You're the sole supporter of a sports team in an arena filled with 5,000 fans of the home team. Do you keep your passion to yourself, or share it with the world?
If you're John Horgan, the recently acclaimed leader of British Columbia's New Democratic Party (BC NDP), you cheer. A lot.
“I was the lone Victoria fan in the stands,” Horgan said, recalling a varsity lacrosse game he attended at Trent University in the late 1970s.
“Whenever Victoria scored, there'd be one person going ‘Yay!' And everyone would look back at me and the people sitting around me started saying, ‘What are you doing here?'”
The conversations he struck up at that lacrosse game led to Horgan choosing to study at Trent.
“I like to talk. I hope it doesn't get me into trouble,” Horgan joked during a recent interview at the BC NDP caucus office, a few blocks away from Vancouver's convention centre.
In contrast to former leader Adrian Dix's stiffer, rarely off-message style, Horgan said he wants “to go out and have a dialogue, and not stick to little boxes.”
Dix gave up an initial 20-point lead to lose the 2013 provincial election to the incumbent BC Liberals, a contest in which the NDP came out with fewer seats than they had going in. Dix's campaign has since been criticized for its lacklustre tone, and for missteps like Dix's ill-timed announcement that he would oppose Kinder Morgan's pipeline expansion proposal. (Horgan said he will wait until the environmental assessment is completed before taking a position on the pipeline.)
Horgan and the party will now have to work to prepare the BC NDP to take on Christy Clark in the 2017 election, Ian Waddell, a former NDP MP and MLA, told Business in Vancouver.
“I think it's a good idea they didn't have a leadership convention right now because the NDP has some really deep thinking to do about policy,” Waddell said.
Horgan, 54, has over 30 years of experience in politics, first as a civil servant and then as an MLA, starting in 2005. He previously ran for the leadership of the BC NDP in 2011 against Dix and Mike Farnworth. Like Dix, he was a civil servant in the NDP governments of the 1990s.
Despite being the only contender for the job this time around, Horgan is the right leader to take on Clark because of his ability to connect with people, Waddell said.
“John Horgan's an Everyman, he's an ordinary guy,” Waddell said. “And he's got the experience. He'll give Christy Clark a run for her money.”
While the hard-hat-wearing Clark gained votes by campaigning on jobs and the economy, Waddell said that's where the Liberals are now weak: one year after the election, job growth has been flat and the Liberals have been criticized for focusing too much on the yet-to-be-developed liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry.
“We need to think of more of an [economic policy] that will combine our tourism, our resources, our technology and our brains,” Waddell said. “I think that's the future, and the NDP has to come out and define that a bit more.”
Horgan grew up in Victoria, the youngest of four children. His Irish immigrant father died when he was a toddler, leaving Horgan's mother to raise the family on her own with help from neighbours and the Catholic Church.
“I had a fairly rocky teen period,” Horgan said. “I didn't have strong male role models, and I was a big kid.
“The basketball coach saw me going off the rails and grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and said, ‘You can do better than this.'”
Horgan would also later throw himself into lacrosse, soccer and baseball.
“I got into team sports and that changed my perspective on a whole host of things, especially on what people can do when they work together,” Horgan said.
The kid who failed four classes in Grade 9 would later go on to complete a bachelor of arts and a master's degree in history, working in a B.C. pulp mill during the summers to pay for his education.
While he initially planned to be a social worker, it was a chance meeting with Tommy Douglas, former leader of the NDP and the father of Canada's health-care system, that steered Horgan towards politics.
“He was [in his 70s at the time],” Horgan recalled, “a wizened, small little man who absolutely captivated me with his passion and his oratory. It struck me that a better course of action to help people might well be through public engagement and government.”
After completing university, Horgan moved to Ottawa with his wife and got a job opening mail on Parliament Hill. He later worked for NDP members of the House, and returned to Victoria in the early 1990s to work in the governments of Mike Harcourt, Glen Clark and interim premier Dan Miller.
Horgan said he'll need to work to convince British Columbians that the NDP is the party to grow the economy in an equitable way.
“The economy belongs to everybody,” he said. “I think there's this misconception that it's the purview of academics and business leaders, but without labour, capital can't maximize its returns.”
Horgan said he is sensitive to environmental concerns, like his mentor Harcourt, but pro-resource development, like Miller.
Much as Justin Trudeau, leader of the federal Liberals, has tried to be open to resource development and environmentally vigilant at the same time by targeting the federal environmental review process, Horgan said B.C.'s environmental legislation needs to be “modernized” in order to regain the trust of British Columbians and resource companies.
B.C.'s stalled First Nations treaty process also needs to be revitalized, Horgan said.
But most of all, Horgan said, his economic vision for B.C. would be broader than what he said is the Liberals' overly narrow preoccupation with LNG.
That includes investing in infrastructure and education.
“That means human capital, that means bridges, roads, public institutions, and also ensuring that private investment can get a reasonable return so that capital is compelled to come here and grow our economy.”
As for how his government would pay for those investments, he said he supports the tax increases on corporations and high-income earners outlined in the NDP's 2013 election platform. Funds would also come from growing B.C.'s economy, Horgan said.
“If we don't grow the economy, that [investment attraction] won't happen,” Horgan said. “I don't believe the public heard that from us the last election, and I'm going to make that the centrepiece of my leadership.”
