“I think there’s a lot of people who are looking for someone who doesn’t beat around the bush, and who just calls it like he sees it.”
–Aaron Gunn
Mic in hand and a camera rolling, Aaron Gunn approaches the Tiny House Warriors activist encampment – a mottled collection of hand-painted signs, small wooden huts and strewn debris blocking a public road. For two years, the group and its notoriously foul-mouthed leader, Amanda Soper, aka Kanahus Manuel, have occupied this spot in Blue River, ostensibly to halt the Trans Mountain pipeline extension through Indigenous territory.
Gunn calls out, asking for an interview. No response. He and his camera crew are starting to pack up when a stocky female figure dressed in a tank top and army fatigues emerges from the blockade, letting loose a volley of vulgarity as she strides toward them.
Gunn explains they are shooting a documentary.
“These are like four white guys,” Manuel narrates loudly, filming with her phone as she approaches. “Stalkers like this could stalk women, stalk women!”
“We’re terrifying,” Gunn says mildly.
Manuel continues. “That’s why there’s so much murdered and missing indigenous people,” she says.
Gunn tries again. “Would you like to be interviewed for our documentary?”
“F–k you,” she responds.
“Would you like to be interviewed?” He says again. “We’ll give you a platform.”
“F–k you! yells Manuel. “We have a f–king platform! It’s the world, mother f–ker!”
Instead of discarding this footage as a failed interview, Gunn features the interaction in a 2020 episode of his Politics Explained series, Meet the Activists Opposing Pipelines. And in two minutes of uncomfortable viewing, relays what Blue River residents, local elected officials and First Nations members had been trying to make BC government officials understand for years: Manuel is an out-of-control menace who torments anyone in her path.
Aaron Gunn is a lightning rod for his critics and fans alike. He seems to infuriate and inspire them in equal measure.
Alternately hailed or decried for his hard-hitting, Conservative-leaning analysis of tricky issues, Gunn has crafted a career as an independent political commentator and built a brand on his forceful on-screen persona.
Armed with his trademark dark beard, distinct cadence, and sometimes bombastic delivery, Gunn has produced hundreds of lacerating critiques of public policy that have drawn upwards of 50 million views, all combined, across multiple platforms.
Detractors dismiss his documentaries as mean-spirited and partisan. They label his counter-woke culture views harmful, racist and sexist, and his scathing dissections of government programs muckraking, alt-right propaganda.
Supporters see him as an insightful, ambitious innovator, whose unapologetic socio-political commentary skilfully skewers the idiocy of public policies gone wrong.
His colleagues describe him as conscientious and dedicated. Longstanding friends say he is a loyal, generous person of high integrity.
And his grandfather is pretty sure he’ll be Prime Minister one day.
Journey of a guerrilla journalist
Like him or leave him, there’s no denying Gunn’s roaring success as an online political commentator and self-made, guerrilla journalist filmmaker who dives deep and unflinching into contentious issues. An outlier in the industry, he operates on his own terms, on his own platform. Openly partisan, he calls out government policies and political decision-makers, namely Canada’s former prime minister Justin Trudeau.
Both his fan base and critics are fierce.
“For sure [my delivery] aggravates people who disagree with me. But I think there’s a lot of people who are looking for someone who doesn’t beat around the bush, and who just calls it like he sees it,” Gunn said in a 2021 interview.
“In the current kind of social, cultural moment that we’re in, I think we need people who don’t mince words, who speak the truth, who don’t back down.”
“For sure [my delivery] aggravates people who disagree with me [but] … I think we need people who don’t mince words.”
Aaron Gunn
Sharing his views on film comes easily to Gunn.
“I really think to find success and happiness in life, sometimes it’s fusing these things that you’re good at, and that you’re passionate about into a project or a career,” he said, and has since been acclaimed the federal Conservative candidate for North Island-Powell River.
The fusion of politics and film began early for Gunn. He filmed videos with friends as a teenager and has been obsessed with politics for even longer. But it was after university that he first began honing the on-screen political commentator skills he’s now known for. First, at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation where he “cut his communication chops,” founding and leading the “Generation Screwed” campaign, focused on the national debt.
Then, working for Canada Proud, a private donor-funded, conservative-minded group that produces social media content on political issues, Gunn produced more than 200 two-minute videos under the banners of Canada Proud, Ontario Proud and BC Proud. He covered tax hikes, government scandals, gas prices, affordability, climate change, the carbon tax, Don Cherry’s firing, and more.
Some of those videos went viral. Fix ICBC was seen more than one million times on social media and Leave Canada’s Anthem Alone exceeded six million total views on Facebook.
Personal brand takes flight
But it was in 2020 that his personal brand took off. He wanted to make longer documentaries to investigate more complicated issues. Some people told him viewers wouldn’t watch 30-minute films. He proved them wrong.
In Politics Explained, his 25-episode, multi-season series on socio-political and counter-culture topics, he combed through the nuances of such topics as gas taxes, pipeline blockades, gun control, free speech, homelessness, addictions, repeat offenders, the justice system, logging protesters, various fronts of the culture war.
In September 2022, he released his first feature-length documentary. Vancouver is Dying investigated failed drug policies contributing to crime and addiction in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside community. It was the first notable media exposé of how federally approved, B.C. government-funded safe supply drugs were being sold by patients, fuelling the illicit drug trade.
Last month, after two-and-a-half years of denials and gaslighting, a leaked B.C. government document corroborated Gunn’s – and by this time, others – account when it revealed safe supply drugs are being diverted provincially, federally and internationally.
Harm reduction activists attacked the film for being being selective and creating a “hate storm” towards vulnerable people. Sean Orr, an unsuccessful Vancouver municipal candidate, called the film “a piece of propaganda” that captured “a zeitgeist that was fuelled by populist dehumanizing rhetoric” and held as an indictment that the film was partially funded by billionaire Lululemon founder, Chip Wilson.
Many criticisms bypassed the core topics to focus on Gunn himself. He was accused of harbouring extreme views and castigated for inflicting indignity for filming people living on the street in deep addiction.
Politics aside, the research and sources in the documentary are journalistically strong: police, addictions physicians, politicians, a whistle-blowing pharmacist, and people in recovery, many of whom publicly supported the film and held it as an accurate snapshot of the issues plaguing Vancouver.
Regardless, the film struck a chord with viewers and drew eyeballs any network would envy. Seen more than 4.5 million times on YouTube alone, it sealed Gunn’s reputation as a serious, if controversial, filmmaker with global reach.
His second full-length film, Canada is Dying, churned up similar public discourse and is nearing 1.5 million views on YouTube.
Forsaken Warriors came out last year, again leading the pack with its examination of deeply concerning, under-reported issues. Gunn, a former army reservist, lays out how the years-long, across-the-board deterioration of our military is damaging our international reputation and jeopardizing our ability to protect Canadian borders.
“He’s extremely brilliant. He’s entrepreneurial. He’s shed light on problems that no one else is talking about,” said federal Conservative Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre, when asked about Gunn in a January interview.
“His documentaries have been enormously impactful, garnering millions of views,” Poilievre added, later referring to Gunn at an event as a “freedom fighter” and “voice of the common men and women who do the work in this country.”
‘He espouses what he believes’
Whether hero or villain, Gunn has an instinct for picking complicated, under-canvassed socio-political topics that matter to people.
“He’s true to what he says in his public views. That is what he believes. And he espouses what he believes,” said Andrew Slater, one of Gunn’s oldest friends.
“But there’s a public face and a private life, which is probably a little bit softer than it looks on Instagram, or Facebook or whatever.”
Slater and Gunn were next-door neighbours in Langford and still remember each other’s childhood home phone numbers – Gunn is a self-admitted “phone guy,” who prefers cell conversations over text, email or zoom. They attended University of Victoria together and both earned commerce degrees. Slater now works in investment banking overseas.
“We knew each other very, very well. We still do,” Slater said, calling Gunn “refreshingly honest.”
The two joined the Conservative Party as teens, volunteered, attended party events, and sometimes mixed with high profile politicians, including former prime minister Stephen Harper (Gunn cites him as an early and enduring political influence). Slater enjoyed the interesting people and political activities, but said Gunn was the driving force.
Film was another shared interest. They started filming in middle school with a third friend, eventually forming a company to shoot weddings and commercial videos for small businesses. All told, Slater estimates they probably shot and edited 100 videos together, supporting themselves through university.
Throughout that time, Gunn loved the cut and thrust of difficult political conversations, Slater said, recalling how his friend often led debates in high school.
“He was very outspoken in class, always happy to have an argument with the teachers about various … political topics.
“He’s a policy nerd, masquerading as a human being,” he added with a laugh.
Sir John A roiling in his grave
Gunn grew up hearing his grandparents’ stories about life during the Great Depression and the Second World War. None served in the war – one grandfather was too young but lived on the front lines in Hungary, the other was in medical school in the army in Canada, and one grandma grew up in occupied Italy. A great grandfather spent time in a Russian gulag.
Many conversations and a natural curiosity led to a voracious interest in history, world politics and WWII. Gunn became fascinated by historical political figures who shaped their cultures and countries.
“History and politics are so intertwined,” he said.
“The more I learned, the more I found the incredible obstacles that people had to overcome, how death was everywhere, there was a million ways you could die at any time. The odds that you were facing and the resolve that you had to show to accomplish anything just blew my mind.
“Then 130 years after somebody’s dead, you’re going to start taking pot shots at them from the 21st century, from your comfy living room, not knowing anything that happened in between. It just seems so spineless and cowardly.”
“Attacks on the history and attacks on John A. Macdonald [are]… driven by ignorance.”
Aaron Gunn
Yet another stance he was pilloried for – embracing national pride and defending Canada’s history – that has since become more politically acceptable again.
“The attacks on the country, attacks on the history and attacks on John A. Macdonald, I hate that stuff. I think a lot of it is driven by ignorance,” Gunn said.
In August 2018, Victoria city council removed the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald from the city square without consulting the public. Council said the removal was an act of reconciliation to protect Indigenous citizens from being reminded of the now-outmoded views held by Canada’s first prime minister. Gunn posted a notice on Facebook, calling on people to protest “the erasing of history.”
Hundreds of protesters and counter-protesters turned out. Local news reporters noted the flag wearers, sign-wavers, veterans, Indigenous advocates, curious onlookers, and others in attendance. A couple Soldiers of Odin supporters were also observed in attendance.
‘Punching back’ against attackers
Fast forward to 2021 and the BC Liberal leadership race to replace former leader Andrew Wilkinson following the party’s defeat in the 2020 election. Several candidates vied for the job, including sitting MLAs, a former politician and two businessmen.
When Gunn publicly mulled over the possibility of entering the race, opposition was swift.
The BC NDP attacked his character, painting him an “anti-2SLGBTQ+ candidate” who held racist, sexist views. Gunn had posted a study that questioned a pay equity gap between men and women, he criticized the University of British Columbia medical school for instructing students to treat patients based on gender identity rather than biological sex, and pushed back against the assertion Canada is an inherently racist country, among other charges.
“This is why people hate politics. These are just more politicians who don’t want to talk about the issues. Let’s talk about the issues. Let’s look at the NDP’s record,” Gunn said at the time.
“Let’s talk about the issues. Let’s look at the NDP’s record.”
Aaron Gunn
Gunn counter-attacked against the BC NDP and union-backed media outlet, Press Progress.
“If you did something wrong, then you should apologize. But if you haven’t, you should be punching back and holding your ground,” he said.
It was just politics for the NDP, Gunn reflected in a recent interview. The BC Liberals was a coalition of federal Conservatives and Liberals. Holding both entities under one tent was challenging. “So [BC NDP] would try to highlight and drive wedges between those two groups and put [BC Liberals] in an awkward position,” he said.
Gunn intended to keep both factions under the BC Liberal tent. “I think there’s a lot bigger tent among everyday people than in the political class.”
His “Common Sense” platform called for tax reform, a return of mandatory care and psychiatric hospitals, minimum sentencing for repeat offenders, a repeal of the carbon tax, doing away with vaccine mandates, building more homes, taking ideology out of schools, protecting forestry jobs, getting pipelines built, and more.
“Get 20 normal people go through my platform, and most of them might agree with 80 per cent. But it would be a different 80 per cent [for each person], a different subset of policies, because there’s different voters,” he said at the time.
His policies found purchase. Within two weeks of submitting his application to enter the leadership race, he said more than 1,000 people committed to buy new memberships if he ran.
Gunn painted an extremist
Despite his views being no further to the right than former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper or Reform Party leader Preston Manning, several media outlets identified him as far-right.
“I would think that the federal Tories would not want Aaron Gunn to be any kind of poster-child for their party. Aren’t they trying to shed themselves of the alt-right as we speak?” wrote Mark Marissen, a long-time BC Liberal operative and ex-spouse of former BC Liberal premier Christy Clark.
The Vancouver Sun went further, with one reporter harkening back to the 2018 Macdonald statue protest and erroneously linking Gunn with the Soldiers of Odin supporters.
“Oh that drove me crazy. I did a Facebook event [calling for people to protest the statue’s removal] that said, ‘I’m going to be here,’” Gunn said. The notice was shared across the Facebook ecosystem.
“Anybody could have showed up.”
About half the crowd were counter-protesters, he said. Victoria city councillor Ben Isitt was there supporting the statue’s removal. There were also self-identified communists counter-protesting.
“I don’t get accused of being associated with communists,” Gunn said.
Instead, someone shows up wearing a Soldiers of Odin t-shirt and the media coverage reads: “organized by Aaron Gunn and attended by members of the far-right Soldiers of Odin,” he said.
“It’s not even guilt by association. I was standing in a public place and somebody else decided to show up in a public place.”
The mistruth was repeated in other publications and online forums.
Out of the running before he begins
On Oct. 22, 2021, two weeks after Gunn submitted an application to enter the race, the BC Liberal leadership committee disqualified Gunn for views “inconsistent” with the party.
The committee cited four social media posts by Gunn explaining residential school origins in Eastern Ontario and arguing against Canada having committed genocide against Indigenous people.
Gunn told his side on This is Vancolour with Mo Amir, and wrote an OpEd for True North: “Ironically, of the un-elected, seven-person [BC Liberal] committee that denied my candidacy, none, to my knowledge, are actually Indigenous. Meanwhile, the one Indigenous candidate in the leadership race, Ellis Ross, enthusiastically supported my entry.”
The BC NDP were gleeful and again weighed on their opponents’ leadership race, scolding candidates who hadn’t yet “condemned Gunn’s intolerance.”
“The things that were said about him were very hurtful, and I know that still bothers him today,” said Aisha Estey, president of the BC Conservatives and a long-time friend of Gunn.
“People were calling him a racist, and he couldn’t be further from that.”
Two years later, slander is resolved
It took repeated phone calls and emails, but two years after a Vancouver Sun reporter erroneously connected Gunn with the Soldiers of Odin, the publication corrected the slanderous mistake and removed all references linking Gunn with the group.
“He has absolutely no association to any of those kinds of [extremist] groups. That was ridiculous,” Estey said.
“People were calling him a racist, and he couldn’t be further from that.”
Aisha Estey
“There’s been other reporters who have said some pretty terrible things about him,” said Estey, a practising lawyer in Vancouver. One was sent a demand letter, she added. “It was extremely irresponsible how they were talking about him.”
Gunn was lucky he had his own business and couldn’t get fired, she said. “Who knows what kinds of opportunities that could have cost?”
Not a ‘human weather vane’
“In our political system today, there seems like there’s a complete shortage of anything resembling political courage. People trying to focus-group everything to death instead of standing for what’s right,” Gunn said in 2021.
“I got into [the leadership race] for the policies and ideas and to affect change, not to be some kind of human weather vane that points in whatever direction I think the winds will be blowing. And that’s why I think no one can make a breakthrough.”
Little did Gunn know, three years later a BC Liberal MLA named John Rustad would achieve just such a breakthrough. Nor could Gunn have known how much his own political vision and redirected political ambitions would fuel the revival of the BC Conservatives and lay the groundwork for Rustad and his team to achieve success.
Old party gets new life
After getting bumped from the candidate process, Gunn and his leadership campaign supporters surveyed B.C.’s landscape for a new political home, eventually deciding to breathe life into the Conservative Party of BC, which last elected an MLA in the 1970s and whose most recent premier served in 1928.
It was ripe for a takeover.
In May 2022, Gunn and his former leadership campaign team, led by Angelo Isidorou, mobilized supporters, voting in a slate of mostly 20 and 30-something board members. Gunn transferred his “Common Sense” policy platform to the party and the new board “modernized” the organization, down to a new website and logo.
“I’ve developed very deep relationships with many of these people and couldn’t have done what we did without them,” said Gunn.
The party was bridling with momentum. Gunn considered running for leader. Then two unrelated events occurred. Long-time northern BC MLA John Rustad was ousted from the BC Liberal caucus. And Pierre Poilievre became leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.
With the change in Conservative party leadership, Gunn’s federal prospects brightened. He’d interviewed Poilievre several times for his documentaries and respected him. Their policies aligned and Gunn believed in Poilievre’s vision for Canada.
Meanwhile, Rustad considered his options as an Independent MLA. He and Gunn began talking. Gunn and the party’s leadership, recognized the benefits of having Rustad, a sitting MLA, serve as leader. Gunn convinced longstanding BC Conservative leader Trevor Bolin to step aside and within months, Rustad had joined the Conservatives and was acclaimed leader.
“He was the right guy at the right time,” Gunn said of Rustad.
So too was it the right time for Gunn. In December 2023, Conservatives green-lit Gunn as the federal candidate for North Island – Powell River.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Rustad, his senior party leadership/campaign team and slate of mostly unseasoned political candidates achieved the remarkable, catapulting from zero elected Conservative MLAs in 2020 to 44 in 2024, just three seats shy of a majority government.
“None of us saw that coming,” Estey said.
Hitting the federal campaign trail
It wasn’t easy for Gunn to watch the meteoric rise of the BC Conservatives from the sidelines and he’ll miss making documentaries, but as he told the Comox Daily Record shortly after securing the Conservative nomination, “while I am proud of my work investigating these issues [as a filmmaker], I don’t just want to report on them; I want to do something about them.”
Standing on the back of a flatbed truck in Campbell River in January, Gunn addresses several dozen employees and contractors gathered in an industrial work yard to meet their local Conservative candidate.
“Aaron’s dedicated. He wants to see our community and his riding prosper, which is a change from what has been the last 15, 20 years,” said event host Mark Stuart, owner of Upland Excavating, which operates from Nanaimo to Cape Scott.
“All the industries that built Campbell River are gone or in trouble. We need those industries to bounce back… for this community to survive.”
Audience members shout out questions to Gunn about forestry, fish farming, crime, safe supply, and more. Gunn answers carefully and confidently. He knows his stuff.
“I think that Aaron works harder understanding the issues, rather than waiting for someone to tell him what his opinion should be, which in my opinion, that’s what most professional politicians do,” said Campbell River mayor Kermit Dahl, who has publicly endorsed Gunn in the federal election.
The next day, Gunn is door-knocking in Comox before taking the ferry to Powell River where he and his riding association have organized a political rally for his boss to meet residents. They’re hoping to draw 500 people. More than 800 show up.
Onstage, Gunn warms up the audience for Poilievre. He looks as relaxed in a ballroom of cheering people as he was talking to locals on the shop floor.
‘I’m happy to defend it’
Unexpected as his career twists and turns have been, Gunn’s old friend Andrew Slater says he’s not surprised.
“It makes sense to me,” he said, adding, Gunn been creating his own opportunities since he was 13.
“Aaron is incredibly intelligent, like, obsessively intelligent, and committed to the truth. He wants to find the truth and espouse the truth.”
That quest has brought him some trouble, but his resolve seems unshaken.
“I’m comfortable with exactly who I am, what I stand for. I’m able to articulate it, I’m happy to defend it. And I think that makes it harder to attack and back me into a corner, because I’m on solid ground,” Gunn said.
He seems almost sanguine about the lambasting he’s endured for expressing his views.
“So many of those things I said that were controversial have now just moved into the mainstream.”
He’s hopeful the dam may have broken. A post by Poilievre in January on John A Macdonald’s birthday was trending on social media in the context of the American tariff threat – pride in Canada’s history is coming back, Gunn said, relief in his voice.
These days, more than anything, he’s impatient to get on with the job. He has a nature cast for battle, waiting around for the contest to begin goes against his grain.
He wants to fight through the election and the face whatever’s on the other side. If it turns out to be having to navigate the most serious political threat Canada has faced since the Second World War, so be it.
“It reminds me of the Jordan Peterson line where he says, ‘Tell the truth and your life will be an adventure.’”
In that case, Gunn is all set.
His truth is the one thing he knows how to tell.