Second in a three-part series; Christy Clark profile published May 2, Andrew Weaver scheduled for May 4.
John Horgan’s first election run came early.
The wait during the Grade 1 Valentine’s Day vote to select the King and Queen of Hearts was agonizing.
“I remember vividly the roiling stomach, wondering how am I going to do.”
He won. Horgan was so proud of the victory he wore his royal crepe-paper robes home, colours bleeding in the rain. The paper turned to mush. “I waited in that mush until my mother got home to show her.”
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John Horgan with his wife Ellie and their two children in 2001.
Horgan had no such anxiety on election day in 2013, when the NDP, led by Adrian Dix, went into election night leading in every poll that mattered. Newspapers, readying for a landslide, had the pizza ordered and the headlines written in advance: Orange Crush.
“I was in my campaign office, winning by a very comfortable margin. I looked at the television and I think it was CBC said Liberals 50, NDP 33. I turned to a guy and said, ‘Someone’s going to lose their job. They’ve got that backwards,’” said Horgan. The correction never came. The night was a shocker: The B.C. Liberals took 49 seats, their fourth straight majority.
“It was devastating. Absolutely devastating.”
Horgan, who was house leader at the time, had been focused on his constituency. He said the party had no sense the Liberals were quietly surging. “It was a shock, there was no indication, the tracking that we had, the public information.”
Horgan had been poised to be part of a government, not an opposition member. Again.
“I like doing stuff. I was very excited about helping people. That’s why I got involved in politics, and you don’t get a lot of that in opposition. It’s a lot of frustration. People come to you yearning for help and you reach out to government and, because you carry a certain flag, you’re looked upon with contempt.”
Horgan, 57, wants to do away with the bitter divide in B.C. politics, work across the aisle on campaign finance reform and increased transparency in government — he has made six bids to introduce legislation to curtail what he calls the “big money” in provincial politics.
“The notion that there’s combating teams, there’s one that’s the victor and one that is forever in purgatory, only allowed to throw rocks every day, the prospect of four more years of that was very frustrating. It was tough.”
Although he had to be convinced to run for leadership of the party after Dix stepped down, he said he doesn’t dwell on the catastrophic defeat. “When I played sports — lacrosse, basketball, cricket — I never looked back at the defeats. You move on and wait for the next game.”
Horgan, who represents Juan de Fuca on Vancouver Island, launched his campaign a week before the writs were issued, rolling out on a bus with a huge photo of himself on the side. He knows he needs to get his face in front of the public if he’s going to get out from under the shadow of the B.C. Liberals and bring home a victory on May 9.
Horgan said he has been criss-crossing the province, listening to constituents, asking questions and meeting people. He remembers everyone he meets, even if the moment is fleeting.
“I remember faces,” explained Horgan.
He is a “super-recognizer.” It’s a weird quirk, a talent that less than one per cent of the population can lay claim to. The ability to recognize faces doesn’t translate to better memorization and never helped him ace a test, but it’s good for business if you’re looking for votes.
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Horgan says he is confident that by the end of this campaign, people will remember him as well — even if his viewpoint is that this campaign isn’t about him.
Horgan’s opponents have tried to make the campaign about him, suggesting he doesn’t have the calm temperament to govern. Horgan addressed the question of what he calls his “Irish” temperament in a media scrum after the B.C. leaders’ debate, saying he feels “passionate about issues” and that his focus is on talking to people, not about himself.
In a Vancouver Sun editorial board Facebook Live session, Horgan simply said, “I am who I am” when asked a similar question.
If a poll released this week by Insights West — which showed Horgan outranked his opponents by a healthy margin as the candidate most “in touch with the problems ordinary British Columbians face in their daily lives” — is any indication, he has succeeded at keeping the focus exactly where he wants it: on the voters. Horgan scored with a healthy 51 per cent of voters on that question, Weaver was second place at 30 per cent and Clark lagged at 24 per cent.
A natural storyteller, Horgan reels off anecdotes about people who have influenced him in ways big and small.
Ella Rebalski, an intern, got him hooked on Game of Thrones last summer. Horgan had never heard of the series. Now he can’t get enough of it. “I like Tyrion. He’s the underdog. Life’s been tough for him, but he keeps bouncing back. He’s becoming a nicer person as life goes on.”
Ray Lalonde is a French-Canadian neighbour from Horgan’s days in Ottawa. Horgan knocked on his door as a stranger, hoping to borrow something one day, and they became fast friends. Lalonde taught him to pick and refinish flea market furniture, and got him hooked on turning “junk” into treasure.
Childhood friend, now Tsartlip chief, Chris Tom walked him down a path on Tsartlip traditional territories, which had been slated for development without any consultation. Tom showed Horgan the burial cairns of his ancestors that lined the path, then leaned over and picked something up. “Oh, here’s a white man’s artifact,” Tom said. In his hand was a golf ball, gone astray from a nearby course.
Tom’s good humour about finding the golf ball alongside the burial cairns made an impression, said Horgan, who worked on treaty process when he was a policy and development adviser under then-premier Mike Harcourt. “Rights and title are real, and if we want reconciliation, we have to recognize and honour that.”
Another person on Horgan’s mind is Erin, the server who brings him breakfast every morning at the Pinnacle Hotel when he’s in town on government business. A couple of weeks ago, Horgan discovered she holds down three jobs. “I said, ‘How do you keep this going?’ She said, ‘I have to. I’m a single mom.’
“Here’s someone who is happy, cheery, doing her job. She struggles every day to make ends meet on three jobs. For me, she has become a symbol of my heart, and I’m going to work as hard as I can … to make sure that these people that have been making life hard for her, and others, are gone.”
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NDP Leader John Horgan gets a lesson in making samosas during a campaign stop in Surrey.
Horgan’s own family struggled after his father, an Irish immigrant from county Cork, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. Horgan was only 18 months old. The family put food on the table through the “kindness of others.”
“My mom was left to raise me and my two older brothers and sister. It was a struggle growing up, but I think it’s shaped how I look at the world, how I treat other people. The kindness of others helped us at a time when we desperately needed it.
“She wasn’t working at the time my dad died, didn’t even know how to drive,” said Horgan.
His mother eventually got work, and remarried. Horgan, who grew up in the Victoria suburb of Saanich, had an uneasy relationship with his stepfather and describes those years as a period he would rather not talk about.
“I had a difficult time at that point coming into adolescence as a young, big guy. I was hanging out with the wrong people, smoking cigarettes. I’ll leave it at that.”
Teachers, and a basketball coach, got Horgan back on track. “I consider that the salvation period of my life. I could have gone in the wrong direction, but teachers said they saw more in me than I saw in myself, and they helped me get back on track.
“It was quite seriously a transformation through this reawakening as not John Horgan the thug, but John Horgan the young man who can do good things. That was the result of teachers stepping up.”
Horgan’s second big political success was a run for president of the student council in Grade 12 at Reynolds Secondary in Victoria. He seemed to know what his Grade 12 constituents would want.
“I ran on a platform of more dancing,” said Horgan. He had found an outlet for his scrappy energy.
Horgan, who grew up scrabbling for cash by delivering newspapers, serving food and working in a mill, became the first in his family to attend university, where he lucked into seeing Tommy Douglas speak. Douglas, whose dedication to helping others contributed greatly to the establishment of universal health care and the Canada Pension Plan, helped Horgan make a visceral connection between social justice, public policy and his own lived experience. He started to think about how he could contribute.
Horgan and his wife Ellie met on their first day at Trent University. The couple married and later moved to Australia, where Horgan earned a Master’s degree in history at Sydney University.
After returning to Canada, they settled in Ottawa, where Horgan picked up a job in the mailroom on Parliament Hill. Inspired by Ed Broadbent, Horgan cut his teeth on policy development and became a researcher on constitutional issues.
In the 1990s, the couple and their two sons moved back to B.C., where Horgan, who was comfortable behind the scenes, worked on policy analysis and development under Mike Harcourt and former premier Dan Miller. Horgan specialized in working on complex issues like the Columbia River Treaty and energy issues. “I liked difficult things. I liked policy,” says Horgan. “I never saw myself as front guy.”
All that changed one day in 2004, when his 16-year-old son was holding a band rehearsal in the family’s home. Horgan was in another room, watching television.
“The announcement that the B.C. Liberals were building ferries in Germany was made,” recalled Horgan. “I started yelling at the TV that this was the stupidest thing I had ever heard of. You’re going to spend 600, 700 million dollars somewhere else.”
His son’s friend came out of the kitchen and challenged Horgan to do something about it.
“As a parent, put on the spot, I said, ‘Well, I’m going to run for the legislature.’”
Horgan won his seat in 2005 and has held it since.
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NDP Leader John Horgan hands out chocolates during an Easter egg hunt at a supporter’s home in Maple Ridge.
“What drives me is this sense, and it comes back to the way my mom raised me. People helped us. My mom said don’t ever forget that. She instilled that in me. My time as a teenager, people helped me. They didn’t have to. Ray Lalonde, my French-Canadian buddy. He could have slammed the door in my face. But he invited me in and he became my friend, and he helped me and he made me a better person, and I think that’s worthwhile.
“I’ve been criss-crossing the province for three years, reluctantly at first, enthusiastically by the end, meeting people and hearing their stories, and trying to figure out how we can all come together and make a better B.C.”
It’s a slogan, said Horgan, but it’s a good one. “Should we just shrug our shoulders and say this is as good as it gets? No.”
dryan@postmedia.com
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