Canada’s main progressive party, the New Democrats, selected a leader on Sunday, in a bid to rebuild themselves as the country’s mainstream left-wing group after a crushing defeat in last year’s federal election.
Last April, center-left voters unsettled by President Trump’s economic and sovereignty threats to Canada flocked to the Liberal Party to elect Mark Carney as prime minister. The New Democratic Party was hollowed out, entering the campaign with 24 elected members of Parliament and ending in the single digits.
That ruinous outcome forced the departure last spring of Jagmeet Singh, who had been considered a rising political star when he took over the party’s leadership in 2017.
Now the party wants to rebuild its identity, and its base.
At the New Democratic Party’s convention in Winnipeg, Manitoba, this weekend, it chose Avi Lewis as its new leader. Mr. Lewis, a filmmaker, is a member of a leftist political dynasty in Canada: His grandfather David Lewis led the federal New Democrats in the 1970s, a period in which his father, Stephen Lewis, was leading it at the provincial level in Ontario. Avi Lewis, 58, is married to the Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein.
“The N.D.P. comeback has arrived just in time,” Mr. Lewis said. “Canadians are living on the edge. We’re under economic attack from the U.S., while Donald Trump stomps around the globe, grabbing foreign leaders and oil fields and starting wars he has no idea how to stop.”
To find its footing, the party will have to navigate a political field shaped by Mr. Trump, and one where even traditionally progressive voters are preoccupied more with economic issues than with advancing expensive plans or lofty social ideals.
Mr. Lewis has campaigned on core principles that are animating the global left: affordability, the environment, and a vocally anti-Zionist position on international affairs that focuses on Palestinians. In doing so, he aims to win back voters who have been disappointed by Mr. Carney, a centrist.
“There’s a big opportunity there for the N.D.P. to be practical,” said Erin Kelly, the chief executive of Advanced Symbolics, an artificial intelligence company that conducts market research. Supporters want to see the party, which is responsible for having introduced Canada’s universal health care program, go back to those roots of innovative and revolutionary thinking as a counterweight to mainstream policies, she said.
Some of the proposals that the New Democrats floated in recent weeks to ease cost-of-living concerns — like Mr. Lewis’s idea of establishing a publicly owned grocery chain — did not resonate with Canadians, according to Ms. Kelly’s research.
“That is not what people want to hear,” she said.
In the last administration, under Justin Trudeau, the party made a deal with the governing Liberals that introduced highly popular programs like subsidized dental care, worker protections and a national drug plan. The policies were largely driven by the N.D.P., but Mr. Trudeau got much of the credit.
Today, the party lacks a clear identity, with many voters uncertain of its relevance, according to a poll this month by the research firm Abacus Data.
Much of the New Democrats’ appeal to its traditional base, union and blue-collar workers who were among the party’s founders in 1961, has also faded.
“The exodus of working-class voters, I think, has hurt them most,” said David McGrane, a political studies professor at the University of Saskatchewan and the author of a book about the New Democrats.
Those voters have increasingly drifted toward the Conservative Party, currently led by Pierre Poilievre, a populist who had been favored to win the federal election last year before Mr. Trump returned to power, threatening to annex Canada and turning the race here on its head.
Dr. McGrane said the New Democratic Party had recovered from calamity a few times in the past. But, he asked, “Is it kind of in a critical condition now, and will it come back this time?”
Vjosa Isai is a reporter for The Times based in Toronto, where she covers news from across Canada.
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