AskACanadian

If they took the position with that kind of tone and flippant attitude, I doubt it would go well. Any time you lead with "no private ownership" people stop listening to you. However, if they took unapologetic socialist positions on all the issues at hand, they might do well, especially citing human rights and dignity as the underlying motivation (which people are consistently finding the other big two parties lacking).

Re: private property, definitely not. In BC right now it's a hot potato for BCNDP leader David Eby because of a couple court cases conflated together, BC Conservatives are scaremongering about Indigenous people taking people's houses abd assuming control over all natural resources, and Premier Eby hasn't had good messaging that has pleased anyone so far.

There are Marxist-Leninist, and Communist political parties that espouse those views unapologetically, they got about 4600 votes each or 0.02% of the vote share in Canada's 2025 elections.

I think where Avi Lewis is situating himself is about reasonable for the mainstream left and progressive left in Canada without being too alienating to moderates and centrists. Publicly owned grocery stores competing with private businesses to lower prices is a few steps removed from nationalization, a state monopoly on grocery or syndicalism, but it is in that general spirit.

I think the answer is a firm no.

Doing this would ignore the material conditions of people in Canada today. A part of that is the effects of the decades-long Red Scare propaganda. Going straight up socialism today would therefore result in the activation of all that latent propaganda along with huge resources behind that activation. That would most likely result in snuffing out whatever socialist potential has emerged over the last 5 years.

Instead of that, we should act in accordance to the current reality of Canadians. This means educating people of the realities of the capital system and how it affects them, as well as telling them about concrete steps we could collectively make to improve their material conditions. E.g. gov't run grocery stores that sell them food for less. As people start seeing the positives of these strategies, we can and should tell them - see this is socialism, as opposed to what The Red Scare told you. People who've gone through this consciousness evolution would then seek themselves to learn more and ask questions about socialism and socialist policies.

To add to that, there's many different kinds of socialism and once we've gone beyond the Red Scare, we should collectively discuss and vote on what kind of socialism we want to have. E.g. whether we want to emulate an existing model, or whether we want to employ a different one, like an economy dominated by worker co-ops.

Finally, we know that socialist policies without the name are broadly popular across the liberal-conservative political spectrum. There's plenty of data on that from the US. I imagine us canucks aren't vastly different on that. That's also a part of the material reality that we should use accordingly.