When longtime Burnaby MP Svend Robinson reappeared in the pages of the Burnaby NOW a few months ago after more than a decade’s absence, he drew the same love-him-or-hate-him response he had gotten used to during his 25 years in office.
We had contacted him in November to comment on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s historic apology to gay and lesbian civil servants and military personnel – an apology Robinson had helped craft as a member of an advisory panel.
After we published that story, some readers were eager to know what he’d been up to since leaving federal politics in 2004.
Others were quick to bring up the notorious incident of the stolen diamond ring that precipitated that abrupt exit.
“It just makes me sad, that for some people that’s how they’ll remember me,” Robinson said of the latter in a sit-down with the NOW recently.
Robinson had already won his Burnaby seat twice before this paper even began publishing in November 1983, and, for two decades, the colourful, controversial life and career of one of Canada’s longest serving MPs provided a steady stream of news stories: Robinson coming out as Canada’s first openly gay MP, spending 14 days in jail for protests against logging at Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island, lending his presence during ALS patient Sue Rodriguez’s physician-assisted death before changes to the law, breaking his jaw and ankle in a hiking accident on Galiano Island and countless appearances at a multitude of local community events.
The stories dried up in April 2004, when Robinson pulled out of that year’s federal election after admitting he had stolen an expensive diamond ring from an auction house in Richmond.
Robinson said it was an “irrational act” that doesn’t make sense to him to his day.
“It was the most painful, humiliating thing, and for me the biggest thing of all was the sense of letting people down, so many people that had looked to me as being their voice, and then that voice is silenced,” he said. “Boy, that was the toughest, that was the hardest.”
For better or worse, the incident launched Robinson’s career into a new international trajectory that came full circle in Ottawa this week.
New trajectory
On Tuesday, Robinson made his final appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee – a committee he once sat on as an MP – on behalf of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, to thank Canada for its strong leadership in the fight against the three diseases and to applaud the Liberal government’s new “Feminist International Aid Policy.”
But support for the fund hasn’t just come from the Liberals, according to Robinson.
“We had great support from the Harper government, and that continued with Trudeau,” Robinson said. “They did the right thing.”
Robinson left Canada for international work in 2007 after a few years at the B.C. Government Employees’ Union.
He first worked in France for Public Services International, the global public sector union federation the BCGEU is a member of.
That work led to an introduction to the head of the Global Fund at an AIDS conference in Mexico in 2008.
He asked Robinson’s advice on what work the fund should be doing with parliamentarians.
After Robinson told him, he was hired to do just that.
For the past 10 years, the former Burnaby MP has travelled the world, engaging legislators in both donor and partner countries.
“I took delegations of MPs from Australia, from New Zealand, from Canada, from the United Kingdom, from the United States, from Spain, from France and I took them to countries in which the Global Fund was making a difference, saving lives, preventing disease,” Robinson said.
In Vietnam, for example, Robinson travelled to rural villages in the Mekong Delta with MPs from Australia to help hand out mosquito nets paid for by the Global Fund to stop the spread of malaria.
“We met with families there and grandmothers. It was incredibly moving,” Robinson said. “When a member of parliament from Australia hears this and knows that their taxpayer dollars are saving lives, it’s pretty amazing.”
During each of his four trips to Vietnam for the Global Fund, he said he also took delegates to meet with a group of gay, lesbian, and trans people benefiting from a drop-in centre the Global Fund was supporting.
“They talked about how this was just making a huge difference in their lives, about how they felt more sense of self-worth and what that meant as they were not taking risks around HIV, for example. They were doing peer education, helping to educate other people, particularly in the trans community; a lot of them were sex workers. So, how do you prevent the spread of HIV?”
In partner countries, Robinson said he worked to empower legislators to be leaders on tough issues, like homophobia, misogyny and big pharma to tackle AIDs, malaria and tuberculosis in their countries.
“They paid attention for two reasons,” Robinson said. “One is because the Global Fund was funding 90 per cent of the programs in their countries, so they had to. They knew that, without us, they didn’t have any resources. And secondly, they knew that I’d been an MP myself in Canada for 25 years and so they weren’t going to get away with a lot in terms of the BS around their role or anything else.”
The work put him in contact with many socially conservative legislators, in donor countries and partner countries alike, he said.
To build common ground, Robinson said he used the same approach he had employed as an MP in Burnaby when fundamentalist Christians would gather to pray outside of his constituency office – especially after he came out as gay.
“What really made a difference was first of all listening – listening and understanding where it is they’re coming from, and I always tried to do that,” he said.
“You don’t go into a country there with a big megaphone. You’ve got to come at it from a place of understanding and respect. You’re starting at ground zero with many of these people, and I think there are some lessons to be learned there for Canada as well.”
Looking forward
Robinson’s tenure at the Global Fund officially ended last year when he turned 65 – the fund’s mandatory retirement age.
He and Max Riveron, his partner of 23 years, have since left their adopted home in Switzerland and are likely to start spending more time back in Canada, according to Robinson, since they still have that place on Galiano Island.
Is another run at politics in the cards?
“No, no I don’t think so,” he said.
Really?
“You know well enough you never say absolutely out of the question, but I had 25 years,” he said. “It was 25 pretty full years, amazing years actually. … I don’t think elected politics is likely in the cards, but the experience that I’ve had in a whole range of different areas, particularly in human rights issues, environmental issues and health issues, and so on, if there’s a way that I can make a contribution back home in those areas, that’s certainly something that I would look at.”
