John Horgan in his Own Words

Review By Hamish Telford

February 26, 2026

When I was an undergraduate student way back in the last century, I took an introductory course on Canadian politics at the University of Toronto. The unofficial university calendar published by the student union renamed the course Fireside Chats with Jack McLeod. This book could just as easily be called Fireside Chats with John Horgan. The book was constructed from a series of interviews John Horgan first recorded for Royal Roads University, and subsequently with veteran labour reporter Rod Mickleburgh. The book covers the entirety of John Horgan’s life, but with just 239 pages it does not go into great detail on any one subject. The book has no secondary sources, footnotes, or even an index.

The book will appeal mostly to political junkies who want to know the inside gossip in Victoria. Horgan liked Justin Trudeau and got along well with conservative premiers Doug Ford and Scott Moe. He laments his feud with fellow NDP premier Rachel Notley, but he seems to accept that she had to serve a different constituency. He did not get along with Christy Clark. “Not at all. Not at all,” he says. He does not appear to have held grudges, expect for perhaps Jenny Kwan (now a federal MP with the NDP), who led the “baker’s dozen” that ousted Horgan’s close friend Carole James from the leadership of the party in 2010. He admits to briefly thinking about crossing the floor to the BC Liberals after his party’s devastating loss in the 2013 election. “Fuck, I can’t do another four years in opposition,” he says. He claims he might have even been in Christy Clark’s cabinet but was glad that he was talked out of it by “a right-wing friend.” Along the way, he reveals himself to be a sports junkie, science fiction fan and a lifelong pot smoker. “There’s not usually a big crossover between sports people, druggie people and geeks, but I was comfortable with all of them,” he boasts.

All too often though the narrative is disappointingly thin. Asked why he wanted to be premier by his future campaign advisor, Horgan says, “it had a lot to do with my values. Someone with my background had never done the job before and I thought that I might be able to add something to the equation that others hadn’t.” Later, he writes, “People often ask me what I was most proud of as premier. I can’t really pick out one thing, but perhaps I’m proudest of the fact that I had the opportunity to be premier and I didn’t fall completely on my own face.” Of course, he had to stick handle some major files over his five years as premier: Site C, LNG, the Trans Mountain Pipeline, the pandemic, the Opioid crisis, UNDRIP, and some major natural disasters – the heat dome in 2021 which killed more than 600 people and the floods in the fall of 2021 which devastated the Fraser Valley and wiped out parts of the Coquihalla Highway. While we get some glimpses of how he handled these files, we get precious little insight.

John Horgan is the most successful NDP leader in BC history, but the book reveals that he did not have a well-defined ideology. He repeatedly refers to himself as a centrist and a pragmatist. He also unapologetically describes himself as a populist. “If you’re going to affect people’s lives, the best way to do that is to engage them. That’s what populism is all about.” He was a fan of big energy projects, and he argues that good social policy depends on a robust economy. Perhaps there are some lessons here for New Democrats across the country. But in the end he says, “So much goes back to values. People who are jerks don’t get rewarded for being jerks.” Perhaps there is a lesson here for politicians of all political stripes. The story of John Horgan is ultimately the story of a thoroughly decent man who through the fate of history ended up serving as the leader of his province for an eventful five years. It was his decency that makes him one of the most beloved premiers in BC history.

While entertaining, this book is not going to be the definitive book on the Horgan government, unlike Rod Mickleburgh’s book (with Geoff Meggs) on the Dave Barrett government.[1] Perhaps Mickleburgh and Meggs – who was John Horgan’s Chief of Staff for five years – could mine the Horgan tapes together and produce that definitive account. This is a story that needs to be told in a more fulsome way.

^[1]Geoff Meggs and Rod Mickleburgh, The Art of the Impossible: Dave Barrett and the NDP in Power 1972-1975 (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing Company, 2012).