William W. Ting

Gregor Robertson, a former organic farmer, spearheaded the creation of a community garden on Vancouver City Hall’s north lawn.

Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson has proven that idealists can succeed in politics—with shrewd backroom tacticians.

There is something in the air this day, something unfamiliar after a month at sea. Behind them lie 6,000 kilometres of open Pacific and a daily dose of salty spray. But the smell is different now: less astringent, more fecund. The two inhale. Yes, at last: land. Somewhere ahead lies the tiny, jungle-covered, equatorial island of Hiva Oa in French Polynesia, their first stop on this 18-month, trans-Pacific journey and—it turns out—an aperture to a profoundly new world.

Gregor Robertson and his wife, Amy, dive for lobsters in Taaoa Bay, buy breadfruit and yams in Atuona, wander through Hiva Oa’s villages, and revel in the islanders’ self-reliance, their sense of community, their pride in surviving in one of the planet’s most isolated places. A nomad then, his future unclear, business and politics the furthest things from his mind, Robertson could look out from the hillside gravesite of the island’s most famous resident, 19th-century French painter Paul Gauguin, and down onto the anchored, 12-metre ketch he’d named Shoeless Joe. He could sense something within him shifting. It was April 1989.

In the months ahead, as the couple sailed through Polynesia and onward to New Zealand, Robertson became aware he had obligations. His middle name was, after all, Bethune. His great-aunt had impressed on him that his bearing the name of her late cousin, Norman Bethune—probably Canada’s most celebrated humanitarian—came with a price. If he couldn’t be a physician like Bethune (Robertson had been rejected by UBC’s medical school a few years before), he’d apply the social principles first encountered at family gatherings in North Vancouver, and later on Hiva Oa, someplace else. As the famous Apollo 11 photograph of Earth rising behind the moon illustrates—he told me over a Happy Planet apple juice in his South Cambie home a month ago—Earth itself is like Hiva Oa: an island in a vast, cosmic sea. Some big changes were necessary, he’d come to realize, if the planet’s inhabitants were to survive.

I heard this story about Hiva Oa in response to my question to Robertson about the event that had most contributed to where he now stood and where he might be headed. These are issues that perplex British Columbia’s chattering class and drive journalists to apoplexy. SFU political scientist Kennedy Stewart thinks, as do many others, that Robertson has his eyes on NDP leader Carole James’s job, that his Vancouver mayoralty is part of a larger, long-term plan to bridge the province’s Green-NDP divide. Others think the 45-year-old Robertson is—with his Happy Planet credentials and his youthful ambition—a closet provincial Liberal, and it’s Gordon Campbell’s position he’s after. The editor of this publication suggests I ask Robertson if he has federal political aspirations and is learning French. So, is he, as some critics say, an eco-opportunist? A chimerical New Ager? A puppet of leftist handlers, like his chief of staff, Michael Magee? Or the real deal? The questions make Robertson laugh.

But they arise because Vision Vancouver routed the opposition in the municipal election one year ago. On the civic left, COPE has been nullified by its loss of leadership—and money—to the centre-left Vision and its subsequent council alliance this year with the very people who abandoned COPE four years ago. The two surviving COPE councillors, David Cadman and Ellen Woodsworth, vote regularly with Vision. The always-a-bridesmaid civic Greens have, with the young and articulate Andrea Reimer, found a place within Vision and Vancouver city council at last. And on the civic right, the NPA appears to be roadkill. It was crushed in the 2008 election (Suzanne Anton winning the sole NPA seat) and was incapable of luring more than 50 people—at $10 for membership—to its cheerless, mid-October AGM this year. (The evening before, a glitzy Vision fundraiser at the Wall Centre attracted 600 bigwigs—at $200 a seat—from across the city’s political and corporate spectrum.) In fact, the NPA’s own supporters at CityCaucus.com have called for the formation of a new free-enterprise party to replace the one that governed Vancouver for 45 of the past 68 years.

How is it that the man who was running carrots through his Glen Valley Organic Farm juicer 15 years ago, and who was sailing the South Pacific on the Shoeless Joe before that, has come to sit in this political catbird seat—with everyone speculating about which direction he’s going to fly?

To understand where Robertson is going, it’s essential to know where he’s been.

If his family’s connection to Bethune and his 18 months cruising the South Pacific help explain Robertson’s philosophical roots, his purchase with Amy of a 20-hectare farm east of Fort Langley in 1991—and the fortuitous sequence of events that followed—help explain his politics. There were artichokes, deer, strawberries, turkeys, bok choy, and all the standard vegetables in the Glen Valley fields, and the first of four children—now all teenagers—around the house. In 1994, the farm was certified organic and Robertson found he needed a way to expand sales beyond a then-limited niche market. While watching the Vancouver–New York Rangers Stanley Cup final on TV that year (the Canucks lost, and a riot in downtown Vancouver followed), Robertson and gathered friends came up with the name Happy Planet for the juices they’d begun making on the countertop with the kitchen blender. There was some discussion about whether or not the name should appear with a question mark at the end: Happy Planet? While seated at the kitchen table of his current Vancouver home on West 23rd Avenue, with his son Satchel watching rugby on the nearby TV and his mostly overlooked tuba in the corner, Robertson admits that the company’s name may sound naive. “It’s more aspirational, given the world’s realities,” he says. “What will it take for that to be the ultimate goal? A happy planet. You can’t tease out the compass. My goal is to ground ideals in tangible steps, in achievable results. It’s about walking your talk. But you do have to start with talk that’s ambitious.”