Documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis says the federal government’s failure to tackle climate change triggered his political debut and he’s chosen the riding of West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country as his stage.
“We have a federal government that says all the right things and then does absolutely nothing,” Lewis, 54, told Coast Reporter following the Halfmoon Bay resident’s announcement he would be seeking the nomination as the riding’s NDP candidate at a May 22 nomination meeting.
The riding association confirmed he would be acclaimed at the meeting.
“People on the Coast deserve politicians who feel the urgency – both the terror and the promise – of genuine climate transformation in their bones,” Lewis said, “and that’s what I’ve been feeling in the last decade of my work.”
Lewis’s work includes the Leap Manifesto – developed with his wife, author Naomi Klein, among others, and unveiled during the 2015 federal election.
Described by the organization Lewis co-founded to promote its vision as “a roadmap for how we can transition beyond fossil fuels in a way that creates a more just, fair, and caring world,” the manifesto was debated at a 2016 NDP convention but was never adopted by the party.
Aside from climate, Lewis used his announcement to focus on housing, which he said is “wreaking havoc in the lives of all of us living along the coast.” The solution, he said, is a “Green New Deal for housing.”
“What we need is for the federal government to unleash the kind of torrent of spending that they’ve shown we have the capacity for in the pandemic,” he said, citing party leader Jagmeet Singh’s May 10 pledge to build 500,000 social and affordable homes over 10 years.
Like Liberal MP Patrick Weiler, a rookie candidate last election, this will be Lewis’s first foray into politics, though Lewis was born into a family rooted to the NDP.
His father, Stephen Lewis, is an outspoken human rights activist and led the Ontario NDP in the 1970s. His grandfather, David Lewis, succeeded NDP founder Tommy Douglas as the party’s federal leader.
The federal NDP has never achieved success in this riding, however.
Weiler won the riding in 2019 with 35 per cent of the vote after MP Pamela Goldsmith Jones chose not to run for personal reasons. NDP candidate Judith Wilson came fourth after joining the race weeks before the vote.
If an election is called this fall, Weiler and Lewis will face off against Conservative candidate John Weston, 63, who served as the riding’s MP from 2008 to 2015.
The Greens have yet to choose a candidate but in the running so far are Remi Charron, Amanda Ladner and Sunshine Coast resident Mike Simpson, also a documentary filmmaker.
Lewis acknowledged the NDP hasn’t fielded a fully-resourced campaign in the riding “for a very long time,” describing the 2019 fourth-place finish as “heartbreaking and frustrating.”
“This time we’ve come to play,” he said. He expects to raise enough to meet the riding’s $124,660 spending limit.
As for his Sunshine Coast ties, Lewis and Klein married in Roberts Creek nearly 25 years ago and in 2005 purchased a residence in Halfmoon Bay and “have been trying to find a way to be here full time for 15 years.”
After the pandemic hit, the couple and their eight-year-old son, who had been born at Sechelt Hospital, moved to the Coast permanently from New Jersey where Klein taught at Rutgers University.
“We came back last June fleeing Trump’s America in the first wave, and we just decided, this is it,” Lewis said.
Over the past six months he’s been “making a point of learning more about the extraordinary local activism that goes on here,” by meeting with organizations, including speaking at the Sunshine Coast Conservation Association’s May 6 annual general meeting.
“It is a community that’s deeply engaged with the climate emergency,” he said. “Rising sea levels and smoke-choked skies are not an abstraction on the Sunshine Coast, they’re a lived reality.”
Lewis admitted he’ll need to win over those environmentally-minded voters to take the seat, telling Coast Reporter he plans to “capture the imagination of the environmental progressive base here on the Coast and Sea to Sky,” as well as in West Vancouver, which has not traditionally voted NDP.
Still, he said, “there’s a lot of people who are I think really disappointed in the chasm between what the Trudeau Liberals say and what they do. And they might be looking for an alternative.”
