Provincial Political Career
During British Columbia's colonial days, Robson had briefly served in the colonial assembly, but otherwise his political activity was limited to editorializing and lobbying. Once the colony joined confederation in 1871, however, he ran and was elected to the new province's first legislative assembly as a representative for Nanaimo. There he became an opponent of his former ally De Cosmos as well as Premier George Anthony Walkem, and advocated reforms, including female suffrage. His support for Alexander Mackenzie's Liberals in the 1874 federal election, won him a patronage appointment with the Canadian Pacific Railway, a position he held for five years. Following this, Robson purchased a newspaper in New Westminster, which he published and edited for two years.
In 1882, after a seven year absence, Robson returned to the provincial legislature as one of the members for New Westminster. He served in various high-profile cabinet portfolios under Premiers William Smithe and A.E.B. Davie, where he earned a reputation as an advocate for public education, accelerated settlement, improved exploration and surveys, and subsidies to transportation providers, such as railways. He was also a vigorous opponent of land speculation, seeing it as a hindrance to settlement and transforming land into economically viable resources. Perhaps his greatest success came as the leading advocate for constructing the Canadian Pacific Railway terminus at Granville, and his encouragement of the citizens there to incorporate their locality. It was Robson who was responsible for having the legislature name the new municipality Vancouver upon its incorporation in 1886.
Upon Davie's death 1889, Robson was appointed premier. In 1890, in order to ease his workload, he moved from representing the busy, growing riding of New Westminster to becoming one of the members for the vast, frontier electoral district of Cariboo in the province's Central Interior. His brief tenure is chiefly remembered for his continued actions to enable homesteading, as well as his lobbying the federal government to construct a dry dock at Esquimalt, just west of Victoria. Robson remained premier until his death in 1892, which occurred after he hurt his finger in the door of a carriage during a visit to London, and got blood poisoning.
John Robson is interred in the Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria, British Columbia.
Read more about this topic: John Robson (politician)
Famous quotes containing the words political career, provincial, political and/or career:
“No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life’s course by a mere accident.”
—James Bryce (1838–1922)
“In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn’t developed space travel were mere prehistory—horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene—and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“My passion strengthens daily to quit political turmoil, and retire into the bosom of my family, the only scene of sincere and pure happiness.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)