A Gladstone on the Pacific

John Robson: British Columbian
by Ivan E. Antak

Victoria: Tellwell Talent, 2025
$25  /  9781834184142

Reviewed by Matthew Downey

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It is fitting that the main narrative of Ivan Antak’s biography of John Robson is preceded by the story of the future premier’s initial arrival to the territory that would become the province of British Columbia aboard the steamship Forwood. Within eyesight of Esquimalt harbour, a powder magazine explosion rocked the ship, killing two, and necessitating emergency repairs before the vessel could limp to harbour. Antak notes that Robson’s name appeared alongside a collection of his fellow passengers in a letter to the editor of the British Colonist newspaper commending the Forwood’s captain in his professionalism during the action despite the fact that one of the two killed by the blast was his son. Subsequently, as the biographical narrative commences to place the sober sentimentality of its subject within the pandemonium of early British Columbian politics, Antak impresses upon his reader that Robson endeavoured to emulate that captain in steering his ship to safe harbour despite the chaos and personal emotions framing the effort. As the first major biography of British Columbia’s ninth premier, John Robson: British Columbian is self-described as an effort to establish a foundation for further scholarly engagement with Robson as a (if not the) leading figure in British Columbia’s first decades as a colony and province.

While Robson’s personality is overshadowed by the unilateral authority of Sir James Douglas, or the eccentric intensity of Amor De Cosmos, Antak posits that he was just as formative in the shaping of BC. Indeed, as a social and political reformer, Robson played a driving role in the establishment of a distinctly Canadian brand of liberalism on the Pacific coast. While Antak never makes the comparison, his portrayal of Robson paints a picture of something like a Gladstone of the Pacific. W.E Gladstone, the long-serving British prime minister and dominating figure of 19^th century liberal politics, shared many traits with Robson: intense religiosity, fervent dedication to liberal democratic reform, and impatience for the flippant and flamboyant political machinations of their rivals. Antak argues that Robson’s role in BC political history is analogous to Gladstone’s influence on Westminster. While far from the most successful legislator, or the most memorable character, Antak pitches that Robson, like Gladstone, represented a stable force in formulating the liberal political assumptions of his era.

In the closing paragraph to his introduction, Antak notes that John Robson’s arrival in British Columbia occurred “at approximately the mid-point of Robson’s life.” This fact is key to Robson’s experience in the new colony, as he had already fully formed and entrenched his beliefs as they were shaped by his Canadian identity. John Robson’s father, also named John, was among the first waves of the Scottish settlers who founded the town of Perth, Upper Canada, in the wake of the War of 1812. Coming from a devoutly Presbyterian family with flexible adherence to the establishment Old Kirk of Scotland, Robson’s family was embedded in the demanding moral culture and democratic structure of reformed low church Protestantism. The elder John Robson, both because of his faith and the patronage of reform-minded businessman Malcolm Cameron, would see his family heavily influenced by the twin issues of responsible government and temperance. The Robsons were not directly involved in the Upper Canadian reform movement against the unaccountable, unelected, and aristocratic Family Compact system. However, the young John Robson’s political convictions would be deeply impacted by the Upper Canada of the 1830s. The democratic clamoring culminated in the 1837 Canadian Rebellions and Lord Durham’s Report recommending the union of Upper and Lower Canada and the introduction of responsible government. On settling down in the newly founded city of New Westminster, two decades after the introduction of responsible government to the United Province of Canada, John Robson would work tirelessly to transplant Canadian liberalism on the west coast.

It did not take long for Robson to clash against the established powers in Britain’s north Pacific colonies. The old fur traders’ clique revolving around James Douglas, Hudson’s Bay Company Chief Factor and founder of Victoria, maintained a tight grip on the governance of the colony. The HBC had founded the colony of Vancouver Island in 1849 and governed it under a 10-year Crown charter. The 1858 Fraser River Gold Rush saw an ensuing flood of gold seekers, largely coming north from California, which caused explosive growth in Victoria and a crisis of sovereignty on the unorganised mainland territory known as the New Caledonia district. Swiftly, a new Crown colony was declared, called British Columbia, and Douglas became the dual governor of both areas. Robson, who found himself among the unsuccessful majority of gold miners, rooted himself in the new colony’s capital at New Westminster. As the editor for the reform-minded newspaper The British Columbian, Robson targeted the fur trade clique and colonial elite and the apparent preference that the Island colony received over the neglected mainland.

James Douglas was in truth a far cry from the elitist Family Compact of the Upper Canada of Robson’s youth. He was indeed sceptical of responsible government, but this was because, just as John Robson’s liberalism was shaped by constitutional debates in the east, Douglas’ authoritarian tendencies were forged by the fragile politics of the Pacific fur trade. Victoria had initially been founded out of necessity after the Hudson’s Bay Company were forced out of their initial base at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River (modern Vancouver, Washington). When the entirety of the Pacific coast north of California and south of Alaska was shared by Britain and the United States, the HBC governed a sparse multicultural society centred around a scattering of trading post forts in partnership with the First Nations. When American settlers travelling along the Oregon trail began arriving en masse in the area, they organised quickly into provisional governments that challenged the Company’s authority. In 1846, Britain and the United States negotiated a border at the 49^th parallel, with the Hudson’s Bay Company briefly maintaining their private operations out of Fort Vancouver. It was then that Douglas had his disconcerting run-in with the dangers of frontier political mobilisation. With the raising of hands and the signing of papers, the new territory of Oregon instituted the same racially discriminatory laws that were to be seen in the eastern and southern states from which they came. James Douglas, born in Guyana to a mixed-race mother, and his Métis wife found their basic rights and liberties (such as giving testimony in court) dissolved. In the context of the 1858 Gold Rush, with the constant threat of Americans organising into militias or committees, it is no wonder that the then-governor was so hesitant to facilitate responsible government.

More contextual information about the authoritarian tendencies of Douglas’ government may have been useful in Antak’s book. Even so, he succeeds to a great degree of pitting Robson as a representative of the emergent Canadianism that took hold in early BC among the defensive old guard of the fur traders and the radical progressivism of the American annexationists. Antak shows how Robson’s Canadian connections were then carried with him through his career as a member of the legislature and premier. This is seen most evidently in Robson use of family, political, and religious connections to Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie in advocating for favourable terms in renegotiating the terms of the railway agreement on which BC’s entry into the Dominion hinged (Robson also accepted a patronage appointment from Mackenzie during the former’s break from politics).

As would be expected of a book dealing with the social and political development of 19^th century British Columbia, Antak does not shy away from mentioning the unsavoury elements of how the First Nations were treated, or Chinese immigration was denounced. While these topics are not dealt with in depth, he mentions many of the names that have in today’s age become bywords for broken treaties – namely Joseph Trutch. Robson’s role in these issues is clearly stated. From his first editorial at The British Columbian, he espoused the limitation of Chinese immigration. In terms of the province’s Indigenous people, Antak goes into more detail to show the complicated and somewhat contradictory nature of Robson’s published opinions. While affirming to a degree his belief in the inherent dignity of British Columbia’s First Nations and their territorial claims, he nonetheless carried the popular contemporary belief in the need to civilise the Indigenous and accepted the assumptions of their decaying cultures. While Antak leaves a more specific examination of Robson’s roles in such issues to further scholarship, his book does well to portray the relationship between his subject’s strong beliefs and the pragmatic contradiction inherent to active political life, particularly in a frontier colonial society.

In the context of 21^st century political culture it may be hard for many people to truly believe that politicians just might truly believe in anything. For this reason, Antak’s book is somewhat refreshing in the way it portrays Robson’s convictions as honestly and ardently held. While Robson may not have believed in an established church for British Columbia, under the liberal persuasion that competition would strengthen faith amongst the population, he nevertheless acted on the conviction that government had a responsibility for the moral wellbeing of the populace. As newspaperman, backbencher politician, and even as premier, John Robson maintained an active leading position in the Presbyterian community of New Westminster, then Victoria. His role as the financial backer of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, prominently seen in Victoria’s city centre along Douglas Street, is observable in the fact that his name is emblazoned on the building’s cornerstone. Though British Columbia only briefly experimented with the prohibition of alcohol in the 1910s under the ironically named premier Harlan Brewster, Robson’s lifelong evangelical teetotalism drove him to legislate limitations on the sale of liquor and privately provide immense support to Temperance society events. In a similar vein to Gladstone, who even as a cabinet level minister walked the East End streets of London to reform the area’s prostitutes, Robson somewhat mawkishly refused to accept a separation between moral duty and political responsibility to a degree that damaged his reputation.

Robson’s moralism was not exactly unpopular. Indeed, the issues of social reform and Christian democracy were highly influential in the Victoria of the Victorian era. However, his sober reputation opened him up to mocking historical attacks from his rivals, the most prominent of which was his fellow reformer and pro-confederation advocate Amor De Cosmos. Just as the strait-laced Gladstone had a lifelong rivalry with his flamboyant and politically fluid Benjamin Disraeli, Robson stood in opposition to the character of De Cosmos even more than his politics. The public back-and-forth arguments between the two politicians, seen in each man’s respective newspapers, is one of the more entertainingly colourful sections of Antak’s book. De Cosmos referred to Robson by the derisive nickname “Honest John.” Robson returned fire, ironically supported editorially by the De Cosmos-founded British Colonist, accusing De Cosmos of communism and “Ku Klux Klan journalism.” Their rivalry would climax during De Cosmos’ premiership when Robson supported a protest over proposed alterations to British Columbia’s confederation terms, resulting in the “Little Rebellion” that saw a mob force its way into the legislative chamber.

De Cosmos, where Antak is most successful in pushing his case for Robson’s longstanding political influence is in the subject of the mainland-island political rivalry. Both Douglas and De Cosmos represented entrenched Victoria interests, while Robson was a champion of developing the area that had grown so much around the Fraser Gold Rush. Robson’s political life would bring him to Victoria for the last decades of his life (he is buried in Victoria’s Ross Bay Cemetery, a mere stone’s throw from De Cosmos). However, Antak does well to emphasise his lifelong advocacy for building an economic, if not political, capital on the lower mainland. Robson worked tirelessly to encourage the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s terminus at Burrard Inlet, as opposed to the alternative proposal of a bridge along the north coast Discovery Islands that would have Victoria serve in that role. While practical considerations led the Dominion government to disfavour the island-centric option anyways, Antak puts Robson at the centre of the political movement that oversaw the development of the small townsite of Granville into the towering metropolitan city of Vancouver.

There is admittedly more work that needs to be done in order the build the case that John Robson is, as Antak states, the leading figure of 19^th century British Columbian history. However, this book stands as a great achievement in opening the door for that argument to be built upon. Antak’s engaging work in this conventional yet attentive biography is well supported by meticulous research and immersive writing. Antak shows how Robson shaped British Columbia just as much as it energised him. In bringing the political and social assumptions developed in his Upper Canadian young adulthood to the wild environment of Gold Rush British Columbia, Robson had an impact in pursuing a stabilising presence to the reform movement on the Western fringes of British North America. He was far from the only advocate for liberal reform or confederation with the Dominion of Canada, but he contributed a unique moral framework steeped in his presbyterian roots. While contributing to the political culture of the capital of Victoria, he concurrently advocated for the establishment and development of the provinces economic centre in what would grow into Vancouver. Though a contemporary of Gladstone, who developed his beliefs idiosyncratically, Robson’s Gladstonian character, seen in his moralism, liberalism, and domineering sober image, comes through in this examination of his true historical legacy.

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Matthew Vernon Downey is an independent writer and researcher based out of Victoria, B.C.. He has degrees from UVic (BA hons) and the London School of Economics (MSc). [Editor’s note: Matthew Downey has also reviewed books by Thomas F. Pedersen, Tim Martin, M. Wylie Blanchet, Jonathan Manthorpe, Robert Amos, and Alan R. Warren for The British Columbia Review. He has also contributed an essay on the subject of Amor de Cosmos.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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