National Affairs: B.C.’s Svend Robinson attempting a compelling political comeback

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on January 21, 2019.

Can a soufflé be successfully re-heated? Paul McCartney famously said no when asked if the Beatles could ever reunite. Former New Democratic Party MP Svend Robinson begs to differ.

Fourteen years after he left the Commons in disgrace, Robinson hopes to rekindle his political career by winning the Vancouver riding of Burnaby North-Seymour for the NDP.

At 66, he is older and greyer. But on the phone he sounds as youthful as he did when he first entered the Commons in 1979 at the age of 27.

As usual, he is staking out a position on the left wing of his party. To deal with climate change, he would go farther faster than current NDP orthodoxy calls for.

In particular, he would not only put a stop to pipeline building. He would also begin shutting down the Alberta oilsands.

“A lot of oil and gas would have to be left in the ground,” he says. Jobs lost in the fossil fuel sector would be replaced by new jobs building affordable housing, infrastructure and renewable energy options.

Is this practical? Robinson’s answer is that failing to counter climate change is even less practical. Climate scientists, he notes, calculate that the world has only 12 years to prevent catastrophic global warming.

To deal with what he calls the affordable housing crisis, he would have governments fund the construction of co-op and non-profit homes.

“The market has failed,” he says bluntly.

During his 25-year stint in Parliament, Robinson gained a reputation as a flamboyant maverick with a knack for attracting publicity. He managed to attach himself to all of the hot-button issues of the day — sometimes to the chagrin of the party bosses.

He was an early and outspoken advocate of assisted dying. He was the first MP to declare himself gay. He was openly sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians.

But he was also an eminently practical politician who managed to win seven consecutive elections in his Vancouver-area riding.

And he was popular enough within the NDP to come close to winning the party leadership in 1995.

That was the contest in which, after coming first in the initial ballot, Robinson took the unusual move of conceding defeat in order to support second-place finisher and ultimate winner Alexa McDonough.

In 2002, Robinson — then NDP foreign affairs critic — journeyed to the Middle East to observe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He enraged many in the party when he said that Palestinian bombings and Israeli military offensives were both forms of terrorism. Critics said that by daring to equate both sides, he was engaging in the sin of moral equivalency.

That resulted in his being demoted to partial foreign affairs critic. He could speak for the party on everything but the Middle East.

Robinson says he hasn’t changed his views, calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies toward the Palestinians “appalling.”

But he has not always been on the outs with the party brass. In 2003, he was one of only two New Democrat MPs to support Jack Layton’s successful bid for the party leadership.

He calls himself a staunch supporter of current party leader Jagmeet Singh, who is running in a February byelection in neighbouring Burnaby South.

Robinson spoke at Singh’s campaign kick-off last fall. The leader is to return the favour Saturday when Robinson is expected to be acclaimed as the NDP’s candidate for Burnaby North-Seymour.

Can Robinson win this riding in the October election? His conditional discharge for stealing a diamond ring — an action that propelled him out of politics — continues to haunt. An earlier attempt at a political comeback in 2006 failed.

However, the ring business was a long time ago and Robinson’s explanation — that he was suffering from mental illness at the time — may be more compelling now.

More to the point, he will have to take the riding from the Liberals who, in 2015 won by a margin of 3,401 votes.

That’s not an insurmountable edge. But does the NDP establishment want this talented, articulate but sometimes difficult man back in caucus? I expect views are mixed.

Thomas Walkom writes on national affairs for Torstar Syndication Services.

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