As Canada’s parliament gets into motion following the spring federal election, it has one new member who has played a particularly pivotal role in the country’s rightward shift on drug policy.
The Conservative Party’s platform itself was antagonistic towards harm reduction and people who use drugs. The party campaigned on a “tough-on-crime” agenda, which sought to limit or end harm reduction programs, characterized safe consumption sites as “drug dens,” and pushed for a life sentence for trafficking just 40 milligrams of fentanyl.
While many conservative personalities and politicians have shaped this political discourse over the last few years, newly elected Vancouver Island-area MP Aaron Gunn was an early and influential factor.
In Canada’s first-past-the-post system, with three major parties, races are often won with well under a majority of the vote, and Gunn’s election was no different, with 39 percent supporting him on April 28.
Gunn benefited from the collapse of the center-left New Democratic Party, which had held the riding since it was created in 2015.
Gunn’s work after leaving the BC Liberals—in both politics and media—helped lay the ground for his own electoral success and wider political shifts.
“To see Aaron Gunn finding a home in [Pierre] Poilievre’s Conservative Party is no surprise to me at all,” Garth Mullins, author of the new bestselling memoir Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs and a member of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, told Filter.
Gunn is a YouTuber who was disqualified from the leadership race for the right-wing BC Liberal Party in 2021 over social media comments on gender diversity and systemic racism, which he called “a myth.”
But his work after leaving the BC Liberals—in both politics and media—helped lay the ground for his own electoral success and wider political shifts.
Gunn went on to produce the documentary-style video Vancouver Is Dying, which today has over 4.5 million views. The film blamed decriminalization and safe supply for perceived increases in crime and public drug use—disregarding the key drivers of growing inequality and homelessness.
Upon its October 2022 release, Vancouver is Dying was immediately promoted by billionaire Lululemon founder Chip Wilson—through his political organization Pacific Prosperity Network, founded to help conservative municipal and provincial politicians get elected.
And it may have played a significant role in the right-wing A Better City (ABC) Vancouver slate sweeping that month’s city council election. That local party includes a former Vancouver Police Department media relations officer, and received a convention-defying endorsement from the Vancouver Police Union, whose president prominently features in Vancouver Is Dying.
Gunn also played a role in rebuilding the provincial BC Conservatives, who piggybacked on the momentum of Poilievre’s Conservatives by aligning their branding with the otherwise unaffiliated federal party.
Common Sense BC, a group launched by Gunn to effectively replace the BC Liberals, worked to elect a group of aligned political actors to the BC Conservatives’ board in 2022. Some of them have stayed with the party, including a Vancouver Is Dying executive producer who is widely credited with building its all-but-successful 2024 provincial election campaign.
Gunn continued pushing “tough-on-crime” and anti-harm reduction videos, including the Vancouver Is Dying follow-up Canada Is Dying.
While the BC Conservatives did not win that election, they did replace Gunn’s former party (by then renamed BC United) as the British Columbia’s dominant right-wing force.
But Gunn had moved on to federal politics by then. In October 2023, he announced his candidacy for the North Island-Powell River riding, with an aim to turn the seat Conservative.
Even before then-Conservative leader Erin O’Toole could take a run at the 2021 federal election, Gunn had been pushing for Poilievre to replace him. And after the Conservatives lost that election, Gunn celebrated Poilievre’s victory in the party’s subsequent leadership race.
That was less than a month before Vancouver Is Dying was released, and Gunn’s public adoration of Poilievre only continued. His YouTube channel is populated with videos such as “New Vancouver Mayor Goes Hard Left; Picks Fights With Pierre Poilievre,” “Pierre Poilievre CALLS OUT Trudeau’s LOVE AFFAIR with Communist China,” and “Pierre Poilievre’s Riveting Defence of Free Speech.”
At the same time, Gunn continued pushing “tough-on-crime” and anti-harm reduction videos, including the Vancouver Is Dying follow-up Canada Is Dying. He published one video erroneously suggesting that legal, “for-profit cocaine” was coming to BC, another touting the “Alberta model” of drug policy and—just days before the latest federal election was called—another titled “The Deadliest Scandal in Canadian History,” referring to “failed” drug policies.
Gunn is prominent among several media personalities who have successfully pushed an anti-harm reduction agenda in Canada. Their narrative has bled from fringe media into right-wing publications like the National Post and on into more mainstream publications.
And this narrative has helped catalyze policy shifts locally, provincially and federally.
Messages like Poilievre’s campaign ad, “Everything feels broken in Canada,” echoed Vancouver Is Dying in substance and style.
After the 2022 success of ABC Vancouver, local police received a significant boost to their budget, and have increased policing of marginalized populations under a controversy-ridden campaign with dubiously approved funding; the city immediately ramped up sweeps of unhoused people and has moved to curb supportive housing and harm reduction.
Since winning the 2024 provincial election, meanwhile, the BC New Democratic Party government has continued its trend of consistently folding to political attacks against harm reduction programs—including safe supply, decriminalization and provision of other harm reduction supplies—and has expanded involuntary treatment.
Many of those attacks came from the BC Conservatives, or from politicians who would eventually ditch the BC United for the BC Conservatives.
And nationally, the government has engaged in a ramped-up drug war, partly in response to Trump’s trade war, but also in alignment with a rightward shift in the public drug-policy discourse.
Centrist parties, such as the BC New Democratic Party and the federal Liberal Party, managed to limit electoral advances by provincial and federal conservative parties in 2024 and 2025. But reduced to minority governments, they now need to rely on other parties to pass legislation.
Mullins said one reason for the advances of conservatives—particularly the federal Conservative Party—has been their appeals to working class politics.
Their faux working class veneer, Mullins said, has included politics that throw people who use drugs under the bus—in particular messages like Poilievre’s campaign ad, “Everything feels broken in Canada,” which echoed Vancouver Is Dying in substance and style.
“When Poilievre says ‘everything in Canada feels broken,’ that feels true to me—a lot of things in Canada are broken,” Mullins said.
He pointed in particular to a growing affordability crisis, paired with rising inequality in Canada.
“[Poilievre] starts by talking about that in a way that the NDP really doesn’t. But that’s the bait. And then comes the switch. The switch is: ‘Well, we have to blame drug users. We have to blame trans kids. We have to blame immigrants,’” Mullins said.
“The NDP spent decades distancing itself from the working class, trying to ‘clean itself up.’ … That left the ground open for blue-collar cosplayers like Poilievre and the Conservatives, and Aaron Gunn was able to benefit as well.”
“Instead of putting the blame where it really is: the Galen Westons, the big real estate developers, governments from the Liberals and the Tories that have been de-regulating capitalism for the past several decades and allowing it to just asset-strip the country and the planet.”
Weston is the billionaire whose family’s holding company, George Weston Ltd., controls Loblaw, Canada’s largest food retailer, among other assets. Weston has been an avatar for inequality in the country—particularly as food prices skyrocketed during a recent period of high inflation.
Mullins said the traditionally left-wing New Democratic Party takes a share of the blame for the Conservatives’ ability to appeal to the working class.
“The NDP spent the last several decades distancing itself from the working class, from unions, from socialism, from labor politics, trying to ‘clean itself up’ and make itself look like this neutral centrist party,” he said.
“That left the ground open for blue-collar cosplayers like Poilievre and the Conservatives, and Aaron Gunn was able to benefit from that as well.”
Photograph by Erik Mclean via Pexels
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