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So why retire from the political fray he so evidently loves? He offered three reasons.

“They say that life begins at 50. Well, I’m 51 and I’m ready for new challenges,” he said, adding that he’ll likely wind up back in business, where he once worked as an investment banker.

Beyond that, he said he wants to leave when he’s “on top” of his political career, not waiting to be carried off “in a body bag or air-lifted off the field.”

But above all else, he said the decision is about — and was made together with — his family, husband Maxime St. Pierre and their four-year-old twin daughters Rose and Claire.

“I think Max and Rose and Claire, to me they’re miracles.”

Photo by Chris Roussakis/ QMI Agency

Brison made history as Canada’s first openly gay federal cabinet minister and again as the first federal politician to wed his same-sex partner. Yet homosexuality wasn’t even legal in Canada until two years after he was born.

“I spent the first two years of my life destined for a life of criminality,” he quipped.

But Brison became emotional as he reflected on the transformation in gay rights since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was entrenched in Canada’s Constitution in 1982 and his own part in subsequent debates that resulted in equality for same-sex couples.

Photo by Handout

“When I realized I was gay, when I totally accepted that I was gay, I thought that my life, I thought that it was going to be very compromised,” Brison said, his voice catching as he struggled to hold back tears.

“I thought accepting the fact that I was gay was going to mean, among other things, that I would not be able to ever enter public life or successfully accomplish the kinds of things that I wanted to do. I thought it would mean that I would never have a spouse or children.