New NDP Leader: Avi Lewis Wins the Leadership His Housing and Real Estate Plan

Avi Lewis has been elected Canada’s new NDP leader, winning the party’s leadership race on Sunday March 29, 2026 with 56%% of the vote on the first ballot. The activist, documentary filmmaker and former television journalist defeat four candidates, including Alberta MP Heather McPherson, in a decisive first-round victory at the party’s convention in Winnipeg.

Avi Lewis takes over the part at a historic low. With just six seats in the House of Commons following the NDP’s, the 2025 federal election is the party’s worst electoral performance in its history. Politics is nothing foreign to Lewis. He is the grandson of former NDP leader David Lewis and son of former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis, making him the third generation of his family to lead a major Canadian political party.

Avi Lewis position on Housing and Real Estate

Lewis walks into the NDP leadership with a clear and unapologetic housing agenda.

His platform frames Canada’s housing crisis not as a supply problem or an interest rate problem, but as a market failure driven by speculation and corporate profit. “housing has become a get-rich-quick scheme for speculators at the expense of working Canadians” says Lewis.

His response is structural: a national rent cap, a public builder to deliver one million homes, new taxes on corporate landlords, and hard limits on who can own and profit from rental housing in Canada. For anyone active in real estate, this platform deserves a close read.

National Rent Cap for Stronger Tenants Protections

Lewis wants to cap rent increases at the rate of inflation, province by province, and extend that cap to vacant units. That last point is significant: today in many provinces, landlords can reset rents to market rate the moment a tenant leaves. 

Under his proposal, that practice ends. He also wants to make pro-density zoning reform a condition for receiving federal housing funds, addressing the supply side of the equation alongside the price controls.

Banning REITs and Corporate Landlords from Affordable Housing

A direct aim at Real Estate Investment Trusts, which have become major players in Canada’s rental market. 

Lewis’s platform calls for ending their tax breaks, banning them from purchasing affordable housing, and cutting off their access to CMHC-insured loans unless they are funding non-market housing. 

The logic is straightforward: REITs are not landlords, they are financial instruments, and their presence in the rental market drives up costs for everyone else.

Housing Affordability: One Million Public Homes in Five Years

Canada largely exited the public housing business in the early 1990s. Lewis wants to reverse three decades of federal retreat by establishing a public builder mandated to deliver one million social, co-op, non-profit and supportive homes within five years. 

The agency would use federal lands, modular and prefab construction, and energy-efficient design to cut costs and accelerate delivery at a scale the private sector has consistently failed to match.

Putting an End to Renovictions in Canada

Renovictions, where landlords evict tenants under the guise of renovations to reset rents at market rate, have become one of the most abused loopholes in Canadian tenancy law. Under 

Lewis’s plan, federal housing funding would be conditional on provinces adopting national standards that explicitly prohibit the practice. 

He also proposes national health, safety and maintenance standards with clear landlord accountability, and a federal fund to support tenant organizing.

Ending Federal Subsidies to Corporate Landlords and Investors

Federal housing money has long flowed to private players with few strings attached. 

The new NDP leader wants to change that fundamentally, by increasing the capital gains inclusion rate on residential investment properties, removing CMHC lending access for REITs investing in market housing, and tying all federal housing subsidies to perpetual affordability commitments of up to 99 years. 

The principle is simple: public funds should never subsidize private profit on housing.