“I had the luxury of starting to work when I was really young – my mom owned our local Hallmark store in Campbell River, and there was no after-school care, so off to the store I went every day after school, or on weekends between soccer games.”
Just how young?
“Really, really young, as far back as I can remember. I actually had a stool so that I could get up high enough on the till so that I could learn to ring things in, probably around six years old and up. I loved it.” In addition to working with her mom at the store, they started a fudge-making business — TJ’s Treats, after their shared initials — and toured the local craft show circuit.
Johnston’s post-secondary education was supported by a five-job rotation: Lifeguard, swim instructor, restaurant barback, nightclub barback, and a teller at the Royal Bank of Canada. “It was all about graduating without any debt. I’m very proud that I was successful in doing that. I mean, I have a lot of energy now, but I just can’t even comprehend when I was this full-time student taking five nursing classes and all these jobs, it was just crazy. But you know, that’s what you had to do, especially to afford rent in Victoria.”
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What Tanille Johnston had to do today was get up at 6am in the predawn cold in Campbell River, BC to hop onto a virtual call with me. She had the additional challenge of a “semi-dead zone” internet connection on the reserve of the We Wai Kai Nation, where she lives today.
Throughout her youth, Johnston experienced both sides of that uniquely semi-permeable border between life on and off the reserve. While she grew up in town, she spent just as much time at her grandparents’ house on reserve. “The students at school, they didn’t know I was First Nations. I’m fairly white-passing — that’s a luxury that I’ve had, the ability to essentially hide as a young person and choose when I was going to embrace that side of my lineage. Remembering the things that kids were saying about my family, and them not knowing that it was my family, was something that I’ve never forgotten.”
Today, it’s her own kids who are learning about this divide. “They both do have Indian status cards, and they are of an era where the two generation cut-off rule is greatly impacting them and our family. There’s certain soccer tournaments that their cousins aren’t allowed to play in, but they can play in, because they have a status card. So try explaining that to a five-year-old why their cousins can’t… that’s the reality that my girls are living in.”
Now that the voting has begun, Tanille Johnston is now officially the first Indigenous person to appear on a federal leadership ballot in Canada. It’s not her first time making history — she already made history as the first indigenous city councillor in Campbell River — but she has continued to find different places to make her mark.
I asked her whether she had considered running for band leadership and I was surprised to hear that she had already run for chief twice. Her first attempt was after she completed her Masters in Social Work at the University of Victoria. Fresh off her time as a student movement organizer, she jumped into the race soon after returning home — something she admits was not ideal for her chances.
When Johnston’s name appeared on the ballot for a second time in January 2025, it came as a shock. “When you’re nominated by two elders in your community, it’s not the most respectful thing to say ‘no thank you’. So I let my name stand in that, but I was by no means pushing for that chieftainship. I had already committed federally and there was no way you could do both, especially with the time difference.”
“I did get some criticism for that from the general public, but the general public does not understand politics on reserve in First Nations communities”, Johnston said. “The challenge with reserve politics is that it’s very riddled with nepotism… it’s kind of the Wild West of politics on reserve, and you know the saying goes, ‘the bigger family you have, the more positions you have on Chief and Council’… our community does its best with our electoral processes and kind of trying to survive within this Western colonial system that’s been imposed upon us.”
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Another system that has been imposed on Tanille Johnston is the gender dynamics of politics. As I’ve watched this campaign, I have noted a lot of similarities with last year’s Liberal leadership race that brought Mark Carney to the office of Prime Minister.
In that campaign, Liberal Member of Parliament Karina Gould — also a mother under the age of 40 — exceeded expectations and drove the conversation in many of the same ways that Johnston is now. They have captured the imagination of the youth wings of their parties, provided both rhetoric and policy around driving internal democratic reforms, and been recognized for their strong debate performances. Despite those successes, the media’s framing excluded both women’s campaigns from consideration as front-runners even before any talk of fundraising and poll numbers.
Though she said she hadn’t paid much attention to the Liberal race, Johnston and her team have definitely felt that sense of exclusion from the media. Her team has even joked that if the National Observer releases another photo of only three candidates, “we’re gonna copy/paste my photo and Tony [McQuail]’s photo onto it.”
When I asked Johnston specifically about how society views motherhood in politics, she said it was “something I think about all the time. I assume it’s probably not as much of a conversation amongst my male counterparts that are running when they get questions about children, about raising a family, about being a parent. You have to be choosy — or I guess you don’t have to be, but I’m choosy [about] when I bring up being a parent, when I talk about my kids, because we still live in a society that says you can’t do both.”
How does she tackle these societal barriers? More hard work.
“I’ve worked very hard throughout my career to try and disarm that kind of talk. I have chosen to be loud and proud about my profession, whichever profession that is… I have very much put my career front and center in my life, very purposefully, because I want my girls to see that they can do whatever they want to do.
“One of my proudest moments of my eldest was when she was having a conversation about her future with one of my friends and she said ‘When I grow up, I want to be everything.’ My friend commented back ‘Yeah, you can be anything you want’ and I said ‘No. She said she wants to be everything.”
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Tanille Johnston’s advice about how to organize: “Enter as the human you are.”
“Show up in those spaces, help out, lend a hand. When the time comes, there’ll be an opportunity to have a conversation” she said. “Focusing more on building the relationship and the trust, that will create a sense of belonging, and that belonging is so long-lasting, and that is what gets people to volunteer and donate and mobilize during our elections. That is where we should be putting our energy and our focus.”
I asked Johnston about the trust-building work inside the NDP, in the relationship between the party headquarters and its electoral district associations (EDA). “We have to start decentralizing where we can, to make sure that the power is sitting in the EDA. Part of that is financial responsibility – we can’t centralize the funding and then deliver a strategy from a centralized office that has not respected the nuances, especially out in rural or isolated communities.”
One of her policy planks specifically targets this funding gap. ”We need to help the EDA fundraise at a local level so they have the money necessary to run strong campaigns, and then when these reimbursements come from Elections Canada, when they hit that 10% mark, then we need to make sure the majority of that money is coming back to the EDA so that they can keep up momentum.”
“Momentum is not something you can just put down and pick back up again”, Johnston continued. “You have to be feeding it every day, not just election day. If we’re not going to feed it, then we’re not going to pick up steam, and we’re not going to grow, and our party isn’t going to reach the heights that we want to reach.”
In North Island-Powell River, Johnston is already showing that she knows how to reach those heights. The riding is not only her strongest in this race, it lands solidly in the top ten of all ridings in the leadership campaign, the only rural riding to grace the top ten. While she did not win the seat in the 2025 federal election, she had the strongest performance from any non-incumbent NDP candidate. She also earned only 1500 fewer votes than leadership rival and MP Heather McPherson achieved in Edmonton-Strathcona, in what has been called “the safest NDP riding in the country”.
Johnston says she is “100% in for the next federal election. I have been every day since that election ended… I’m probably the only one who is really excited about the next election. Like, let’s get on it, let’s go. I think that a lot of people who voted Liberal out of fear last time are itching for that opportunity to correct that and to bring back the NDP in a way that the Liberals and Conservatives are probably not expecting.”
What every Canadian should expect is that whether it is as the councillor for Campbell River, the candidate for North Island-Powell River, or as the leader of the NDP, Tanille Johnston will continue to work hard. It’s just what she does.
Editor’s Note: This article appears in a series of interviews with NDP candidates by The Leveller.
