Avi Lewis maintains fundraising dominance with three weeks to go
NDP leadership race looks like it's Lewis's to lose
With less than three weeks to go before the New Democrats choose their next leader, Avi Lewis holds a towering fundraising advantage over his chief rivals, making him the odds-on favourite to win the contest.
Filings to Elections Canada show that Lewis has raised $1,229,484 from 10,407 contributors, giving him a greater than two-to-one edge over his nearest competitor, Edmonton MP Heather McPherson. She has raised $560,144 from 3,807 contributors.
Rounding out the top three is Rob Ashton, who has raised $356,933 from 2,019 contributors.
The first interim returns from Lewis and Ashton include donations up to February 24, while McPherson’s report ends a week earlier on February 17. If we extrapolate McPherson’s fundraising over the previous four weeks to the week missing in her report, we can estimate that she might have raised another $27,000 or so, keeping her below the $600,000 mark and hardly making a dent in Lewis’s fundraising.
Note: The interim returns from Tanille Johnston and Tony McQuail have not yet been posted to Elections Canada’s website. This post will be updated on The Writ when those numbers have been published.
I’ve written before about how predictive fundraising was for the 2012 and 2017 NDP leadership races. The chart below compares each candidate’s share of fundraising to their first ballot results in those two contests and shows just how predictive the fundraising race turned out to be.
Because we don’t yet have the numbers for Johnston and McQuail, we don’t know Lewis’s current share of fundraising. But the two would have to combine for at least $312,000 for Lewis not to be raising more than half of all the money in this leadership contest. Considering that the two combined for only $237,000 up to December 31, it is entirely possible that Lewis is over the 50% threshold in fundraising, making a first ballot victory entirely plausible.
With $1.2 million (and counting) in fundraising, Lewis has raised more than did either Jagmeet Singh ($925,000) or Thomas Mulcair ($523,000) in their victorious leadership campaigns in 2017 and 2012.
While that’s an impressive feat for a prospective NDP leader, it still pales in comparison to the $5.1 million raised by Mark Carney’s leadership bid in 2025 or the $9.8 million raised by Pierre Poilievre in his leadership bid in 2022. But, for a party that has struggled to raise money, Lewis’s fundraising chops can’t be dismissed.
Unlike his two main rivals, he is also raising more money from different parts of the country, suggesting that he isn’t simply tapping a regional base. Let’s look at those numbers.