Who's Funding Aaron Gunn?
Conservative candidate for North Island—Powell River
A lot of attention is being paid to Aaron Gunn’s history of racist comments.
But little has been said of the fact that his career is financed by Vancouver billionaire Chip Wilson and some of the greasiest dudes in Western Canada.
If you’ve read some of my older posts, you’ll recognize a recurring theme: the connection between real estate speculation and BC politics. With Gunn, we’re seeing the same old story playing out in real time.
For the past eight years, his only job has been making YouTube videos about Canadian politics. He’s made over two hundred of them. But who’s funding them?
I did some real basic research, taking screenshots of the credits on his YouTube videos and then Googling the producers.
Here’s who they are:
Brett Wilson
Brett is a Calgary based, multi-millionaire investment banker. If you’re a fan of CBC’s Dragon Den (seasons 3-5), you’ll recognise Brett as one of the panellists. He also enjoyed a brief moment in the public light when he called environmental activists “slimy bastards” and repeatedly suggested they should be hanged for treason.
He made his fortune in Alberta’s oil and gas industry. Before the business went belly-up in 2017, he was the single largest shareholder of Forent Energy.
In 2020, the Alberta Energy Regulator ordered Forent to clean up their thirty-one abandoned oil wells. Instead, Wilson’s business dumped sixteen wells onto the publicly funded Orphan Well Association, leaving taxpayers to foot a $1.1 million cleanup bill. His company still owes $44,000 in unpaid property taxes and an estimated $3.7 million in liabilities for its remaining fifteen abandoned wells.
Despite his legal troubles, he has an estimated net worth of $300 million. As well as producing several of Gunn’s documentaries, Wilson donated the maximum individual contribution limit to his nomination campaign in 2023.
Angelo Isidorou
Angelo is the BC Conservatives’ executive director and campaign manager.
In an attempt to embarrass the BC Conservatives, the (now defunct) BC United party leaked a seven-page report titled "Angelo Isidorou's Extremism" a few weeks before BC’s 2024 provincial election.
Aside from glowing tweets about Donald Trump and Surrey’s very own white-supremacist celebrity Lauren Southern, the most embarrassing revelation from the document is about Isidorou’s failed defamation lawsuit against former Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart.
In 2021, Isidorou was the director of Vancouver’s right-wing municipal party, the Non-Partisan Association (NPA). At the time, the NPA was running Fred Harding as its mayoral candidate. Fluent in Mandarin, a former cop, and a successful real estate investor, Harding got in trouble for promoting luxury Vancouver real estate in China during his campaign.
Stewart claimed that public statements by Isidorou demonstrated the NPA’s "open support for hate groups." When the NPA sued for defamation, the courts agreed with Stewart’s assessment of Isidorou and the NPA and awarded Stewart $100,000 in legal costs.
Frankie Basso and Grant Woods
I couldn’t figure out who Frankie Basso is. sorry guys. Maybe this realtor from Guelph?
Grant Woods is the owner of Woods Media Company - a business that creates videos and graphics for the political right. He’s a young guy and a frequent collaborator of Gunn’s.
Significantly, many of his videos are produced by Chip Wilson’s corporate lobby group, Pacific Prosperity Network (PPN).
Chip Wilson
Chip is savvy enough to keep his name off Gunn’s credit roll, but his fingerprints are all over the guy.
Chip Wilson is best known as Vancouver’s billionaire founder of Lululemon, but in 2015 he was pushed off the board for his offensive comments about women. Since then, he’s pivoted into real estate, development, and right-wing political advocacy.
His new company, Low Tide Property, is on a mission to build a real estate portfolio worth $1.5 billion by 2030. They’ve been bullish, buying up property in East Vancouver neighbourhoods. Their strategy is to evict low-income tenants, charities, musicians, and artists - then turn their homes into revenue-generating condos and storefronts.
In 2022, Chip founded the PPN with a $380,000 donation. PPN is a free-enterprise lobby group that advocates for the interests of Chip’s real estate empire. This hints at their motivation for sponsoring the premiere of Gunn’s viral documentary, Vancouver is Dying - a documentary that argues for using police to clear homeless people from valuable sections of the city’s downtown core.
Chip also owns the Facebook page BC Proud, which he uses to get around Election BC’s third-party advertiser laws since (even though he’s paid for followers) social media posts don’t count as advertisements.
From 2017 to 2020, Gunn was on Chip’s payroll as a senior contributor and board member of BC Proud.
Conclusion
This has been a break from my usual history writing.
I live in Gunn’s riding and am frustrated that no one else has connected the dots between his campaign and the real estate industry.
People are struggling to get by right now. Undoubtedly, many voters are willing to overlook Gunn’s anti-Indigenous racism if he can do something about the cost of living - if he can bring down rents, cut taxes, and help people drowning in mortgage payments.
The thing is, he won’t. His backers are real estate speculators, corporate landlords, and oil executives. He’s going to be looking after their interests, not yours.
This is outstanding journalism. These people are abhorrent misanthropes who need to be shamed and shunned. The notion that they’d have a direct line to the PMO should Poilievre’s rogues gallery of vindictive stains form government is a nightmare.
Thanks for writing this. I’m down in the Oceanside area. I had no idea this was the same guy who did that POS “Canada is Dying”. My old landlord showed me that if that’s anything to go by…