Stephen Lewis, former politician and UN envoy, dies at 88
Ontario New Democrat’s father David Lewis was federal leader, a job his son Avi Lewis claimed just days ago
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Stephen Lewis, who has died aged 88, was a gifted orator and statesman who followed his father into the highest ranks of New Democratic politics, and though he never won government, he eventually transcended Canadian politics for global diplomacy as an ambassador and leader of the United Nations campaign against the AIDS pandemic in Africa.
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He died in Toronto after a long illness, the Stephen Lewis Foundation announced Tuesday. His son, Avi Lewis, won the federal NDP leadership on Sunday.
“The world has lost a voice of unmatched eloquence and integrity,” his family said in a statement.
Lewis was first elected to the Ontario legislature at age 26 in 1963. He took the Ontario NDP to the Opposition benches during a minority government in the mid 1970s, which he led from 1970 to 1978, when he lost seats and left politics for good as MPP for Scarborough West, an obsolete riding in what is now Toronto.
He left with a reputation for oratory, compassion, socialist sensibilities, and for holding power brokers to account, such as the Progressive Conservative Premier Bill Davis, on issues of importance to the poor, such as rent control.
He briefly worked in labour arbitration and in news media. He was the NDP member of a political panel with the Tory Dalton Camp and the Liberal Eric Kierans on Morningside, Peter Gzowski’s CBC Radio show.
Lewis’s public profile and esteem were such that the Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney named him ambassador to the United Nations in 1984, a post he held until 1988, in an era when Canada was developing a new confidence in world affairs
He told broadcaster Steve Paikin in 2021 that fighting apartheid in South Africa, where Mulroney was an early ally of Nelson Mandela, was the first of two moments in his life that he will forever value.
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“We did humanitarianism with a human face,” he said. “We saved real lives.”
In that interview, Lewis spoke of being unsettled by his abdominal cancer diagnosis but determined to fight it, and was reflective and grateful for the life he lived.
“When you come to a point in your life where you’re battling a disease like cancer, you reflect philosophically on life and what you’ve done and what the future might or might not hold,” he told Paikin. “Fortunately, I lived an interesting life, surrounded by bright and principled people and a loving and supportive family.”
Lewis’s time as UN ambassador also coincided with the steep rise of AIDS in Western consciousness, as the epidemic took off in the United States and became entrenched worldwide and especially in Africa, a problem to which Lewis would later devote his life’s work and his good name through the Stephen Lewis Foundation, created in 2003 as a “progressive, feminist organization rooted in the principles of social justice, international solidarity, and substantive equality.”
That same year he was named Companion of the Order of Canada, the honour’s highest rank.
From 1995 to 1999 he was in New York as a senior director with UNICEF, the United Nations agency devoted to children’s welfare and development. In 2001 he began five years as the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.
His family are similarly prominent on the Canadian left and in international development circles.
His brother Michael Lewis and sister Janet Solberg were both involved in the Ontario NDP. His sister Nina Lewis-Libeskind is the wife and professional partner of architect Daniel Libeskind.
His wife is the journalist and activist Michele Landsberg. Their son Avi is married to the author Naomi Klein, who was an originator of the Leap Manifesto, which figured prominently in the 2015 federal election campaign.
They have two daughters, Jenny Leah Lewis and Ilana Naomi Landsberg-Lewis, executive director of the Stephen Lewis Foundation.
Stephen Lewis’s father was David Lewis, a labour lawyer and national secretary of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, Member of Parliament for York South, and leader of the federal NDP while his son led the Ontario party.
Lewis’s grandfather was Moishe Lewis, a labour activist for Jewish workers in Montreal, and before that in imperial Russia. Their surname is anglicized from Losz.
Lewis was born in Ottawa, but became a Torontonian. He moved there as a boy and studied at Oakwood and Harbord collegiates before entering the University of Toronto, and not exactly wrapping it all up in the traditional fashion, much as he later started but did not complete law school twice.
He wrote the book Race Against Time: Searching for Hope in AIDS-Ravaged Africa, based on his 2005 Massey Lectures. He has several dozen honorary degrees.
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