I ended up watching some of the Q&A after the NDP leadership debate. Interestingly, @avilewis was asked about an allegation which I hadn't heard before: that he obstructed and undermined the employee union at The Leap, the climate advocacy organization which he co-founded.

(edit: He is asked about it at 2:01:16 in the CPAC video of the debate and subsequent Q&A, it's the question from David Thurton at the CBC)

I found the reporting which was the source of the allegation: https://provincialtimes.ca/exclusive-did-an-ndp-leadership-candidate-bust-his-own-workers-union/

The main facts stated are:

1) Workers at The Leap obtained certification for a union in June 2020. (https://theleap.org/the-leap-workers-vote-to-join-cupe/)
2) Despite the union being certified, no progress on bargaining or reaching a collective agreement with the union ever occurred, for 9 months.
3) In March 2021, The Leap shut down. One of the cited reasons was the departure of Lewis. (https://theleap.org/closing-statement/)
4) In March 2021, 6 days after The Leap shut down, The Breach, a progressive news organization, launched.
5) Lewis would go on to become a prominent contributor to The Breach.
6) Notably, The Breach to this day remains a non-unionized newsroom.

The main allegation is that Lewis took part in "union avoidance", specifically "an employer delaying bargaining until an organization closes, only to re-emerge in a non-union form."

In light of my reading I wasn't impressed with Lewis' answer, because he only pointed to the initial certification of the union in June, and never addressed the substance of the allegation: that he and other management deliberately delayed any progress towards an actual collective agreement before the organization shut down. I think that anyone who purports to care about unionization should be familiar with the "don't give anything substantive to the union, stall until the business shuts down" tactic that employers use. It's kind of 101 level union avoidance stuff.

I also have a very low opinion of The Breach as a newsroom, because they have a recurring pattern of publishing pieces that are indistinguishable from Russian and Chinese propaganda. For example, these articles that are basically bottom of the barrel scraping, lurid personal attacks on Chrystia Freeland, which use a line of attack ("her grandfather was a nazi!!1!!1") that is completely the same as what Russian state media says:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250922055414/https://breachmedia.ca/chrystia-freelands-denials-grandfather-complicit-nazi-genocide/
https://web.archive.org/web/20250821034722/https://breachmedia.ca/foreign-policy-without-diplomacy-will-be-freelands-legacy/

Or these articles that try as hard as they possibly can using scraps of circumstantial evidence to deny that Chinese interference in Canadian politics took place, while very conveniently ignoring the Chinese diaspora who have actual first-hand experience with PRC transnational repression and interference:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250611194539/https://breachmedia.ca/no-traitors-cost-of-baseless-reporting-chinese-interference/
https://web.archive.org/web/20250828165825/https://breachmedia.ca/china-interference-canada/

(I left an angry comment on the first article lmao)

The Breach is aware of the existence of transnational repression and foreign propaganda - they've done great reporting on the role of the Hindutva movement / BJP in Canada - so the fact that they would publish this other garbage is even more damning. And to be honest, Lewis' involvement with The Breach, and The Breach's endorsement of Lewis, is kind of an anti-endorsement for me.

However, despite my doubt in Lewis' answer, and my disdain for The Breach, I think the allegations fall apart on one point: That The Breach was a direct succession organization to The Leap. The organizations had different purposes, and the same people were not involved in founding The Breach as the ones which departed The Leap. The facts of the allegation that I've listed above are correct as far as I can tell, but the rest of the reporting and the conclusions it drew are suspect (basically the same level of journalistic malpractice as The Breach's terrible articles above).

tl;dr I think my main point is just Don't Read The Breach. To put it politely, they are using the guise of being a leftist publication to sneak in pieces that are very much defending authoritarianism

#cdnpoli #ndpleadership #ndp #ndpdebate