The Trumpet Laid Down

A Eulogy for Stephen Lewis, 1937–2026

He was born on Armistice Day. His parents, honouring that coincidence of history, gave him the Hebrew name Sholem - peace. And so, from his very first breath, Stephen Lewis carried a kind of covenant. Not a quiet peace. Not the peace of complacency or comfortable silence. The peace that can only be won through struggle, through honesty, through the willingness to look at suffering and refuse to look away. I knew him while I was in Ottawa and felt his ethical shadow fall across me each time we spoke. It was an inspiration.

He died on the 31st of March, 2026, eighty-eight years after that Armistice Day morning in Ottawa, in a hospice in Toronto, surrounded by family. He died just two days after watching his son Avi was elected leader of the federal NDP. Even at the very end, Stephen Lewis was part of something larger than himself. Even dying, he was witnessing the next chapter of a movement he had given his whole life to. If ever a man’s final days reflected the full arc of his character, his did.

We live in a time when politics has become performance. When outrage is currency and contempt is strategy. When public life rewards the loudest voice and the sharpest insult, not the deepest conviction. Into that world, Stephen Lewis stands as a rebuke - not an angry rebuke, but a graceful one. He showed us, by the simple force of how he lived, that there is another way. That you can fight with everything you have and still treat your opponents as full human beings. That passion and decency are not opposites. That the heart can be fierce without being cruel. 

He came from a family for whom justice was not a theory. His grandfather Moishe had been an activist in the Jewish Bund in Russia, fighting for the dignity of workers in a world that did not  love them. His father, David Lewis, rose to lead the federal NDP at the very moment Stephen was leading the party in Ontario. Theirs was a family in which moral seriousness was the native language, spoken at the dinner table and in the public square with equal fluency. Stephen didn’t inherit his convictions the way one inherits furniture. He earned them, tested them, and spent every year of his adult life trying to live up to them.

Those who saw him speak - really saw him, in full flight before a crowd - will never forget it. The voice would build slowly, gathering evidence, marshalling facts with lawyerly precision, and then, when the moment was right, it would rise into something closer to music. He wept for Africans dying of AIDS. He raged at the G8 for turning its back on the African continent. He named the suffering, which is the first act of any true moral witness. His words were not ornaments. They were weapons, and he used them in the service of the defenseless.

What he found in Africa in the early 2000s broke him open in the best possible way. Appointed as the UN’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, he walked into villages in Malawi and Zambia and Lesotho and encountered, as he later said, scenes of unendurable human desolation. Millions were dying. Children were orphaned by the tens of thousands. Grandmothers were raising entire families on their own while burying their own children. The world knew and was doing almost nothing. Stephen Lewis refused to let that stand. He raged at governments. He pressed pharmaceutical companies. He hectored, cajoled, inspired, and shamed the powerful with equal effectiveness. Then he went home and founded the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which raised more than two hundred million dollars for community-based AIDS work across Africa.

Here is what made him rare: he never stopped believing that the powerful could be moved. That shame and argument and the right speech at the right moment could shift the moral calculus of institutions. He was never naïve - he had seen too much for naivety - but he maintained, against all evidence of human failure, a fundamental faith in human possibility. That is not optimism. Optimism is cheap. What he had was harder won. It was hope - and hope, unlike optimism, has looked into the darkness and chosen to keep moving anyway.

He was appointed Canada’s UN Ambassador by Brian Mulroney - a Conservative prime minister. That fact alone should pause us. A man of the democratic left, appointed by a man of the centre-right, because Mulroney knew that Lewis’s quality of character and mind transcended party. That is what political life at its finest looks like: the recognition that some people are larger than their tribe. Stephen Lewis was always larger than his tribe.

In these last eight years, fighting stomach cancer with the same relentless energy he brought to everything else, he did not slow down. He did not turn inward. He kept speaking, kept travelling, kept bearing witness. His family said in their statement that he battled cancer with the same indomitable spirit he brought to his lifelong work. That is not a cliché in his case. That is simply accurate.

His name — his true name, Sholem — meant peace. But we should understand what kind of peace he sought. Not the false peace of people who look away. Not the peace of the comfortable and the indifferent, those who refuse to speak up because they don’t want to cause trouble. He sought the peace that can only emerge from justice. The peace that requires us to see each other clearly - across continents, across races, across the long distances that separate the privileged from the abandoned - and to act on what we see. That is the hardest kind of peace to build, and it is the only kind that lasts.

Canada produces, every few generations, a figure who reminds us who we are at our best. Who holds a mirror up and says: this is what we could be, if we were braver and more generous and more honest than we usually manage. Stephen Lewis was one of those figures. He was our conscience made eloquent. He was proof that words used with precision and passion can still move the world.

His trumpet has been laid down this morning. The note it played still hangs in the air. 

We should do our best to be worthy of it.