash people’s household bills for heating in Canada, which are significant, and slash emissions at the same time; an electric bus revolution, to reconnect this vast country, to save our auto industry, which is so entwined with the U.S. and Mexico under NAFTA and now CUSMA, that we’re really, really in an existential spiral with the auto industry in Canada. We need public ownership, to put people back to work, to reconnect our country, to build an independent economy.

And more than anything, we should be investing in the economy of care, where most of — the biggest sector by employment in Canada, healthcare, education, long-term care, childcare, these dominated by women, this industry, underpaid and undervalued, is the actual social fabric, the ties that bind us together in communities. You get way more economic benefit when you invest in care. And we need to pay women workers more and actually support what holds Canadian society together.

We’ve got a very strong alternative offer that speaks to Canadians. And we still have a lot of work to do to kind of surface the contradictions in the Carney story. He is a smart guy, and he’s very popular right now, but we think that these programs are going to fail, because they’re doubling down on the same old thing that got us in this mess in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: Avi Lewis, we want to thank you so much for being with us, the newly elected leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, speaking to us from Ottawa.

I’m here in Toronto for Hot Docs, for the screening of the new documentary Steal This Story, Please! It will be screening tonight at 6:30. People can check our website at democracynow.org.

This is Democracy Now! Coming up, ministers from more than 50 countries are gathering in Colombia for a major summit on transitioning away from fossil fuels. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Honduran musician Karla Lara performing in our Democracy Now! studio.