MONTREAL — Four months into the job, NDP Leader Avi Lewis is still in no rush. Since winning the leadership of a party knocked to its knees in the 2025 federal election, Lewis has maintained his immediate priority is preparing the NDP for an election — not winning a seat in the House of Commons. Multiple byelections are set to take place before the end of the year; Lewis will be door-knocking with candidates in those ridings but won’t be on the ballot himself. “I think there will be a point in the next year where I feel we’re election-ready across the country. We want to run serious campaigns everywhere,” Lewis said in a recent interview in Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood. “We’re in a position as a party on the rebound where I can’t just pursue a seat at all costs. So I do need a litmus test for when is it time for me to get in there? And that’s going be either in the next election or the run-up to the next election, once we are election-ready.” Lewis ran and lost in Vancouver ridings in both the 2021 and 2025 elections. He has spent the last three weeks in Montreal campaigning with NDP candidates Pierre Céré and Nima Machouf, who are running in the Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie and Laurier-Ste-Marie ridings respectively. Maps of those two ridings cover part of an office wall in a Montreal Presbyterian church where Lewis has been taking daily one-on-one, three-hour French lessons while in the city. “Normally when you do French immersion, you go to Jonquière or Trois-Rivières or somewhere outside of Montreal, because it’s a very bilingual city. I’ve made a real effort to stay in French here by knocking on doors in these two byelections that are coming up,” Lewis said. His French lessons have focused on political communication. Wednesday’s lesson began with his teacher critiquing an interview he did a day earlier with Radio-Canada. While Lewis’s teacher did pause the interview periodically to discuss his pronunciation and phrasing, she did a celebratory fist pump when the Radio-Canada host complimented his French at the end of the interview. The NDP is looking to hold Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie, currently represented by Independent Alexandre Boulerice, who left the NDP caucus after announcing plans to run in the Quebec election this fall. Former Liberal cabinet minister Steven Guilbeault has said he will resign as MP for Laurier-Ste-Marie. Lewis spent part of a recent French lesson studying a Guilbeault interview on the Radio-Canada program “Tout le monde en parle” from Nov. 30, 2025 about his resignation from cabinet. He said he was studying host Guy A. Lepage’s interview style and political rhetoric techniques in Québécois French. Lewis knows his party history. Former leader Jack Layton’s appearance on the program during the 2011 election campaign is widely credited with helping to drive the NDP’s breakthrough in the province — a feat Lewis hopes to replicate. The last election saw the NDP reduced to just seven seats in the House of Commons. Since then, Nunavut MP Lori Idlout joined the Liberals and Boulerice left federal politics entirely — leaving Lewis with a five-member caucus that could comfortably carpool to the House of Commons in a family sedan. That has left the party with no standing on parliamentary committees and reduced visibility in question period. Lewis said the caucus and NDP supporters don’t want him tied to Ottawa when he can be out knocking on doors. Lewis attributed the NDP’s staggering loss last year to widespread anxiety brought on by U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war. That fear still exists, he said, and many people still see Prime Minister Mark Carney as the best person to handle the situation. But Lewis also said he sees signs of “buyer’s remorse” among New Democrats who voted Liberal in 2025, and among Liberals offended by Carney’s embrace of artificial intelligence, higher military spending and his “doubling down on fossil fuels in the midst of a climate emergency.” “There are lots of progressive Liberals who are ready to come over and I think that we have the potential to flip some seats in the next election in places that may surprise people,” he said, adding the NDP will be there when Canadians are “ready to actually get back to voting their values.” He may be on to something. A recent Angus Reid online poll suggests that one in six 2025 Liberal voters now say they would support the NDP, and half of those voters cite climate change as their top political priority. (The Canadian Research Insights Council, an industry organization that promotes polling standards, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.) Lewis said he sees the downtown Montreal ridings as “very progressive” areas where the NDP can compete by calling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide, condemning Israeli and American military action in the Middle East and supporting green energy over increased fossil fuel production. Lewis said that after he’s done in Montreal, he’ll head to the Toronto riding of Beaches-East York and to North Vancouver-Capilano in the coming weeks. Byelections will be held in those ridings and in Chicoutimi-Le Fjord in Quebec on Aug. 31. The NDP does not have candidates in those ridings yet, but Lewis said volunteers are out canvassing ahead of the vote. Lewis said the party planned to have full nomination contests in those ridings but did not anticipate Carney calling summer byelections. He said he may have to appoint candidates in those ridings. These byelections will test Lewis’s claim that, after losing support to both the Liberals and Conservatives last year, his party is regaining lost ground in key constituencies. Lewis said he’s seeing signs that one key constituency the NDP lost in part to the Conservatives is starting to come back: young people. He said young Canadians who are struggling with an unaffordable housing market and staring down threats like artificial intelligence and climate change are giving the party a second look. “If we can excite young people to actually go out and vote, which they don’t do in the same numbers that other demographics do, there could be a big surprise coming … either in these byelections or in the next election," he said. “And it will come at the expense of the Conservative votes that we lost, rather than the Liberal ones.” If the NDP can siphon votes from Conservatives, he said, it undermines one of the Liberals’ key arguments — that votes for New Democrats only elevate Conservatives. “If we’re taking from both sides, the strategic voting argument just doesn’t work the same way,” he said. ”Liberals can’t hold people’s vote hostage and say, ‘If you don’t vote us, then you get the Conservatives,’ when the NDP shows that we can take votes from the Conservatives as well.” This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 1, 2026. David Baxter, The Canadian Press
