One of the five contenders seeking to be the next leader of the federal NDP hit Port Alberni, Tofino and Ucluelet on her Vancouver Island tour in between Christmas and New Year’s.
Tanille Johnston is a city councillor in Campbell River and was narrowly defeated in the 2025 federal election in the North Island-Powell River riding where she ran for the New Democrats. She stopped in several places in the Courtenay-Alberni riding during her Vancouver Island tour as well as places such as Comox, Texada Island, Qathet (near Powell River) and Nanaimo.
“I think everywhere matters and I think a lot of places, like Port Alberni, don’t get much attention from politicians or especially from leadership candidates and I’m a big champion of rural communities matter,” she said before a meet and greet at a cafe in Port Alberni on Dec. 27. “It doesn’t matter if you come from a big urban centre or a tiny community in the middle of nowhere, your voice should be included in the NDP.”
Johnston said she’s focused on telling people the truth and not making promises she can’t follow through on. She added to win the next election, New Democrats need to be able to go to places they historically haven’t.
“What we can do right now is we can go to ridings all over the country and kind of re-spark interest, have conversations, hear people out and start bridging those divides and growing the party. That’s a very tangible thing we can do,” she said.
She said it’s easy for candidates to come up with major policies they can talk about but for the NDP to succeed they need to have more members of Parliament and those MPs need to be people who can connect with communities across the country.
“We need leadership that can go into the spaces and places that we have either neglected or not shown up in ever before and build new relationships to grow the party,” she said. “I can create really cool ideas like wealth taxes and that sort of thing but we can’t get any of that until we get a very strong set of NDP leaders in the House of Commons.”
In the 2025 election the NDP won just seven seats, its worst result ever. When asked what the party did wrong, Johnston said they didn’t pivot, didn’t take advantage of local candidates’ knowledge and didn’t use resources well enough.
“We saw investment dumped into Burnaby in the last election that a lot of us didn’t understand,” Johnston said. “We knew that Burnaby was gone, that was a lost cause and ridings like mine, they might have had a couple extra human resources (which) could have maybe got us across the line.”
The party’s former leader, Jagmeet Singh, was the MP for Burnaby South. He won just 18 per cent of the vote in his riding in the 2025 election, coming in third and resigning the leadership that night.
Johnston said some parts of elections can’t be done from the central campaign and should be delegated to local candidates and their teams and poor decisions were made in the lead up to the election.
“There were decisions that were made centrally that I think hamstrung us quite a bit,” she said, pointing to the Conservatives campaigning for years prior to the election in her riding.
Johnston said ridings should start finding candidates and campaigning early, adding the central party still hasn’t reached out to some riding associations to see if candidates would be interested in running again in the next election.
“I would have loved to tour around my riding saying ‘look, I’m still your candidate,’ and I’m so ready to go for the next one but I couldn’t because you lose your candidacy title as soon as that election is over,” she said.
“We still haven’t run our nomination races to get our candidates out, we’re sitting on our hands. We could be in an election within the next year. By the time a leadership race is done, we could have eight months until we’re in an election.”
Johnston is advocating that her party start dispersing more money and messaging power to candidates in ridings across the country rather than having it stay with the central campaign.
“The most important thing people should know about me, one of my core values is integrity. I truly believe in being a genuine human being,” she said. “I’m always going to give it to you straight and I think we need more of that in politics. We need actual human beings in politics.”
The NDP membership will elect their next leader on March 29. The other candidates are: Avi Lewis, Rob Ashton, Heather McPherson and Tony McQuail. If any of those candidates don’t meet fundraising deadlines set out by the party, they will not be on the ballot.