Gord Johns

Gord Johns represents Courtenay-Alberni on Vancouver Island as an NDP Member of Parliament and is one of seven NDP MPs who survived the party's collapse in the 2025 federal election. He has represented this riding since 2015 and has built a parliamentary career substantially defined by one of the most important and least discussed policy failures in Canadian history: the opioid epidemic. Johns was calling for a public health emergency declaration on opioids years before the federal government acted. He pushed for decriminalization, harm reduction funding, safe supply programs, and treatment access when these positions were politically costly and widely dismissed. He was right — not in the sense that any single intervention would have stopped the epidemic, but in the sense that the policy frameworks he advocated would have saved lives, and the delay in implementing them cost lives. Courtenay-Alberni, like much of Vancouver Island, has been devastated by the toxic drug supply. The communities of Port Alberni, Campbell River, and the smaller towns of the riding have seen overdose deaths at rates that would constitute a scandal if they happened in downtown Toronto. Johns has been a consistent and often lonely voice for these communities in Parliament. He is not perfect — no politician is — and the opioid crisis has continued to worsen through the decade of his advocacy, which reflects the scale of the problem more than any failure of his. But a politician who identifies a crisis early, advocates consistently for evidence-based responses, and refuses to abandon the issue when it is politically inconvenient is doing exactly what Parliament is for.