By Daniel Béland

April 2, 2026

Whenever the next federal election happens to be, the outlines of the fiscal argument that will define the choice Canadians face came into sharper relief this week with the election of Avi Lewis as federal NDP leader.

Lewis won the NDP leadership race with 56% of the votes on the first ballot. His victory speech tells us a lot about how the left-wing populism he embraces translates to fiscal policy.

While it was not as combustible as defeated candidate Rob Ashton’s full-throated call from the stage of the party’s Winnipeg convention to “Eat the damn rich!!”, it is a less visceral, more mainstream iteration of the vision that has long informed the policy prescriptions associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s omen that, “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich”

Central to Lewis’s approach is that further taxing the rich and corporations will harness redistribution to reduce inequality, finance a massive expansion of the public sector to address the cost-of-living crisis, and improve the quality of life of ordinary Canadians.

The spending measures he outlined in his speech include a large-scale broadening of health care coverage (“the whole thing—eyes, teeth, mental health, and medicine”) and a public grocery option to “break the stranglehold of the corporate giants on our dinner tables.”

“Of course, we can already hear the howls from the establishment,” Lewis said during his speech. “‘But how will you pay for all this?’ Well, let’s remind them, this country is awash in wealth, we can have nice things.”

Having the rich, here the top 1%, pay for “nice things” is related to the fact that, as a left-wing populist, Lewis blames “a tiny group of billionaires who control every part of our lives” for most problems Canada faces. Unlike the Liberals and the Conservatives, who “have bent to the will”, per Lewis, of that corrupt corporate and financial elite, under his leadership, the NDP will take on that corporate elite and make it finance new economic and social programs by increasing the tax burden of the top 1%.

Lewis’s leadership care platform suggests that the message to the 99% is that we can massively increase public spending without taxing them more, as the top 1% and corporations will bear the full fiscal burden of new, large-scale government programs.

Therefore, the 99% can have their cake and eat it, too — to evoke another French Revolution allegory on the dietary intake of the masses — because the top 1% would be forced to pay the bill. As Lewis himself put it during his victory speech, “It is time, far past time, to properly tax the corporations and billionaires that have been riding a tidal wave of profits while the 99 per cent have been suffering and struggling.”

This fiscal approach is obviously not new. It represents one side of the ideologically and politically divided debate between trickle-down economics and redistributive economics that has been fought in one form or another since Reaganomics.

Now, amid a trade-based economic war waged by a rogue American president and fears of a radically shifting economic model due to the impact of AI on human livelihoods, it is consistent with the push to address rising economic inequality between the top 1% and the rest of society that has been a source of financial and political ruction since the term “1%” was coined by Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011.

If Lewis and other people on the left really want a much larger welfare state, they should probably recognize that only targeting the top 1% for new revenue is unlikely to be enough to pay for it all.

Closer attention to growing economic inequality and wealth concentration has also become an increasingly key issue within academic and policy circles, notably since the publication of French economist Thomas Piketty book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which appeared in 2014 in English translation.

In the United States, the idea of increasing taxes on the top 1% is a central theme of the left, especially among democratic socialists including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. There are differences between Canada and the United States that inform whether this strategy can be as successful in the former as in the latter.

For instance, income inequality remains significantly lower in Canada than in the United States. Moreover, according to the Bank of Canada, “income inequality in Canada increased substantially during the 1980s and first half of the 1990s but has been relatively stable over the past 25 years.”

Still, it is easy to understand why funding higher government spending by taxing the top 1% is seen as politically expedient, as a very small percentage of voters would make it possible for the 99% to have nice things without paying more taxes.

Reducing inequality and increasing government revenue by raising taxes on the wealthy is a legitimate policy alternative that, if carefully designed, could be implemented in a fair and efficient way. For instance, proposals to broaden the tax inclusion of high capital gains would help tackle wealth inequality while increasing tax revenue. Yet, to seriously tackle that issue and generate more revenue, the focus should not only be on the top 1% but on a significantly larger percentage of better off Canadians.

In contrast, taxing the top 1% as the main way to finance a much larger public sector as Lewis frames it is problematic because it is unlikely to generate enough revenue to pay for all the nice things he promises to the 99% but also because this is not how high spending social democratic countries in Europe such as Denmark and Sweden have done it.

In these countries, value-added taxation, which is not progressive and affects all consumers, is a major component of fiscal policy. Conversely, countries like Canada and the United States that rely to a greater degree on progressive forms of taxation rather than on payroll contributions and value added taxes (despite the existence on a comparatively smaller scale of such contributions and taxes) on average generate both less revenue and lower levels of social spending.

As political scientist Olivier Jacques puts it with regard to Canada: “On the one hand, the progressivity of Canada’s tax system reduces income differences between the rich and the poor, but on the other hand, the relatively low level of revenue generated limits the government’s capacity to reduce poverty and inequality with social spending. Indeed, the size of the Canadian welfare state is small in comparative perspective: public social spending in Canada is among the lowest of the OECD.”

So, if Lewis and other people on the left really want a much larger welfare state, they should probably recognize that only targeting the top 1% for new revenue is unlikely to be enough to pay for it all. In other words, in the end, even if we do extract more fiscal resources from the top 1%, a significant component of the other 99% would probably have to contribute more, in a way or another.

The best antidote against populist fiscal magical thinking (see Donald Trump’s “Bedminster Doctrine”) is to recognize that countries that impose the highest overall tax burden on their population are typically the most democratic ones.

As U.S. historian Vanessa Williamson puts it, “Progressive taxation is not the be-all and end-all of egalitarian economic policy.” In other words, eating the rich on its own is unlikely to provide enough sustenance for all the nice things Avi Lewis is promising.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University.