Stephen Lewis, 1937-2026: He ‘Changed the Course of History’ with the World’s First Climate Target
Mitchell Beer
Carleton University School of Journalism Yearbook 1986-87, courtesy of Lella Blumer
Tributes have been cascading in after widely beloved Canadian diplomat, philanthropist, HIV/AIDS advocate, politician, and early-stage climate hawk Stephen Lewis died March 31 at age 88.
Lewis, who survived cancer for eight years after being told he had only months to live, died in hospice less than 48 hours after his son Avi Lewis
secured a convincing first-ballot victory in his campaign for the federal New Democratic Party leadership.
“He waited for his son to win,” Stephen Lewis’ sister Janet Solberg
told the Globe and Mail. “I’m not joking. He never lacked for will power.”
Avi Lewis told the same story in a bit more detail last weekend, during the NDP convention in Winnipeg. “Ever the political fanatic, Dad has demanded daily updates about our organizing, delivered to his hospital bed, a veritable IV drip of campaign data,” he
told delegates. “But he told me something kind of heartbreaking that David, his father, said to him once: ‘Son, not in my lifetime, but maybe in yours.’ And recently, my dad told me the same thing: ‘Not in my lifetime, maybe in yours.’ Well, Dad, I refuse to tell that to my kid.”
The story referred to David Lewis—Stephen’s dad, Avi’s grandfather, and former leader of the federal NDP. And it was the same fire and determination that Stephen Lewis brought to his role as chair of the
Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere [pdf] in 1988. At the end of that conference, more than 300 scientists, policy-makers, governments, and non-government organizations issued a stark warning that the consequences of climate change “could be second only to a global nuclear war.”
‘Stephen Lewis Was Our Closer’
“We landed on a recommendation that global greenhouse gas emissions be reduced by 20% by 2005, relative to their 1988 level. But it had to pass the final plenary, and that was going to be a challenge,” recalls Ralph Torrie, now one of Canada’s foremost energy modellers and director of research at Corporate Knights.
“Stephen Lewis was our closer,” Torrie told The Energy Mix in an email. “He chaired that final plenary, and it was performance art. He was determined, and when Stephen Lewis was determined, you’d better bring your A game if you disagreed with him. There was no way anybody was leaving the room until there was a Toronto Target. It was the world’s first greenhouse gas reduction target. He changed the course of history that day.”
Author, campaigner, and former Climate Emergency Unit team lead Seth Klein
remembers hearing Lewis address a peace conference in Montreal when Klein was 16 years old—little imagining that “Stephen would later end up my sister’s father-in-law.” More than 40 years later, “I can still clearly see and hear it in my mind,” Klein writes.
“It wasn’t just the beauty and precision of the words—the man was a walking thesaurus—or the gripping cadence. It was the ethical clarity and the emotional journey on which he took you. When you listened to a Stephen Lewis speech, you would most certainly learn a lot, but you were also sure to laugh and to cry, and you would be moved to act. His ability to commit to memory both statistics and story was unparalleled—he often spoke without notes.”
The ‘Most Consequential’ Ambassador
Lewis, a former Ontario NDP leader, went on to serve as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, appointed in the early years of the Progressive Conservative government of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Klein says Lewis was “quite likely our most consequential UN ambassador of modern times, almost certainly elevating Canada’s international reputation more than any diplomat since Lester B. Pearson.”
Lewis’ four-year assignment at the UN “was a critical time for the global movement to end apartheid in South Africa, and Lewis’ voice at the UN was among the most compelling in demanding an end to that grotesque injustice,” Klein recalls. “Lewis maintained deep and abiding friendships with South African leaders from the anti-apartheid era for the rest of his life.”
By 1988, the global HIV/AIDS epidemic was beginning to build, and the regions of Africa that Lewis knew so well were being ravaged by a disease for which there was no treatment and endless stigma. In 2003, he co-founded the Stephen Lewis Foundation along with his daughter, Ilana Landsberg-Lewis, to support community-led organizations in the
14 African countries hit hardest by the epidemic.
One of those projects,
Grandmothers to Grandmothers, rallied grandmothers in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States to support their counterparts who were raising the millions of children in Africa who’d been orphaned by AIDS.
“Stephen leaves a very big legacy and a mark on the continent,” said Idah Mukaka Nambeya, a senior advisor to the grandmothers’ campaign. “My country, Zambia, will never forget him.”
“Stephen was an amazing man,” SLF Executive Director Meg French
said in a video. “He was a white man from Canada who came from a well-known family, had all the opportunities that life could offer, and he took that power and that privilege and used it to bring about change.”
French added: “What was most important to him, and where he felt he learned the most, was in the meetings he had at the community level. He not only heard about their experience, but he also heard the solutions they had… and he realized that is how we’re really going to address this [HIV] pandemic.”
“It is heartbreaking,” Lewis declared, in a speech excerpted in French’s video. “The treatment has been around for nine years in the developed world, and we’re only now providing it to Africa.”
“The beauty of the foundation is that it’s working at the grassroots, it’s working at community level,” he said on another occasion. “It’s so much more insightful, knowledgeable, authentic than all of these cerebral hotshots who occupy the palatial suites in the multilateral institutions.”
Galvanizing the Conversation
That mix of fact, expectation, and an irresistible call to action was familiar to the conference publishing firm that eventually launched The Energy Mix. We first covered a Stephen Lewis keynote in September, 1987, at the Canadian Conference to Observe International Year of Shelter for the Homeless (IYSH)—at a time when it seemed reasonable to expect major, global progress on homelessness by the end of last century. He was one of the most compelling, complex speakers we ever covered, and one of the most difficult to get right—because we knew that if our notetaking missed any part of a nuanced, multi-layered argument, we would never catch up.
Cassie Doyle, now chair of the Canada Energy Regulator, was a lead organizer of the IYSH conference.
“He was riveting, and the participants in what I believe was then the largest meeting ever convened in Canada on the subject of homelessness were listening attentively,” she recalls. “He spoke to homelessness being a moral failure for the countries that allow it to happen and the necessity for action.”
At one point in the half-hour talk, “one of the conference participants who was unhoused and there as a representative of people with direct experience of homelessness found a way to get up on the stage and approached Lewis. She wasn’t coherent, and one thing I remember is that she asked if she could wash his feet. He was a bit alarmed at first as she approached him at the lectern, and then he kindly said, ‘no no, you don’t have to do that’, and he gently took her arm and walked her toward me. I was already up on the stage and put my arm around her to guide her off, and Lewis continued.”
In that moment, Doyle wrote in a LinkedIn message, “everyone there witnessed this great man being so compassionate to a person experiencing the very condition that he was discussing. His words and actions that morning galvanized the entire conference. It was remarkable.”
Thank You, Stephen
While the accolades streamed in for “
one of Canada’s greatest social justice champions,” we realized that so many of us at The Energy Mix had our own memories of Stephen Lewis.
“Our International Reporting class from Carleton University took a road trip to New York in February, 1987 to learn about the UN first hand,” writes Community Engagement Lead Lella Blumer. “The calm amid the chaos was being in a quiet room at a long table listening to Stephen Lewis, who had returned from an overseas trip hours earlier and still graciously listened to and answered our very likely under-informed questions and tongue-tied awkwardness. He has always been for me someone to look up to and count on.”
“Very early in my public policy career, Stephen Lewis came to Ottawa to deliver a keynote address for the NGO that I was working with at the time,” recalls Community Engagement Strategist Karri Munn-Venn. “I don’t recall being awe-struck or intimidated—that wasn’t the way he came across—but being introduced to him was one of those memorable moments. Hearing his name this week takes me back to that bland, beige hotel conference room, and the tremendous fortune of knowing he was a part of what we were trying to achieve.”
Editorial Adviser Carrie Buchanan was in a graduate program at Carleton in the mid-1980s when Lewis met with a group of journalism students in his New York office. While she was already familiar with what she calls Lewis’ “superbly literate public speaking style,” she learned that “he even spoke that way in ordinary conversation.” She also discovered his “marvellously self-deprecating sense of humour and mastery of storytelling.”
Lewis described one of his earliest appearances at the UN General Assembly, when a vote was being taken on a resolution involving freedom. “We’re in favour of that,” he surmised. (Buchanan hastens to add that these quotes are approximations, as the students did not record the meeting.) He was in the process of rising to cast a Yes vote, when “someone in our delegation reached out and pulled me down,” Lewis told the students, laughing. It was explained to the neophyte delegate that the resolution had been put forward by a country in the Soviet bloc that used a definition of freedom that was, ahem, not quite the same as ours.
“Such was life at the UN, Lewis told us,” Buchanan writes. “Language was being used in ways entirely new to him, despite his vaunted mastery of the spoken and written word. And despite his frustration with the UN’s initially inscrutable resolutions and procedures, he grew to love the international scene and proudly represented Canada as one of its leaders.”
We heard from Stephen directly in November 2024, after we launched the
Stephen Lewis Climate Journalism Fellowship in his name. “I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to see that the Fellowship is in place, and that you have the first ‘occupant’,” he wrote at the time. “The subject matter of the Fellowship could not be more important.”
That first “occupant”, Tova Gaster, wrote this week about the “enormous loss” so many of us are feeling now. “Sending love to all who knew him, and feeling so humbled and grateful to have crossed paths with him even a little bit.”
