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He’s back! Svend Robinson will be the NDP candidate for Burnaby North-Seymour in this fall’s federal election. He looks good at 66, brimming with comeback vigour. His ostensible motivation for returning to politics is concern over climate change and the affordable housing crisis. But he has not denied that his real ambition — a realistic one considering Jagmeet Singh’s failure to advance his party’s fortunes — is the NDP leadership.

From 1979 until 2004, Robinson went from strength to strength within the NDP. Suddenly, his career imploded over his theft of a valuable ring, an action he attributed to mental illness.

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That’s water under the bridge for me. What isn’t is Robinson’s extreme, career-long animus against Israel, which continues to this day. As the NDP’s foreign affairs critic, his lack of balance and seeming indifference to Palestinian terrorism during two intifadas was noted with scorn by such notables as Bob Rae, who asked in 2002, “Where is his (Robinson’s) solidarity with the families of the victims of the massacre on Passover? Where is his humanitarian outrage over the children killed while dancing in a discotheque or eating in a pizzeria?” Rae concluded that the NDP’s policy on Israel was “not a vision of social democracy worthy of support.”