OTTAWA — Former Alberta NDP environment minister Shannon Phillips wants an apology from NDP leadership frontrunner Avi Lewis, after a years-old video re-emerged of Lewis and wife Naomi Klein laughing over Phillips losing her cabinet post.
The video, which has been on YouTube since September 2020,
shows the two reacting to “mean tweets”
about their Leap Manifesto, a sweeping attempt to shut down fossil fuel use and impose extensive income retribution that they had tried unsuccessfully to force through as official NDP policy at the party’s 2016 convention in Edmonton.
Lewis reads out a tweet calling him an “extreme radical eco-terrorist who would shut down Alberta’s oil sands and send Alberta’s economy off a cliff.”
He jokes that the tweet was him “mistakenly endorsing” Phillips before she was elected to Alberta’s legislature in 2015.
“We’re still married and she’s not environment minister anymore,” riffs Klein, adding “That’s really horrible to say.”
Both Klein and Lewis crack up at the comment.
Phillips, who served as Alberta’s environment minister from 2015 until the party’s loss to the United Conservative Party in the April 2019 provincial election, said the slight is no laughing matter.
“Let’s situate ourselves in what (Lewis and Klein) are doing here,” said Phillips, who continued to sit as an NDP MLA until 2024.
“They are actively running down, in highly personal terms … a sitting (NDP) MLA at a time when Avi (Lewis) was preparing to run for the federal party.”
Phillips was the Alberta NDP’s finance critic when the video was first released. Lewis was
in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland seven months later (he came in third in the 2021 general election, with the same third-place result in a different B.C. riding in the 2025 election).
The mocking comments about Phillips were made two months after news broke that two police officers in her hometown of Lethbridge, Alta. had been demoted
for improperly following and photographing her
during her time as environment minister because they had opposed Phillips’s plan for a provincial park.
Phillips said the appropriate course of action for both Lewis and Klein would be to “both publicly and privately” apologize to her.
She said she hadn’t heard from either since the clip
began making the rounds online on Sunday evening
, adding it shouldn’t be hard for them to get a hold of her.
“To be clear, Avi Lewis has had my phone number since the, I guess, early 2000s,” said Phillips.
Phillips has endorsed Edmonton MP Heather McPherson to be the next federal NDP leader.
Lewis’s campaign didn’t respond by deadline when asked about the clip and Phillips’s reaction.
The video also shows Lewis and Klein poking fun at Alberta labour union leader Gil McGowan,
who said he was angry at the two
“downtown Toronto political dilettantes (who) come to Alberta and track their garbage across our front lawn.”
“That’s not solidarity, Gil!” laughs Klein.
McGowan declined to comment on the video when contacted by National Post, although Phillips said she believed he was owed an apology as well.
The campaign of fellow NDP leadership hopeful Rob Ashton said that the video reflected Lewis’s general dismissiveness toward the NDP’s provincial sections.
“The federal NDP should be building on the success of our provincial governments, not undermining them the way Mr. Lewis has repeatedly done,” said Ashton campaign spokesperson Aly Koa.
Unlike the other Canadian parties, the NDP is federated, meaning its federal and provincial branches all belong to the same national organization.
Delegates at the Alberta NDP’s
voted to allow provincial members to opt out of joining the federal party.
National Post
rmohamed@postmedia.com
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