If Government Programs Make Canada Canadian, Canada Is Already Dead

Avi Lewis and the Government-as-Identity Problem

A leadership race is underway in the New Democratic Party (NDP), and the frontrunner has a theory about Canada. Not just about policy, not just about economics, but about the country’s soul. Avi Lewis, Stephen Lewis’s son, Naomi Klein’s husband, and the latest heir to Canada’s most celebrated progressive dynasty, wants Canadians to understand what they are. And what they are, apparently, is reduced to a collection of government programs.

Here is what he said, in his own words, at a recent leadership debate:

“Our campaign has put forward the essential role of public ownership to make. To, to double down on the things that make Canada, Canada, not just our healthcare system, investing in the care economy where more than 3 million people, mostly women, work in long-term care in childcare and healthcare and education.

A public option for groceries, cell phones, internet connection, a public bank through Canada Post and postal banking. These are measures emphasizing the responsibility of the government to step up and govern and use our public resources in the public interest. Not everybody on the stage is willing to go there, but that’s the only way that Canada can build a Trump proof economy.”

Read it again. “Our campaign has put forward the essential role of public ownership to make.” To make what? He pivots mid-thought, catches himself, and doubles down. The sentence knew where it was going better than he did. But the core claim arrives clearly enough despite the syntactical wreckage: public ownership is what makes Canada, Canada. Governing is reduced to providing things, and government services are the soul of the country. Expand them, which means expanding government and, therefore, spending and taxation, and Canada becomes Trump-proof.

This endless expansion of services is also an endless expansion of employment for public service unions. The more the state leviathan grows, the less there will be room for individual autonomy and social freedoms. Such a vision of Canada deserves careful examination. Lewis may become the next leader of the NDP.

The NDP has been reduced and crippled, but it will not likely disappear, and may come to hold the balance of power in a not too distant federal future.

The Dynasty Problem

Before examining the ideas, the man requires some context, because with Lewis, the context is rather the point.

Avi Lewis is Stephen Lewis’s son, the Ontario NDP politician and UN representative. He is the grandson of David Lewis, another prominent Canadian politician and leader of the federal NDP from 1971 to 1975. Avi is Naomi Klein’s husband. He has never lacked for institutional support, ideological affirmation, or access to the right rooms. He is, in the fullest possible sense, Canadian progressive royalty, a man whose primary qualifications for national leadership appear to be his surname and his marriage certificate.

Canada just spent a decade governed by another man whose main credential was his father’s name. Pierre Trudeau’s son ran the country from 2015 to 2025 and left behind a doubled national debt, a divided country, a hollowed-out military, and a bloated federal bureaucracy that nearly doubled in size while delivering less of everything, plus lower quality. The Liberal dynasty did not serve Canada particularly well.

And yet here are the progressives, casting admiring eyes at another son, another political heir, another carrier of a famous name. One might ask why the left is so enchanted by dynasty. The uncomfortable answer is that dynasty substitutes for accomplishment, and accomplishment is not always in abundant supply in their circles of admirers.

The NDP, the self-declared party of working people, is auditioning another political aristocrat. One hopes the irony registers somewhere.

What Does Lewis Actually Mean?

In that short passage, Lewis makes an identity claim, not merely a policy one. He does not say Canada’s public services are useful, affordable, or well-administered. He says they are “the things that make Canada, Canada.” This is a statement about the national essence of the country. Strip away the healthcare monopoly, the regulated telecoms, the supply-managed dairy sector, and what remains is apparently not quite Canada anymore. Canadians should be so thankful that the federal government supplies what makes Canadians who they are. Without government, in other words, there is no national community, there is no identity.

The question this raises is straightforward: what does this claim actually require one to believe about Canadian history?

If we follow the intrinsic logic, it requires believing that Canada did not meaningfully exist before these programs arrived. Medicare did not become universal until 1966. The care economy Lewis celebrates is largely a creation of recent decades. Were the Loyalist settlers of Upper Canada waiting in some anteroom of nationhood, pending the arrival of a federal childcare framework? Were the Métis of the Red River, the habitants of the St. Lawrence valley, the homesteaders of the prairies all somehow proto-Canadian, their identity incomplete without Ottawa’s progressive administrative blessing?

The claim is historically absurd. Canada has been distinctively itself, with a developing but recognizable character, a constitutional tradition, and a cultural personality of sorts, long before the federal government decided to monopolize hospital care and regulate cell phone rates. The main problem here is that Canadian leaders don’t know what it means to be Canadian because Canadians themselves do not know or are unable to articulate it.

But the deeper implication is the one Lewis is peddling. If public services define Canadian identity, then the erosion of those services brings us to the collapse of Canada itself. Emergency rooms are closing or operating perpetually beyond capacity. Specialist wait times stretch into years. Federal workers fought their own government rather than return to their offices to work. The insolvent post office cannot reliably deliver a letter. If Lewis is right about what Canada is, Canada is in serious existential trouble. He has constructed an identity politics argument on a foundation that is visibly disintegrating beneath him.

But fear not, he and an expanding NDP government are the solution to the crisis.

The Institutional Man and His Blind Spot

Lewis is, at bottom, an institutional man. He has moved through progressive media organizations, activist networks, and political circles his entire adult life. State institutions are his natural habitat. It genuinely does not appear to occur to him that the failures he is circling around might be rooted in the very interventions he is prescribing.

He knows Canadians are furious about grocery prices, cell phone bills, healthcare wait times, and internet costs. He is not raising these topics from a position of satisfaction. He is raising them because he can read a poll. But watch what he does with the discontent. Every problem caused by government protection or monopoly is to be solved by more government protection and more monopoly. It is the inescapable circle of the bureaucratic soul.

He refuses to see that cell phone prices are high because Ottawa has spent decades shielding Bell, Rogers, and Telus from foreign competition. Lewis’s answer is a public option, not competition. Grocery prices are elevated partly because supply management insulates Canadian agricultural producers from market discipline. Lewis supports supply management. Healthcare is rationing care and driving physicians out of the country because the single-payer system prohibits parallel private care and punishes innovation. Lewis endorses the system. The post office is insolvent and cannot deliver basic services. Lewis proposes to build a bank on top of it.

This is not problem-solving. It is lose technocratric liturgy. The congregation is suffering, so the preacher prescribes more hymns and a larger collection plate.

The Trump-Proof Contradiction

The Trump-proof economy argument is where Lewis’s logic becomes genuinely revealing and genuinely self-defeating.

The structure is simple enough: Trump represents American-style markets and private enterprise; Canada must therefore define itself against those things; the more Canada commits to public ownership, the less American and more Canadian it becomes. Government programs and bloated bureaucracies are not just good policy. They are an identity shield.

There is something appealing in the instinct. Canada’s autonomy from the United States is a legitimate aspiration. The country has real interests that differ from Washington’s, a distinct [though not necessarily better] set of institutions and political culture, and good reasons to resist being absorbed into the American economic and cultural orbit. On this much, Lewis is pointing at something real. It’s the Canadian response to these realities that is always disappointing.

That failure ushers in a significant contradiction. To free Canadians from dependence on the United States, Lewis proposes making them thoroughly dependent on the Canadian state. The path to national autonomy runs directly through individual subservience to Ottawa. Canadians will be liberated from American influence by becoming wards of their own federal government, receiving their groceries, their banking, their telecommunications, and their healthcare from the same administration that cannot keep the lights on in a military base or deliver a parcel before Christmas.

This is the warped logic: freedom from Washington can only be achieved through dependency on Ottawa. One form of external control is exchanged for a more intimate, domestic variety. Domestic oppressors are always preferable to foreign ones. The Canadian will be autonomous from America and answerable to the federal bureaucracy for basic daily functions. Lewis appears not to notice the problem.

And who, precisely, would run this expanded public economy? Lewis is a creature of the labour movement. His vision of public ownership is union-administered, public ownership. The model is not some idealized Scandinavian technocracy with rigorous accountability, demands on effective outcomes and competitive benchmarking. The model is Canada Post: rotating strikes, structural insolvency, workers who do not want to come to work, and a basic delivery operation that required government bailouts while still failing to deliver the mail. Lewis proposes to take that model and apply it to groceries, banking, and telecommunications. Picture the checkout line. Picture the hold music. Picture filing a complaint.

The Bank: The Most Dangerous Proposal

The postal banking idea deserves particular attention because it is the second-most-dangerous proposal in Lewis’s platform and has received the least scrutiny.

In February 2022, the Trudeau government unlawfully invoked the Emergencies Act to freeze the bank accounts of Canadians who had donated to a trucking protest. No charges in most cases. No court orders. A cabinet decision, and access to your own money was suspended. Two subsequent legal challenges found the invocation did not meet the legal threshold. The government used the banking system as a tool of political punishment outside normal legal channels, and then a commission told them they should not have done so, yet they care little for what the courts have said. They violated Charter rights wholesale.

Now Lewis wants Ottawa to run a bank.

The last thing Canadians need, after watching the federal government weaponize financial access against citizens it dislikes, is a federally owned bank with only private oligopolies left to flee to. A public bank is not merely a financial service. In the hands of a government that has already shown what it will do with financial leverage over dissenters, it is a compliance infrastructure: attend the wrong rally, donate to the wrong cause, or sign the wrong petition, and you will suffer the consequences.

Lewis seems to present this idea as a service to the underbanked. It is, in practice, a proposal to hand the government a direct financial leash on its citizens, administered by an organization that goes on strike before Christmas and cannot deliver the mail.

The Grocery Store Test

Lewis proposes a public option for groceries as though this is a daring innovation rather than one of the most comprehensively tested and consistently failed policy ideas in modern history.

Anyone curious about how state-run grocery retail performs in practice might consult Cuba’s rationing system, Venezuela’s food distribution apparatus (which produced shortages so severe that Venezuelans lost an average of eleven pounds annually in the late 2010s), or the Soviet grocery store, defined by empty shelves, long queues, and the best goods reserved for elite party members like Lewis (I hear echoes of Bob Rae screaming at the Toronto airport his Air Canada Super Elite status). These are not cherry-picked horror stories. They are the predictable results of removing price signals and profit incentives from food distribution.

Canadian grocery prices are substantially higher because of carbon taxes, inflationary monetary policy, and Ottawa's protection of incumbent retailers and agricultural producers from competition. The solution to a protection problem is competition. But competition does not appear anywhere in Lewis’s vocabulary, because competition implies the possibility that the state is not always the answer. For an institutional man, that possibility is unthinkable.

Identity and the Spiritual Poverty of the Government-as-Soul Argument

Canadian identity is genuinely elusive. The country’s character is not easily reduced to a single idea, a founding myth, or a crisp national narrative. That ambiguity is, in some ways, part of the character itself. It is an unsolved riddle.

But the difficulty of defining Canadian identity does not mean that any proposed definition is equally valid. And the claim that Canada’s substance is its government programs, that the soul of the country resides in federal administration, deserves to be examined for what it actually is.

Canada predates Medicare by a century. It predates the progressivist care economy, the CRTC, supply management, the CBC, and the Canada Infrastructure Bank by considerably more. Its constitutional tradition, its common law inheritance, its French cultural survival, its geographic immensity, its particular experience of building something in an inhospitable place without a revolutionary founding mythology, these things constitute elements of a character that Ottawa did not create and cannot sustain or destroy by expanding the civil service. Sadly, the country lacks the leadership to articulate its essence.

To say that Canada is defined by its government programs is to say that Canadians are defined by what they receive rather than what they do, by their state dependency rather than their agency, by the services administered to them rather than the lives they build. It robs them of autonomous agency. It reduces citizenship to clientage and the country to a delivery mechanism administered by soulless bureaucrats far away.

One may struggle to articulate precisely what Canadian identity is. That is an old and honourable struggle. But there is something spiritually impoverished (and empoverishing), something genuinely hollow, about resolving that struggle by pointing at a federal program and saying: there, that is us. That is what we are. That is what makes us worth preserving.

A man who believes the essence of a country is its bureaucracy (and what a bureaucracy it is!) has not thought seriously about national community, about history, about purpose, about the nature of government, about people, or about what makes a life worth living. He is an entitled political heir who has simply mistaken the institutions he grew up in for Canada and for the world itself.

The NDP is considering making him its leader. Canada should be paying very close attention.