Robson joined forces with other colonial-era editors such as Amor De Cosmos in railing against the Governor and his officials, including Chief Justice Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie.

In 1862, Begbie cited contempt of court charges against Robson during the Cottonwood Scandal for publishing an unproven allegation that the Chief Justice had accepted a bribe from land speculators.

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.

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.

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.

In 1890, 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 Dominion Lands Act homesteading, as well as his lobbying of the federal government to construct a dry dock at Esquimalt, just west of Victoria.