Profile: Aaron Gunn inspires, unsettles and downright aggravates
Hello readers,
A magazine profile for your Sunday morning scroll…
I first met Aaron Gunn July 2020 in Blue River. We were both in town to cover the ongoing hostilities of Kanahus Manuel and her band of activist followers. Manuel and her motley crew had occupied a public road for two years, all the while harassing residents, Simpcw Nation members, pipeline workers, tourists and police.
The community was desperate to have them gone. Local First Nation chiefs told them to leave. Police couldn’t arrest. Crown wouldn’t charge. The premier and solicitor general refused to intervene.
Aaron filmed the situation for a documentary and I wrote a story with Geoff Russ – Occupy Blue River.
It was only after meeting the polite, friendly filmmaker in Blue River that i discovered his unapologetic online persona who blasted governments and politicians on their public policy absurdities. When i asked around about Aaron, people tended toward one of two camps: big fan or abso-f’n-lute-ly despise him.
I watched his reels. Partisan politics aside, his research, sources, arguments, and sheer nerve at getting the story, were impressive.
Who was this guy? And did he really spout “white supremacist christofascism?”
When Aaron declared his intention to run for the BC Liberal leadership in 2021 and was thwacked with criticism from every direction, I knew he was profile material.
My first interview with him took place at his BC Liberal leadership rally in Comox. Since then, we’ve had many more conversations as i tried to flush out who he is.
Every profile is necessarily incomplete and will miss more than it can capture, but I hope, whether fan or foe, you appreciate this glimpse of Aaron and the words that he just won’t mince.
–Fran
Aaron Gunn doesn’t need your approval, he knows who he is
Written By Fran Yanor
“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 were 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.”
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 in 2021, 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 videaos 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.
But it was in 2020 that his personal brand took off…