Reviving a party that was broke and demoralized from a string of electoral defeats, John Horgan ended the B.C. Liberals’ 16-year hold on power in 2017, winning enough seats to catapult him into the premier’s chair as head of a minority government.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
John Horgan’s success as one of British Columbia’s most admired premiers was an accomplishment few could have foreseen. As a failing high school student, who preferred to smoke dope and drink beer than attend class, he was going nowhere, but a tough-talking basketball coach turned his life around. He stumbled into politics because he needed a job, and then had a long, frustrating apprenticeship in opposition. But during his five years in office, Mr. Horgan chalked up a legacy of achievement, popularity and successful government unparalleled among the province’s five previous NDP premiers.
Reviving a party that was broke and demoralized from a string of electoral defeats, he ended the B.C. Liberals’ 16-year hold on power in 2017, winning enough seats to catapult him into the premier’s chair as head of a minority government with support from the BC Green Party. It was a remarkable turn for someone who had strongly discouraged persistent calls for him to seek the party’s leadership just three years earlier. In 2020, Mr. Horgan secured a place in the history books as the first NDP premier to be re-elected in a perpetually polarized province, where politics is often a blood sport.
He died of cancer on Tuesday at the age of 65. It was his third cancer diagnosis, having fended off bladder cancer in 2008 and throat cancer, as premier, in 2021. Both times, he was declared “cancer free” after treatment. After stepping away from politics, he had been appointed Canada’s ambassador to Germany on Nov. 1, 2023.
Despite the challenges of coping with the COVID-19 pandemic and a series of unprecedented climate-related calamities while he was premier, Mr. Horgan’s popularity rarely wavered. Polls showed him consistently among the country’s most highly regarded leaders, with an approval rating averaging 55 per cent.
Even apart from his inauspicious youth, well into his political career, Mr. Horgan’s success would have seemed improbable. As a chippy Opposition leader, his temperamental, occasionally-off-the-wall outbursts led opponents and many members of the media to write him off as “Angry John.” But Mr. Horgan surprised the pundits with his changed demeanour as premier, to such an extent that people began calling him “Happy Horgan.” Engaging and affable, he embraced consultation and co-operation over confrontation. As his government implemented an aggressive agenda that strayed at times from NDP orthodoxy, he exuded cheerfulness.
Despite various challenges, Mr. Horgan’s popularity rarely wavered. Polls showed him consistently among the country’s most highly regarded leaders, with an approval rating averaging 55 per cent.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Most notably, Mr. Horgan pushed through construction of the massive Site C dam in northeastern B.C., after it had been launched by the previous B.C. Liberal government and was widely reviled within the NDP. Joking that he, himself, had had a Kama Sutra of positions on Site C, Mr. Horgan argued it would cost the province billions of dollars to end the project and, besides, hydro power from the dam would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Mr. Horgan’s government also negotiated terms to facilitate what has been touted as the largest private-sector investment in Canadian history to transport liquefied natural gas by pipeline to the northwest port of Kitimat for export.
Both were controversial, multibillion-dollar resource projects with environmental concerns that shook traditional supporters. But Mr. Horgan’s decisions dramatically ended the NDP’s long, politically damaging reputation as “the party of ‘no.’ ” “That’s how we were identified in the paper every day,” Mr. Horgan elaborated. “Rank-and-file members of the building trades were reluctant to support us, because there was no evidence we were going to do anything for them. If you want to provide jobs, you’ve got to build things.”
Mr. Horgan showed his “green side,” however, with a series of legal challenges and manoeuvres – ultimately unsuccessful – to halt Trans Mountain Pipeline’s expansion to carry more Alberta oil to a terminal just outside Vancouver. At the same time, his government’s CleanBC program, drawn up with the aid of Green Party leader Andrew Weaver, is considered the most ambitious environmental action blueprint in Canada, designed to cut emissions by 40 per cent by 2030.
And Mr. Horgan maintained the NDP’s strong focus on social policies. Soon after he took over, B.C. became the second province in Canada, after Quebec, to launch a $10-a-day daycare program. Social assistance and disability benefits were raised significantly, long-standing medicare premiums, a financial pain for those without employer-paid health plans, were done away with, and adult education was made free. No measure was more popular than the removal of highway tolls on the Port Mann and Golden Ears commuter bridges linking the suburbs to Vancouver. Mr. Horgan’s early campaign promise to axe the tolls set the NDP on the road to its upset victory in 2017.
Yet the decision likely to have the most enduring impact was his government’s adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, the first jurisdiction in North America to do so. UNDRIP commits the province to intense reconciliation and involvement with First Nations on a wide variety of issues.
A self-styled pragmatic progressive, Mr. Horgan believed in balanced budgets. He engaged with the business community and found common ground with a raft of Conservative premiers during COVID-19 and as head of the Council of the Federation, pressed Ottawa for more health care funding. For Mr. Horgan, it was a matter of focusing on areas of agreement, rather than areas of division. Ontario Premier Doug Ford was so impressed by Mr. Horgan’s approach, he expressed relief he didn’t lead the NDP in Ontario. “We would be in deep trouble,” he once told Mr. Horgan.
In 2020, Mr. Horgan secured a place in the history books as the first NDP premier to be re-elected in B.C.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
John Joseph Horgan was born Aug. 7, 1959, in Victoria. His parents, the former Alice Clutterbuck and Patrick Horgan, met during the Second World War, when both were stationed at the Patricia Bay air force base. Ms. Clutterbuck was a tall, resourceful woman from an arch-Presbyterian family in Toronto. Patrick Horgan was an Irish-born jack of all trades and salesman, who could “talk angels out of their underwear,” his son liked to say. He died in 1962, leaving his wife to care for two teenage sons, a teenage daughter and two-year-old John.
John grew up in the Greater Victoria community of Langford, B.C. His first elected office came on Valentine’s Day in Grade 1, when he was chosen King of Hearts by his classmates, proudly keeping on his rain-soaked, crepe paper costume and crown so he could show his mother. After her husband died, she went to work at Saanich Municipal Hall in the tax department, but there was never a lot of money. Neighbours often pitched in to help, and young John’s growing interest in sports was supported by donated equipment.
Jack Lusk, a teacher and basketball coach at John’s high school, saw something in the troubled youth. “[He] grabbed me by the scruff of the neck in Grade 10 and said, ‘You are going nowhere, friend,’ ” he related to a reporter. “ ‘You should try this instead.’ ” The rude awakening led Mr. Horgan to take sports and school seriously, and he excelled at both. “Were it not for Jack Lusk, I could be dead, and that would be no surprise.”
Mr. Horgan attended Trent University in the small Ontario city of Peterborough. On his first night on campus, he met Ellie Mast, another first-year student, at a raucous pub gathering. The next day, he asked her out, beginning an inseparable bond that lasted 45 years, until Mr. Horgan’s death.
After graduation, the newly married couple travelled to Australia, where Mr. Horgan obtained a master’s degree in history. They enjoyed their time down under and planned to stay. But visa requirements forced them back to Canada. Needing work and having joined the NDP after hearing a speech by former B.C. NDP premier Dave Barrett, Mr. Horgan found a menial job on Parliament Hill opening mail for MP James Manley. Although it took him a while to warm to politics, Mr. Horgan was bright, hard-working and a committed social democrat. When the NDP won the 1991 B.C. election, he returned to the province to serve in a series of increasingly responsible positions, until the party’s landslide loss in 2001.
Mr. Horgan entered electoral politics in 2005, winning a seat in his home riding of Malahat—Juan de Fuca. But the NDP lost that election, lost again in 2009, and in 2013, suffered a devastating defeat when polls had pointed to a certain NDP victory. Fed up with his years in Opposition, and considering himself “an old white guy,” Mr. Horgan rejected all entreaties that he run to replace Adrian Dix as leader. It was time for someone younger to head the party, he asserted. When no one stepped up to the plate, Mr. Horgan reluctantly took over. He reasoned to himself: “If I lose the next election, I’ll be done with politics forever. If I win, I’ll be premier. It’s win-win.”
After an early blip during a radio debate, when he snapped “Don’t touch me” at premier Christy Clark, as she urged him to calm down with a pat on the arm, Mr. Horgan seemed to find his footing during the 2017 campaign. Although the NDP fell two seats short of the incumbent Liberals, the party forged a comprehensive Confidence and Supply Agreement with the Greens, whose three seats represented the balance of power. On one of the most dramatic days in B.C. political history, lieutenant-governor Judith Guichon opted to give Mr. Horgan and the NDP a chance to govern, rejecting Ms. Clark’s request for a new election. Mr. Horgan punctuated his new status with a call from Government House to his wife’s voice mail: “It’s the premier calling.”
After three years, frustrated by internal squabbling with the Greens and riding high in the polls, Mr. Horgan called a snap election. Despite widespread criticism of the early trek to the polls in the midst of the second wave of COVID-19, the NDP won its largest majority ever.
Yet Mr. Horgan’s second term proved difficult. A severe heat dome killed hundreds of British Columbians, an atmospheric river caused widespread damage, and record numbers of wildfires swept the province. There was a botched announcement on a new provincial museum, the continuing opioid crisis, and the sobering effect of Mr. Horgan’s second run-in with cancer. In the fall of 2022, he decided to call it quits, saying he no longer had the intensity to remain in politics.
Under Mr. Horgan, the NDP reversed a policy of the previous government that drastically affected hospital workers, allowing hospitals to contract out their services and drastically reduce workers’ pay. Last week, Mr. Horgan told a small group of friends about a hospital worker who recognized him when he went in to wash the former premier’s back. The worker said he never thought he would get a chance to thank Mr. Horgan for what his government did for hospital workers, and yet there he was washing his back. They both cried.
Mr. Horgan was predeceased by his brother Patrick. He leaves his wife, Ellie; sons, Nate and Evan; his brother Brian; and sister, Kathy.
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