You could feel the sorrowful news coursing through Greater Victoria on Tuesday afternoon, when the official word moved that John Horgan had died a few hours earlier.

John from Langford. Our guy. The Reynolds grad who was born and raised in Greater Victoria, worked as waiter downtown as a kid, and died here, at Royal Jubilee Hospital.

Years ago, he was yelling at the TV about something the government did when his wife Ellie asked him: “Why don’t you do something about it?”

So he got into politics and became premier of B.C., the first from Vancouver Island since the 1940s.

He was an unfiltered heart-on-his-sleeve man who was wide open about his motivations and ideas. He telegraphed every move he ever made, with little artifice or guile. You could tell what he was feeling nearly every time he walked into a room.

And what he was thinking was mostly common-sense ideas about making B.C. better, and doing the right thing.

Looking back at it from this time of sadness and regret, it was a very unlikely career.

Lots of people get into politics out of agitation or upset, so nothing unusual there. And he was an NDP staffer in the 1990s, so he knew the ropes.

But his move up the ladder was unlikely. When Christy Clark beat Adrian Dix in the 2013 election, his party was gutted.

When Dix quit the leadership, Horgan, then a second-term MLA, was one of a handful of names kicked about as a successor. He’d finished third in an earlier leadership race.

He rejected the idea. “Too old. We need new blood.” But the party was so dispirited that nobody else was interested either. So he........

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