Chris Selley: Why so shy about running for Parliament, Avi Lewis?

There has been minor hubbub this week down at the Laurentian Tennis and Raquet Club — not a real place — over a new Abacus Data poll suggesting a generational divide among Canadians when it comes to their most basic views on democracy. Among poll respondents aged 60-plus, 78 per cent felt “democracy is always preferable to any other kind of government.” Among 18-to-29-year-olds, it was just 43 per cent. In that same younger cohort, fully 13 per cent agreed that “for someone like me, it doesn’t matter what kind of government we have.”

Those certainly aren’t encouraging numbers. But I don’t think they’re necessarily evidence of some failure of civics education, as former cabinet minister Jason Kenney and several commentators suggested. I thought Conservative Senator Leo Housakos hit much closer to the mark, arguing the findings should be “a red flag to all of us who play a role in public institutions that we need to be better.”

Indeed, these results really shouldn’t be surprising. Your average Canadian aged 60-and-over has simply had it much better than their kids and grandkids. Governments talk a reasonably big game about fixing things as basic as housing affordability, but progress has been maddeningly slow and piecemeal.

Younger Canadians should be hacked off. And they are not wrong to perceive that it often doesn’t make a huge difference who’s in charge in Ottawa or their provincial capital, or even what democratic system (or otherwise) they operate under. Problems either get solved or they don’t.

That doesn’t explain why federal NDP Leader Avi Lewis doesn’t seem super-interested in running for a seat in the House of Commons, however. He’s not going to solve anyone’s problems without one.

Of six forthcoming byelections, one is in an existing NDP riding — Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, the party’s last redoubt in Quebec, which Alexandre Boulerice has vacated in order to run provincially. Another is Beaches—East York, where the Liberals have been dominant for more than a decade. But the NDP has held it in the past, and if there’s a riding where Lewis’s name-recognition and resumé might make a dent, that could be one. He hasn’t many of those to choose from.

Instead, reportedly, former Toronto city councillor Mike Layton — son of late NDP leader Jack Layton — is eyeing the party’s nomination in Beaches—East York. Name recognition could take Layton much further in a centre-left Toronto riding than Lewis, I suspect. Jack Layton is still fresh in the minds of most core New Democrats, and he knew how to expand the party’s appeal.

But Mike Layton isn’t the party leader. He could have run for the leadership, and didn’t. One can understand Lewis’s hesitation about strong-arming a sitting Dipper out of a safe seat in British Columbia. But not running at all is a very odd look from a leader who clearly fancies himself quite an orator and who, by rights, should be haranguing Prime Minister Mark Carney every opportunity he gets on the floor of the House.

Is that not the job? I sure thought that was the job, even if Abacus suggests kids aren’t so sure. Most everyone else seems to think so, federally at least. Before Carney did it, John Turner was the last Liberal leader to win the party leadership (and the Prime Minister’s Office) without a seat in the House. They both won seats in the ensuing general elections, as a matter of correctly perceived necessity.

On the Conservative side of the aisle, Pierre Poilievre certainly saw the imperative to get himself back in the House of Commons after losing his Ottawa-area riding last year. And quite rightly. Question period is rarely an edifying spectacle — do not take children there! — but Parliament is where politicians like Poilievre and Lewis, if they’re worth their fight-for-the-little-guy bona fides, should be making their case against this elbows-akimbo Liberal government.

For all its travails and dramatic decline in the polls, the federal NDP has gotten one thing right in recent years: It doesn’t generally kick out a leader after a single election loss (unless that leader is Tom Mulcair). None of Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, Andrew Scheer or Erin O’Toole got a second chance with the Liberals and Conservatives, respectively. Poilievre has bucked that minor trend (so far) on the Conservative side of the aisle — and that’s a party whose supporters actually expect and want to win elections.

If Jagmeet Singh could hang on to the NDP leadership as long as he did, even as he steered the party near oblivion, Lewis surely needn’t fear being defenestrated should he contest Beaches—East York and lose a reasonably competitive byelection fight. He’d be on the news, quite apart from anything else. Certainly, Lewis can’t hope to do any better than Singh did without a seat in the Commons. And if he doesn’t think he can win one, or that it’s even worth trying ASAP, perhaps the party didn’t make the wisest choice.

National Post cselley@postmedia.com