Canada’s Next Prime Minister: Stephen Lewis

Sure, Conservative Party PM Stephen Harper nabbed another four-year term in the May elections up in Canada, but the real news is that the progressive New Democratic Party has replaced the wheezy and corrupt Liberal Party as the Official Opposition, unseating the LP’s leadership. This is largely due to the efforts of firebrand NDP leader Jack Layton, who died of cancer last week at the age of 61.  Harper’s a Bush-style Conservative, although he’s tempered some of his most repellent views to appeal to the generally liberal Canadian public, and he’s never been wildly popular, winning by bare margins in Canada’s Parliament. Here’s a video of the NDP’s Stephen Lewis delivering a eulogy at Layton’s funeral last weekend. (Full text here.) He stirred the audience to standing ovations with his impressive eulogy and didn’t shy away from making Harper and the other CP members in the audience uncomfortable. (Are you paying attention, President Obama?) His definining of the differences between the small and selfish Conservative view of government and the populous propositions of the progressive NDP couldn’t be clearer, and Lewis is an obvious choice for NDP leader and a shoe-in for PM in four years. (The majority of Canadians are sick of Harper, just as the Brits became tired of Margaret Thatcher, but the anti-Harper vote has been splintered among four different parties. With the hapless LP and the Parti Quebecois vanquished, the NDP will, I think, unite the left into a concerted front against Harper.) Why is this important to America? It shows the shift is on to the progressive left, with Canada leading the way. (BTW, Lewis is father-in-law of Naomi Klein who, literally, wrote the book on Disaster Capitalism in “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” (2007). )