Stephen Lewis may be the best ex-politician Canada ever had.
Lewis passed away aged eighty-eight on March 31 after a long battle with cancer. News of his death came just two days after his son Avi Lewis won a majority of votes at the federal New Democratic Party (NDP) leadership convention in Winnipeg.
Stephen Lewis led the provincial branch of the NDP to official opposition status in Ontario in the mid-1970s, a considerable feat for a relatively new party in a province long dominated by “big tent” conservatives.
But it was outside of politics that Lewis made his greatest contributions, first as Canadian ambassador to the United Nations — where he pushed Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney to take a hard line against apartheid South Africa — and then as a global leader in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Lewis leaves a complicated legacy for Canadian leftists. Though he is well remembered as a diplomat and humanitarian, he also played an instrumental role in expelling a left-nationalist, democratic socialist movement from the federal and Ontario branches of the NDP in the 1970s.
“Stephen Lewis was one of the best leaders the Ontario NDP ever had,” says Steven High, a professor of history at Montreal’s Concordia University.
He was a brilliant man whose oratory skills were second to none. But just as Lyndon B. Johnson’s legacy as one of the most progressive presidents in US history was forever marred by his going all-in on the Vietnam War, Stephen Lewis’s time as NDP leader will always be associated with the expulsion of the left-nationalist “Waffle” movement.
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…
Auteur: Taylor C. Noakes
