NDP Leader Avi Lewis says his immediate priority is preparing the party for the next general election, not winning himself a seat in the House of Commons. Lewis, who has led the federal New Democrats for four months, told The Globe and Mail he expects the NDP to be election-ready across the country within the next year and plans to seek a seat either in the next federal election or in its run-up once that threshold is met (The Globe and Mail).

The decision means Lewis will not be on the ballot in multiple by-elections set to take place before the end of the year. Three of those contests, in Ontario, B.C. and Quebec ridings, are scheduled for Aug. 31 after being called by Prime Minister Mark Carney (The Globe and Mail). The choice carries practical weight: with the departures of NDP members, the party is left with just five seats in the House of Commons, seven seats short of the number required for recognized party status (Avi Lewis, Facebook). That figure is down from the seven seats the NDP held after the 2025 federal election (The Globe and Mail).

Lewis has spent the last three weeks campaigning in Montreal alongside NDP candidates Pierre Céré and Nima Machouf, who are running in Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie and Laurier–Ste-Marie respectively. The party is looking to hold Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, a riding currently represented by Independent Alexandre Boulerice, who left the NDP caucus after announcing plans to run in the Quebec provincial election this fall. In Laurier–Ste-Marie, former Liberal cabinet minister Steven Guilbeault has said he will resign as MP, opening the seat (The Globe and Mail).

While in Montreal, Lewis has been taking daily three-hour, one-on-one French lessons focused on political communication. He said he has been studying the interview style of host Guy A. Lepage and political rhetoric techniques in Québécois French. Former NDP leader Jack Layton's appearance on the program Tout le monde en parle during the 2011 election campaign is widely credited with helping drive the NDP's breakthrough in Quebec (The Globe and Mail).

Lewis ran and lost in Vancouver ridings in both the 2021 and 2025 federal elections. He won the federal NDP leadership on March 29, 2026 (Lewis is Leader), defeating Heather McPherson, who had launched her bid the previous September (The Globe and Mail). Lewis had officially entered the race promising policies including a wealth tax (The Globe and Mail) and campaigned on building an NDP that fights for the 99 per cent (Lewis is Leader). He was the perceived front-runner throughout (The Globe and Mail).

Before launching his leadership bid, Lewis had said he was considering seeking the leadership of the party his grandfather David Lewis led from 1971 to 1975 (The Globe and Mail). Two former NDP MPs had ruled out bids to lead the party (The Globe and Mail). The NDP had launched a review of its 2025 federal election campaign, which Lewis called "absolutely essential" and said he looked forward to participating in vigorously (The Globe and Mail).

The broader context here is a party attempting to rebuild from a historically low seat count while its leader remains outside Parliament. Seven seats after the 2025 election, now possibly five with recent departures, leaves the NDP well below the threshold for official party status in the Commons. A leader without a seat is not unprecedented in Canadian federal politics, but the combination of a sub-status caucus, an imminent by-election cycle, and a leader who has lost two consecutive election contests in Vancouver creates a narrow margin for error. Lewis's decision to forgo by-election candidacy trades the immediate visibility of a Commons presence for time spent on party-building and on the French-language skills that the Layton precedent in Quebec suggests matter electorally.

Lewis's Montreal sojourn signals where the NDP sees its path back running through Quebec, a province that delivered the party's 2011 orange wave and where two of the three Aug. 31 by-elections are not in play but where the party infrastructure is being tested through Céré and Machouf's candidacies. The concentration on Lepage's interview style and Québécois political rhetoric suggests Lewis is preparing for the kind of media performances that can define a leader's credibility in the province, rather than simply meeting a functional bilingualism threshold. Whether a year is sufficient to build election-ready associations across all 343 ridings, and whether that timeline aligns with when the next election is actually called, will determine whether this sequencing pays off.