David Lewis (politician) - Leader of The NDP

Leader of The NDP

Stephen Lewis was coming into his own during this period. In 1963, at the age of 26, he was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. Following the engineered 1970 resignation of Donald C. MacDonald, Stephen was elected leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party. During the early-to-mid-1970s, the father-and-son-team led the two largest sections of the NDP.

In February 1968, Stephen Lewis, as a supposed representative of the Ontario NDP legislative caucus, asked the 63-year-old Tommy Douglas to step down as leader so that a younger person could take over. Donald C. MacDonald stated that Lewis was not representing the caucus, but acting on his own. Though Douglas was taken aback by the suggestion, his defeat in the ensuing election bolstered Stephen's case and on October 28, 1969, Douglas announced that he would step down as leader before the NDP's 1971 convention.

David Lewis ran to succeed Douglas as national leader. The 1971 leadership convention was a tumultuous affair. A new generation of NDP activists known as The Waffle proposed many controversial resolutions, including nationalization of all natural resource industries and support for Quebec Sovereignty. It took the combined efforts of the NDP establishment — and the sizable trade union delegation — to vote down these resolutions, which caused many bitter debates and sharply divided the convention. Lewis, as the leading establishment figure, won the party's leadership on April 24 in a surprisingly close race that required four ballots before he could claim victory over the Waffle's James Laxer. Laxer had been prominently featured in media coverage leading up to and during the convention. Lewis' perceived heavy-handedness in dealing with The Waffle at this and previous conventions made him many enemies, as had his involvement in most of the CCF and NDP's internal conflicts during the previous 36 years. Many members who had felt his wrath as party disciplinarian plotted their revenge against him. At his first press conference after winning the leadership, Lewis stated that he was not beholden to the Waffle, as they were soundly defeated at the convention, and that he made no promises to them. He also warned the party's Quebec wing that they could continue to theorize about possible self-determination resolutions, but that come election time they must pledge themselves to the party's newly confirmed federalist policy. He did not purge the Waffle from the NDP, but left it to his son Stephen to do in June 1972, when the party's Ontario wing resolved to disband the Waffle or kick its members out of the party if they did not comply with the disbanding order.

David Lewis led the NDP through the 1972 federal election, during which he uttered his best known quotation, calling Canadian corporations "corporate welfare bums". This election campaign also employed the first dedicated plane for the NDP leader's tour, dubbed "Bum Air" by reporters, because it was a slow, twin engine, turbo-prop driven Handley Page Dart Herald. In previous campaigns, the party's leader, Tommy Douglas, had to use commercial Air Canada flights to get around during the election, with few people in his entourage.

The 1972 election returned a Liberal minority government and elected the greatest number of NDP MPs until the 1988 "Free Trade" election, and left the NDP holding the balance of power until 1974. The NDP propped up Pierre Trudeau's Liberal government in exchange for the implementation of NDP proposals such as the creation of Petro-Canada as a crown corporation. Lewis wanted to topple the government in a vote of no-confidence as early as possible, because he saw no strategic advantage to supporting the Trudeau government: he believed that Trudeau would get the credit if a program was well-received, and that the NDP would be vilified if it was unpopular.

In hindsight, Lewis' no-win evaluation of the situation appears correct: the party would not be rewarded for its efforts by the electorate. In the 1974 election, the NDP were reduced to 16 seats. Lewis lost his seat, leading him to resign as party leader in 1975. It was revealed immediately after the election that he had been battling leukemia for about two years; he had reportedly kept everyone, including his family, unaware of his condition.