[♪♪]
[Rod Mickleburgh] BC's dominated by the resource industries,
which attract a different kind of a worker.
I mean, it's tough,
and so you get tough people.
And BC for a long time
had the most militant labour movement
in the country.
[Mark Leier] We see resistance and conflict
and organized workers pushing back.
[Lara Campbell] It was in organized labour,
it was in the women's movement,
it was in the suffrage movement.
[Adam Rudder] People from all over the world
have contributed to building British Columbia.
They were fighters.
They stood their ground.
I think that's one of the most valuable contributions
that our ancestors have made.
[Geoff Meggs] People have struggled,
and they have sometimes lost,
and they have sometimes won.
And what history does
is give people that broader perspective
to help make sense of the world that they're in today.
[♪♪]
[Shane Koyczan] You're looking
at what many people call British Columbia.
The place where people have always worked.
From the bounty the sea provides
to the rich agriculture of its land,
immigrant settlers
and ancestors of the land itself
toiled to build their lives here.
And while the land was being forged
into a province,
it drew the gaze of those
who gleaned the treasure of its resources.
The pull of greed brought those
who paid their workers little respect,
and even less money.
But like the tides that embrace this coast,
the people, too, would rise up.
They fought for better wages, working conditions, and rights.
It was the shoulders of labour
that built not only the economy...
but also a way of life that remains unchanged...
even today.
[♪♪]
Known the world over for its sea and its forests,
the resources that stem from this place
have fed the world.
Shelters have been built from its lumber,
letters and stories written on its paper.
But before these assets became industries,
there was another resource
that provided the first paid labour.
[Mickleburgh] The coal mining on Vancouver Island
into the 1920s
was really the heart of the BC resource economy,
and led to monumental struggles.
Really, you could say that work in the way we know it today,
where you work for a wage,
really started on Vancouver Island
with the coal industry.
Who were the first workers in British Columbia?
Well, they were the First Nations.
Who else was there?
Until 1890, they were still a majority of the population
of British Columbia.
Indigenous Peoples have been a crucial part of this economy,
but right from the very beginning,
when First Nations kept settlers and explorers alive
by showing them how to use the natural resources
of the area.
[Charles Menzies] A lot of the early structures
required Indigenous participation.
It required Indigenous knowledge.
It even required Indigenous permissions,
in many cases.
So this is a kind of interesting aspect,
which we don't really see today.
[Leier] In the 1830s and '40s,
the Hudson's Bay Company
was both the largest commercial enterprise
and essentially the governing power
here in British Columbia.
And as coal is becoming a huge industry
for heating and for industrial boilers,
they start looking for coal.
And they are shown coal by Indigenous Peoples.
[Mickleburgh] And who did they hire
to mine the coal?
The local First Nations people.
And they put it onto boats
because the ships were offshore there.
And the Indigenous women would row the coal
out to the boats,
and they'd get paid in blankets or whatever they got paid in,
but those were the first coal miners.
So the surface coal was easy to get at.
But the First Nations didn't know anything
about underground mining,
and that's where the real lucrative coal was.
[Leier] They thought that they could bring in
British coal miners with lots of experience
but hadn't realized that coal miners in Britain
had a sense of community.
That meant that they did not see themselves
as the servants of the Hudson's Bay Company.
[Mickleburgh] They arrive at Fort Rupert,
and they find conditions are not what they thought.
[Leier] Instead of being paid wages per hour,
they were paid by the tonne.
And that often meant to make a decent wage,
you had to take shortcuts in safety.
[Mickleburgh] And what do they do?
They go on strike.
[Leier] The Hudson's Bay Company
presumed that they could tell their workers what to do,
and since they were also the government,
had the resources to throw them in jail
if they disobeyed.
[Mickleburgh] Two or three of the ringleaders
were thrown in jail.
So you had right off the bat
the first industrial workforce going on strike
and then being punished by the authorities
for going on strike.
[Leier] So that pushed miners to form unions to fight back.
[Mickleburgh] Robert Dunsmuir was a Scottish miner,
and he had a relative
that was going to British Columbia.
And basically, on a whim,
he went on that ship.
He was a company man,
and he was never a fan of the ordinary workers.
[Leier] He believed that he was special
and therefore had earned the right
to tell other people what to do,
to make them work under terrible conditions...
and quickly moved from being a miner
to deserting his comrades and fellow workers
to becoming a coal mine owner and operator himself,
and became one of the most notorious
of the robber barons
in North America.
[Mickleburgh] He believed in making his money
by, of course,
paying the workers as little as possible...
unsafe mines.
If they went on strike,
he would first evict them from their company homes
and say, "You'll never work in my mines again."
And the miners would try to organize a union.
He would never, ever recognize the union,
and he made that clear to them.
He was as hard a man as the surface of the coal.
And if you think the white miners were exploited,
you can imagine what the conditions were like
for the Chinese miners.
And Dunsmuir was the first
to really start hiring a lot of Chinese labourers.
And they would often do the really unsafe jobs.
The conditions in those mines were just appalling.
[Leier] Coal mining is highly explosive,
and there are several devastating explosions
in BC history
that killed hundreds of people.
[Mickleburgh] The loss of life was unbelievable.
And for families in the mining community,
it was absolutely devastating.
There was one explosion in 1887.
150 miners died.
It's still the second-worst mining disaster
in Canadian history.
The loss of life compared to the number of workers
was basically the worst in the world.
Dunsmuir amassed so much money,
and we have streets named after him.
But what about the workers that made him rich,
that fought against him
for decent wages and working conditions?
Why aren't they recognized?
But you keep fighting for something,
and there's kind of a recognition
that this is a social issue that should be addressed.
And eventually, we got workers' compensation
in 1902,
the first in the British Commonwealth.
And that's a direct result of the ongoing struggle
by the coal miners of Vancouver Island.
I don't think people realize
how significant the Chinese population was
in a lot of these mining communities.
Cumberland was a significant mining community,
and it was a multicultural community.
Same thing with Nanaimo.
There was an active mine.
The Chinatown was significant.
And on the other side of the road
was the African-Canadian community.
Most Canadians recognize
that there was an African-Canadian population
on the East Coast,
but they don't realize that the rest of Canada
also had an African-Canadian community.
I had no idea that we'd even had one.
I didn't really believe it.
I remember finding that out and then going to the library,
and finding out
that James Douglas may have been a quarter black,
and that he was a powerful man who had a lot of influence.
For me, that was kind of a big moment
because my whole life,
I had kind of had this feeling
like black people don't really have history here.
Douglas invited a number of black people
from the States, from California.
Douglas's promises to those people
was opportunity.
And opportunity was something
that was in really short supply for black people
at that time,
particularly in the States.
[Fran Morrison] He was certainly aware
of the situation in California
with the racial discrimination that blacks were facing
at that time.
But also, many of them had family members
who were still in slavery.
[guns shooting]
[John Lutz] The 1840s, 1850s in America
is the period leading up to the Civil War.
America's in crisis
between the slave states and free states.
And they start to introduce legislation in California
that doesn't allow black people to buy property,
doesn't allow them to testify in court against whites.
And then there's a Supreme Court decision,
which allowed people
to claim a black person as an escaped slave
and basically take them back to a slave state.
[Stephanie Allen] The black folks that came
thought, "This is the land
where we will be free to be ourselves,
free from all of the hatred, the violence,
the fear that we live under in the United States."
[Morrison] They were satisfied that they would be able to vote
and be protected under British law.
Those were things that they had not had
in the United States.
And so, over the next several months,
several hundred black pioneers came and settled here.
It's said that they doubled the population
when they arrived.
[Lutz] Douglas recognized their motive for being here
was to avoid Americans,
and he enlisted them to act as police officers,
kind of a local militia to defend the colony
against the same people that they're trying to escape.
And so the first real police force
is actually blacks who had come from California.
[police whistle blowing]
[Morrison] After they arrived in Victoria,
we started seeing advertisements in newspapers
for their businesses.
They owned saloons, clothing stores,
grocery stores...
They were barbers, bakers, washermen...
One was a lawyer.
[Lutz] Mifflin Gibbs was involved
in several business enterprises.
He was the first black person to be elected to city council
in British Columbia.
[Morrison] There are about 150 businesses, shops,
and services
run by blacks.
[Rudder] So that community came there
running away from slavery.
They moved up here
with the sort of promise
that the British Empire was different than the States,
right?
They wouldn't face the same kind of racisms
or barriers to their advancement.
And in the beginning, in Victoria,
some of them became quite successful.
But as they became more successful,
they began to draw more attention
from the larger community.
And at that time,
that didn't turn out to be a good thing.
White people in that community may have been happy
having black people in the community
had they known their place,
but as soon as they became more prominent,
they began to be attacked by the white community.
And this is a theme that'll come up
even when we start looking into the history of Vancouver.
[Allen] Vancouver, like many other urbanizing areas
at that time,
the late 1800s, early 1900s,
absolutely implemented and upheld
racial segregation by land use.
In Vancouver,
there are restrictive covenants on title
to this day,
where people of African descent,
people of Chinese descent,
Indigenous people
were prohibited from owning housing.
Northeast False Creek was considered
the racialized part of Vancouver.
So just like the Chinese, Japanese,
and people of South Asian descent,
black folks clustered in this area
that came to be known as Hogan's Alley.
[Rudder] Hogan's Alley means a lot of different things
to different people.
It was a neighbourhood
where there was the largest concentration
of black people
in the city of Vancouver.
But it was very multi-ethnic.
[Allen] It allowed people from that community
to have their own safe space.
They could develop their own social networks,
their economic capital and interdependence,
as well as a little bit of political capital.
[Rudder] It was a place you could actually go
to have a good time in Vancouver.
You could get a drink, you could listen to music.
Things were more entertainment-focused.
And during the day,
that's when families were present,
and they were doing things that families do.
[Allen] It was this tight-knit community.
And the church that was formed
under the leadership of Nora Hendrix,
the Fountain Chapel,
was the cornerstone of that community.
[Rudder] I think moving through Hogan's Alley,
particularly for black people,
would have been that experience of being welcomed,
of feeling belonging in this city.
[Allen] Almost as immediately as this community formed...
[needle scratching a record]
people in positions of power wanted them gone,
and the City of Vancouver took textbook displacement steps.
The trash wouldn't be picked up for weeks.
The roads and the sidewalks were not kept up.
And this was not benign neglect.
This was very targeted neglect.
[Rudder] Newspapers called it a place of squalor, crime,
and a place of blight.
[reporter] Blight is death to a city.
And these dwellings are dying, board by board.
Most of Vancouver is kept strong and healthy.
But in areas such as this,
nothing happens except dilapidation and decay.
Property values fall,
and blight is the result.
[Allen] "Blight" was the word to use
to describe low-income racialized communities
that had fallen into disrepair,
ignoring the fact
that that disrepair was a direct result
of systemic neglect.
Letting something fall apart, you say,
"Now it's fallen apart, it's a blight,
and now we have to clear it out."
They also wanted to replace
the aging Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts
that were previously in place.
And Hogan's Alley
was dead smack in the middle of them.
And they prioritized putting those viaducts
directly over the centre of Hogan's Alley.
Can you imagine trying to go
up to a wealthy white community and say,
"Move, we're going to build a freeway through your mansion,"
you know what I mean?
[Allen] Some folks just decided to cut their losses and move on.
And when we think about what we lost
as a black community,
businesses that were there for 30 years.
We lose all of these community assets.
And this community just starts to completely disperse.
[Rudder] There was a history of invisibility
in the sense that they were largely invisible
to the general population.
I had never heard of them.
Any time I told my friends living the suburbs
or my parents,
they were always quite shocked to hear
that a black community had been here.
But for the ambitious members
of the community of Hogan's Alley,
it was just a starting point.
There were some members of the black community
that had made contributions in other places
and who had become successful in other areas of the city.
[Lutz] One of these black settlers
was a young man named John Sullivan Deas,
and he was a tinsmith.
In 1871, he was commissioned to make the first salmon cans
in British Columbia,
as a man called Edward Stamp
decided to create the first salmon cannery.
And then Stamp dies,
and Deas acquires the property
and becomes a canner in his own right.
In fact, was the biggest salmon canner
in British Columbia
until he sells out in 1878.
[♪♪]
The canneries got started in the 1870s,
and they really start to take off
as industrial operations in the 1880s.
[Menzies] Canning is this marvellous technology
that actually allows you to preserve food
for an ungodly length of time...
two years, three years, four years.
It also allowed for cheap transport,
so it went all around the world.
[Meggs] The canneries sprung up like mushrooms
all up and down the coast.
The number of canneries rose and rose and rose.
The number of boats rose and rose and rose.
And the number of canners
actually controlling all of that wealth
was relatively small.
They could all meet around a boardroom table,
and they worked together to fix prices
and try to maximize their profits.
And on the other end of the scale
were Indigenous fishers,
who were working the gillnetters
and there were families working in the canneries.
[Menzies] For about 100 years or more,
Indigenous communities were the forefront
of the commercial fishing industry.
Every village had the same boats and gillnetters.
Indigenous communities
get called "people of the salmon,"
and that's correct.
[Lutz] Indigenous men used their knowledge
of where the fish were,
and they would bring the fish back to the canneries.
And Indigenous women would gut the salmon and chop it
and put it into the cans.
And so you would have these seasonal factories
popping up all over the coast,
employing tens of thousands of Indigenous fishers,
Indigenous women.
If you look at the Canada Census
in 1881 and 1891,
you'll find that Indigenous women
were the most numerous among the factory workers
in British Columbia in this era.
It's ironic to me that the capitalist economy,
which displaced Indigenous people,
ultimately relied on Indigenous people
to help create that economy.
There was a strike in 1900 and 1901
where the white fishermen, the Aboriginal fishermen,
and the Japanese fishermen were at loggerheads.
The Japanese fishermen were beholden to the canneries
because they were renting their boats
and they were in cannery housing.
And so the threat was
that if they don't stop the strike,
then all these things will be taken away from them.
[Meggs] There's no question
that the Japanese fishers were being used by the canners
to replace Indigenous fishers
because the Japanese were more vulnerable
to direct exploitation.
An Indigenous fisher
who didn't like the terms and conditions
could pack up, take everybody home,
and go back to their community.
That was not an option available
to a Japanese fisher who just arrived.
[Fukawa] In 1900, there were 4,000 Japanese fishermen.
I'm sure that almost every Japanese-Canadian family
can identify a grandfather, an uncle, or even an aunt
who was somehow connected to the fishing industry.
They formed the majority.
And they wanted to join the white union,
but they were not accepted.
[Meggs] And as a result,
the pay that was necessary to give a Japanese fisher
was far less.
Once the strike began,
the Indigenous fishers had ways and means
they could get fish,
but the Japanese were caught in their bunkhouses,
really the prisoners of the canners.
[Fukawa] And so they formed their own union,
and they fought not just for economic gains,
but also they fought racism
and tried to improve the social and living conditions
of the Japanese-Canadian people.
And they even built a hospital in Steveston,
which was confiscated by the government in 1942.
But it was the only hospital in Richmond
for a long time.
In the First World War,
the Issei, the first generation of Japanese-Canadians,
wanted to fight for Canada.
[♪♪]
Some people
from the Japanese-Canadian community said,
"We have 200 Japanese-Canadians all trained.
They want to go to Europe and fight for Canada."
And the response was "No, thank you."
[Jim Kempling] They would simply have been told
"No, our white recruits
don't want to have anything to do
with serving in the same unit as somebody from Japan.
Go away."
And the people they were turning away,
some of them had 10 years' service
in the Japanese Army.
[Fukawa] And so they disbanded.
But several of them went to Alberta,
where they could enlist in the Canadian Army.
They couldn't in BC,
but they could in Alberta.
And they fought in many battles in Europe.
[Kempling] World War I, in many ways,
shaped the nature of Canada.
There was a high level of readiness for war,
but the actual events triggering the outbreak of war,
the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo
that set the war off
came as a complete surprise.
When the king declared war, the Empire was at war.
And when Britain was at war, Canada was automatically at war.
The response was very dramatic and very rapid.
Within days, people have signed up,
and they're on trains bound across the country,
where they were trained,
and then it was off to England and France and Belgium,
and to the horrors of that war.
The rate of enlistment early on was incredible.
And it was supported by the fact
that the economy in this period has gone in the tank.
But if you're 25 and unemployed,
sitting in Victoria,
getting you to sign up
is not much of a recruiting challenge.
[Forsythe] And consequently,
our enlistment rates were the highest, per capita,
in the country.
As well, we had Indigenous people
enlisting per capita
in the same numbers as the white community.
They had no rights,
but they were still prepared to sign up.
[Sonny McHalsie] The men that enlisted for the war,
they were protecting our land
and taking care of everything that belongs to us.
And what had happened once they got overseas,
they experienced how there was no racism.
In the battlegrounds, there's no racism.
Everybody is equal.
[Forsythe] Millions of people were killed, obviously,
and every community suffered losses.
If you travel around British Columbia,
virtually every community has a cenotaph.
By the time the war was over,
6,225 British Columbians were killed,
and so many more came home maimed.
It was cataclysmic, I think, for the province,
and as it was for Canada,
to have so many people gone,
almost an entire generation of young men
who could no longer become what their potential was.
[telegraph beeping]
[Kempling] The telegraph meant that people here,
through the newspapers,
had up-to-date information
on what was happening around the world
on a daily basis.
And during the war, you got daily reports of casualties.
The names of people
who were killed in France on Tuesday
would be reported on Wednesday or Thursday
in Victoria.
Today, we tend to think we're in an age
where there's been
very, very rapid technology advancement,
it's never been like this before.
But if you go back 50 years and say,
"What was it like in 1970 and today?
How much change has taken place?"
Well, there's been obvious changes.
I've got an iPhone, and I've got an iPad,
and the Internet and social media, and so on.
You do the same thing for World War I,
and you've got the invention of the automobile...
the electric light bulb...
motion pictures...
All those kind of things get invented
in that 50 years leading up to World War I.
And really, they're much, much more dramatic
than the past 50.
Due to the fact
that Canadians started to get stories
of what was going on in the war
from Canadian stories,
Canadians in general
think of themselves much more as Canadians
after the war.
As an example, the initial reports had come out
of the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
You'd hardly know that Canadians were involved.
The British reporting that was going on
tended to downplay Canadian involvement.
But shortly after that,
the story is presented as not only a Canadian victory,
but a victory that probably changed
the course of the war.
And it's a story that people at home
want to hear.
They want to hear that the loss of their loved ones,
the loss of all these soldiers,
was not in vain.
Back home, it was a time of dramatic change
for women and their place.
Women were taking on new roles.
Many of them ended up operating the farm
because their husband was away.
They also enlisted in other ways.
We had nurses who went overseas,
close to the front lines,
to look after the soldiers who were being maimed.
We had ambulance drivers.
There is one woman of note,
Grace MacPherson of Vancouver,
who was one of the first women to learn how to drive.
And she had watched her brother go off to war.
And she read the telegram that said he had been killed.
And she wanted to do something.
She got an interview
with the head of the militia at the time
and said that she wanted to drive an ambulance in France,
and he said, "No way.
I will not let any woman do that kind of work."
But because of so much carnage, they needed more men.
So the male ambulance drivers were now needed
to be part of the war effort.
So this opened the door for Grace to serve.
And she was there later in the war
when the Germans were becoming more desperate
and they started bombing hospital trains.
So she was near the front lines in her ambulance,
driving these wounded soldiers to the hospitals.
[Kempling] And this involvement of very large numbers of women
had a political spinoff.
Male politicians looked around them and said,
"There's a lot of power here.
We'd better sit up and take notice."
So it's no surprise that in 1917,
women in British Columbia get the vote.
[Veronica Strong-Boag] Women come out of the war
desperately seeking some kind of a solution
to what seems to be five years
of continued reports of death and injury.
The only way we're going to have world peace
is to make sure
that more women are involved in setting public policy.
The assumption is that women are more nurturing,
more caring, more loving,
and that if we apply those characteristics
to public life,
that there will be less violence.
[Campbell] BC enters Confederation in 1871.
And elected politicians at the time
start to debate the meaning of representative democracy.
So this is a question that's on the table.
Who gets to vote?
Who shouldn't vote?
Who should participate
in the political questions of the day?
And so there was some debate
over whether you could let women in into the political sphere.
Most male politicians at the time
were worried that women voting would upend the social order.
A lot of men believed
that women's brains were too small to vote,
that they didn't have the intellectual capacity
or the emotional capacity,
that they were irrational beings.
Or they were worried
that women would want to run for office
or take on male jobs,
like the legal profession, the medical profession.
And this was an issue of some concern
for many male politicians at the time.
But other men believed
that women could clean up society,
that society was corrupt,
and that politics was corrupt,
and perhaps it was corrupt
because women didn't have a voice.
So it was William Fraser Tolmie who introduced the first attempt
to allow women to vote in 1875,
in the Legislature.
And he was laughed down by his male colleagues.
And so his motion failed.
Failing to pass private members' bills
in British Columbia
didn't lead to the failure of continuing to try.
Women came very close in 1899,
when Ralph Smith introduced a private member's bill
that lost by only one vote.
And it turned out the next day
that a male MLA had accidentally raised his hand
and voted against the bill.
He'd actually intended to vote yes.
He'd just misheard the question.
So if that had passed,
women would have had the vote in BC in 1899,
and that would have been
the first province in the country
to do so.
But it did fail,
and all the bills failed until 1917.
[Strong-Boag] The federal government
introduces the Wartime Elections Act
in 1917,
under a great deal of pressure,
to be seen to acknowledge women's war effort.
And this gives the vote to women relatives
of men serving in the Canadian Armed Forces,
so only British women, effectively.
[Campbell] That means Chinese, Japanese, South Asian,
and First Nations men and women
are not allowed to vote in British Columbia
until the late 1940s.
It still maintained racial restrictions
on the right to vote.
And I will say that British Columbia
has some of the longest racial restrictions
in the country.
[Fukawa] After the First World War,
the people who are veterans are given the vote.
And so when Japanese-Canadian soldiers
came back,
they said, "Okay, we fought.
Can we have the vote?"
And they said no.
And that meant
that you were a second-class citizen.
[McHalsie] The same with First Nations people.
Even though our warriors, you know,
went and fought for us,
they weren't even regarded as real Canadians.
And so a lot of our veterans played a role
in fighting for that.
So 1963, we're finally able to vote.
[Leier] When the First World War ended,
there was so much opposition to the war,
to the terrible rate of casualties,
to the inflation in the economy
that meant that workers were earning less and less
while working longer and harder.
Workers had been told
that this war was a war for democracy.
And so many of them started to ask,
"Why don't we have more democracy where we work?
Why do we have immense wealth and immense poverty
in this country?"
[Mickleburgh] And that's when labour became,
for a few years, anyway,
became very, very radical,
and the shooting of Ginger Goodwin
was definitely part of that.
Who was Ginger Goodwin?
He was a coal miner from the British Isles.
He drifted out to the West Coast
and got work in the Cumberland coal mines.
[Leier] He was described as a very class-conscious worker.
[Mickleburgh] And he was part
of the incredible two-year coal strike
on Vancouver Island,
the biggest, most violent, and hard-fought strike
still in BC history.
And this was during the First World War.
He had been declared unfit for service
because he had lung problems.
He was weak.
And he just totally opposed that war.
[Leier] He was an anti-militarist.
His line was that war benefited employers,
and workers had nothing to gain from it.
They had more in common with that German worker
than they did with their own boss.
[Mickleburgh] He ended up in Trail, British Columbia,
where he plunged into union activities there.
They led a strike for the eight-hour day,
and then after he led that strike,
suspiciously, he was recalled for service
and declared medically fit to fight.
And to Ginger Goodwin,
this was basically a death sentence.
So he took off and went to Cumberland,
where he hid out in the woods.
And the local mining community knew him,
and they looked out for him.
But the authorities,
of all the draft dodgers in all of British Columbia,
that's the one they wanted
because he was a charismatic, well-known labour leader.
They regarded him as a threat and a danger.
One of the special constables, a guy named Dan Campbell,
discovered his hiding place in the woods.
And he confronted Goodwin.
One shot was fired.
Only two people know what happened.
And one of them was dead.
[Leier] The constable claimed
that he told Goodwin to drop his weapon,
and Goodwin then tried to point the weapon at him,
and the special constable fired first.
[Mickleburgh] Very few people believed that.
The workers, the miners believed this was cold-blooded murder.
[Leier] What we do know
is that the bullet tore through Goodwin's neck
and blew out his spine,
and he was killed instantly.
The killing of Ginger Goodwin outraged the labour movement,
and they were convinced
that he was the victim of a plot against him.
[Mickleburgh] In Cumberland, they had the funeral procession,
and there's a dramatic picture of Goodwin's casket
draped in white, with flowers on the top,
led by a brass band,
and the line goes on forever,
people in their Sunday best,
marching behind the casket.
And it went from one end of the town
to the other.
It wasn't just in Cumberland where there was this reaction.
On the day of his funeral,
they called a 24-hour general strike
in Vancouver.
The streetcars stopped, the docks stopped,
businesses stopped,
factories closed.
And that was the first general strike
in Canadian history,
let alone BC history.
[Leier] The outcome of this general strike
was two-pronged.
One effect of it
was that local businesses mobilized against the strike.
[Mickleburgh] The business community
was outraged.
"Our workers, they're not working.
What's going to happen?"
There was this total fear
that there was going to be a proletariat revolution.
So the business community riled up all these veterans
who had returned from the First World War
and said,
"Look, this is all on behalf of this draft dodger
who had fled rather than fight."
And a huge mob of veterans gathered
outside the Labor Temple at 411 Dunsmuir.
It still exists today.
And there's a great picture of this huge mob
outside the Labor Temple.
The veterans got really fired up,
and they rushed into the first floor.
They ransacked the place, broke up furniture,
threw papers everywhere.
Then they charged up the stairs to the second floor.
And there was Victor Midgley,
the secretary treasurer of the Labor Council.
He was in the forefront of this general strike.
[Leier] The mob tried to throw him out
one of the upper-floor windows.
[Mickleburgh] He went out onto the ledge,
and you can see that ledge there today.
So they made for Midgley out the window,
and somebody blocked their way.
[Leier] One of the women secretaries got in
between him and the crowd.
[Mickleburgh] Frances Foxcroft of the Telephone Workers' Union
said, "You're not going any further, boys."
And so the veterans allowed Midgley
to crawl back in,
and they said,
"If you kneel down and kiss the Union Jack,
we'll let you go,"
which he did.
And then out they went.
So that was Canada's first general strike.
The other effect of this, however,
was that it showed workers across Canada
that they could engage in a different kind of strike,
that they did not have to go on strike
as, you know, Local 19
of the International Typographical Union,
that they could win better conditions for themselves
if they struck as members of a community.
And that reflected their motto,
"An injury to one is an injury to all."
The killing of Ginger Goodwin
was the kind of lighting of the fuse
because the conditions were ripe.
And it set the scene for general strikes.
[Leier] From 1918 onwards,
what we see is a wave of these general strikes
from one end of Canada to the other.
And, of course, the Winnipeg General Strike
was one of the longest and one of the best known
of those strikes.
Workers during this strike wave start to put forward
candidates to legislatures and to city councils
across Canada.
They paved the way for a series of reforms,
the creation of the new political parties,
the Progressive Party,
many of whom then later became part of the CCF,
which is around today as the NDP,
and so they changed the political landscape
of Canada
as a result of that.
[Strong-Boag] In the 1920s and the 1930s,
women were allowed a short period of independence.
We begin to see in films
and public entertainments
women starting to smoke
and the use of makeup,
and women have a legitimate claim
to some kind of wage labour.
So for the middle class,
it would be professional employments.
Nursing, teaching, a few in medicine.
And you see women
who are working in clerical work,
in factories, the cannery lines.
[Leier] In the 1920s in Canada,
the hot new industries were things like mining,
the auto industry,
hydro-electric projects,
and the logging industry.
After several years of investment
in these new industries,
what became apparent was that we had more capacity
to produce automobiles, pulp and paper, mining,
than we could use or that people could buy.
When that starts to happen,
the price of goods starts to drop.
When prices drop below a profitable level,
businesses shut down.
[Mickleburgh] And the economy just went into the tank.
When it collapsed, it really collapsed.
So when the stock market crashed suddenly,
almost overnight, there was a million unemployed.
They couldn't get work.
And it lasted for 10 years.
[Leier] The Depression was part of the cyclical booms and busts
that we have seen, really,
since capitalism got itself started
in the 1790s.
[Strong-Boag] As economic conditions
become more and more desperate,
what we see is a great deal of hostility
and efforts to drive women out of the labour market.
Because although their wages are lower than men's,
and thus they become more attractive to employers,
men are desperately trying to preserve their opportunities
in the labour market.
[Campbell] There's a fear
that women are taking over the labour force
and taking away jobs from men.
So there's very little aid given to women
throughout the 1930s in Canada.
[Strong-Boag] The assumption is that women, if they're wives,
they should be supported by their husbands,
and if they're daughters,
they should be supported by their fathers,
and that they always have alternatives.
[Campbell] Unemployed single women
don't get access to any relief at all.
They are expected to move back home to their families
or to survive on charity.
Of course, this is an unfair policy
for many reasons.
[Leier] When men started losing their jobs,
they would climb aboard freight trains
to look for work in other towns.
Vancouver was a popular spot
because it was the only city in Canada
where you would starve to death before you froze to death.
[Mickleburgh] And it's the end of the line.
And so Vancouver
became the unemployed capital of Canada,
and these hobo jungles arose in Vancouver.
[Leier] These were small camps of men
who would organize themselves
to create some rudimentary shelter
and to find food.
[Mickleburgh] But the government then became nervous
because there were
all these restless, unemployed, single men
all gathered in Vancouver.
[Leier] It was particularly frightening
to the government
when it realized that many of the men
in these camps
had been veterans of the First World War
and now found themselves without jobs,
without families, without hope.
[Strong-Boag] Some of these men, of course,
had been trained overseas
to use rifles, and guns, and bayonets,
and they're seen to be much more dangerous.
[Mickleburgh] And the authorities got nervous
of all these people being in Vancouver,
thinking there was going to be a revolution.
Now, there's very little attention given
to the female unemployed.
They're not seen to be violent
in the same way that men are to be violent.
So a lot of the public attention is very much informed
by the notion that men are more dangerous
if you don't get them employed.
[Mickleburgh] So they set up work camps
in the Interior of British Columbia.
[Leier] We won't force you into these camps,
but the only relief we will offer you
will be a chance to go into camps
run by the military.
You'll be housed in barracks, given military food,
and you'll be paid about 20 cents a day
on make-work projects.
20 cents a day.
That's what they were given.
They were basically slave camps.
[Leier] The idea was not to perform useful service
but to simply keep people occupied
to wear them out.
So people would literally be asked
to dig holes one day
and fill them in the next.
By 1935, they'd had enough.
And they marched out en masse from many of the camps
and headed to Vancouver.
[Mickleburgh] And their leader was this amazing guy
named Slim Evans,
brilliant and tough as nails.
And he was a really, really good organizer.
And so they would form daily marches.
And there was incidents with these.
Once, they went into the Hudson Bay Company
that exists today,
and started walking through the store.
And somehow, some glass cases got broken
and the police were called.
And then a real scuffle took place.
They came out of the Hudson Bay
and they marched down to Victory Square,
where the cenotaph is today.
And they were ringed by Mounties on horseback,
and it was this tense, uneasy standoff.
And the mayor, Gerry McGeer,
emerged from his office just a couple of doors down,
and read the Riot Act,
which meant you had to disperse, right?
The thing was, basically nobody heard him.
And so what happened
was when word finally circulated,
"Hey, the mayor's reading the Riot Act,"
and they said, "Okay, we'll disperse."
And they just formed up, orderly,
and just marched off.
[Leier] The workers responded to that
by organizing demonstrations the next day,
now protesting the use of the Riot Act.
And they found all kinds of support.
One of the most powerful and evocative pictures of this
is the Mother's Day Protest, at Stanley Park,
where women formed themselves into the shape of a heart,
with signs saying "Abolish the relief camps."
Because when you have
something like a third of the working population
now unemployed,
everyone has a friend, a close relative,
who is affected by this.
So as the unemployed and relief camp workers
are meeting regularly,
the question is, well, what do we do next?
How do we continue the pressure here?
[Mickleburgh] And somebody came up with this idea.
"Let's take this to Ottawa."
And the whole crowd just erupted, "Rah!"
The idea was to take their complaints
right to the prime minister,
and they would do that by riding the rails.
Off they went.
A thousand men, late one night,
clambered up all these boxcars,
headed out into the darkness,
having no idea what lay ahead.
And, of course, the authorities didn't mind.
"Oh my God, they're leaving Vancouver.
This is great."
[Leier] By the time that they got to Kamloops,
crowds were there waiting for them.
Organizers were absolutely surprised.
By the time they got to Golden, BC,
they found people there bringing out bathtubs
and building fires under them
to create massive amounts of stew
to feed these people.
[Mickleburgh] They were hungry.
They were cold.
And here was this hot breakfast awaiting.
And people talked afterwards
that that was the best breakfast they ever had.
More and more people started joining them.
They went into Calgary,
and the authorities tried to stop them
from holding a tin can fundraising.
They did it anyway
and raised this huge amount of money.
[Leier] The On to Ottawa Trek gained momentum.
It doubled in size.
By the time it got to Regina, it was 2,000.
[Mickleburgh] The authorities started to get really nervous,
especially the prime minister, R.B. Bennett,
in Ottawa.
Bennett said, "It's going no further than Regina."
This is where the police decided
they were going to make their move.
[Leier] A number of trucks pulled up around the park.
The back doors of the trucks flew open.
[Mickleburgh] Someone blew a whistle...
[whistle blowing]
and they charged into the crowd with their clubs and so on.
And one of the strikers, who eventually landed on D-Day,
fought for Canada,
he said that's still the most terrifying moment
of his life,
was hearing that whistle,
and then the police just charging in.
And it was mayhem.
[Leier] They used tear gas, night sticks
to beat up the protestors.
So it was smashed by the forces of the state.
[Mickleburgh] It's a terrible, terrible thing
that went on in Regina.
And there's a picture of them heading back to the trains,
back to Vancouver,
and they're all bandaged.
And there's a guy, though, playing the accordion.
It wasn't that long afterwards
that many of them signed up to fight for Canada,
the same country
that had treated them so shabbily
in the 1930s,
when all they wanted was work.
So the Depression really ended with the Second World War
because you can imagine what that did to the economy.
I mean, they had to produce so much for the war effort,
building planes and the ships, and the munitions,
and just everything.
The war had a tremendous impact on the economy
in British Columbia.
And a lot of it was driven by government military spending.
Not only here in Canada,
but our allies across the world
were also expanding their militaries.
And so the markets for our manufactured goods
also began to reappear again
after years of depression.
By the end of 1941, Canada reaches full employment.
There's literally a job for every man and woman
over the age of 16.
And forestry, farming, salmon fishing, mining
all become listed as industrial essential work.
And so when conscription is brought in,
in the summer of 1940 for home defence,
you could gain deferment from that service
if you worked in an essential industry.
And they were all booming in British Columbia
as a result of the wartime demand.
I think one of the most important figures
in British Columbia forestry history
was H.R. MacMillan,
who had created one of the biggest forest companies
in the world.
During World War II,
he was tasked with finding enough Sitka spruce
to build the fighter aircraft.
The Mosquito Bomber,
it was a famous bomber in the Second World War,
and they called it "the Wooden Wonder."
[Sheffield] It was a wooden-framed aircraft.
It's only later in the war
that metal-skeleton planes begin to be used.
But in the early part of the war,
they were still wooden-framed,
and then usually wrapped with lightweight aluminum.
[Forsythe] They had a lot of that Sitka spruce
was harvested up in the Queen Charlottes,
Haida Gwaii region.
The wood was strong.
It was straight.
And one of the fascinating things about it
was that it wouldn't splinter when it was struck by a bullet.
So you can see why it had an essential role
in keeping our pilots alive.
It was an important but little-known aspect
of British Columbia's contribution to the war effort.
[Mickleburgh] Who were the first to enlist
in the Second World War?
These same unemployed guys
that had had their heads beaten in
by the authorities.
And there they are,
volunteering to fight for Canada.
[newsreel] Sons of the Empire have come to Britain
to swell our fighting forces,
a new division to fight the Nazi tyranny.
Welcome, Canada.
[Sheffield] After 10 years of aimlessness,
of just eking out an existence,
the prospect of three square meals a day,
clothes on their back,
a roof over their heads,
and, God forbid, a sense of purpose,
it looked pretty attractive.
Not only that,
but the enlistment here in British Columbia
was very high,
far greater numbers than in 1914,
well in excess of 90,000 men,
and more than 25,000 women.
That's almost 15%
of British Columbia's population enlisted,
almost 50% higher than the national average.
We don't think of British Columbians
as military people.
They didn't always get the same kind of credit
that I think, perhaps,
the Canadian Corps, for instance,
had achieved during the First World War.
But I would argue that their achievements
and their contributions
were as or even greater.
The Seaforth Highlanders regiment,
based out of Vancouver,
fought throughout Italy.
And their most famous battle
was probably the Battle of Ortona in 1943.
They battled their way through this medieval small city
in central Italy.
And it was brutal, difficult, urban fighting.
The German paratroopers
had turned those streets into death zones
with machine guns and mortars.
And the Seaforths had to try and work their way
through the city, house by house,
and then blow their way through into the next.
[mortar exploding]
They worked their way down the street.
Every single officer became a casualty
during this week-long battle.
They did eventually succeed
in driving the paratroopers out of that city,
and in the process
became the kind of acknowledged experts
in urban warfare
amongst the Allied Forces in the Italian Theatre.
[Mickleburgh] So many workers did join the army
and were overseas
that there was a shortage of labour.
So who was available?
Women.
And for the first time, in significant numbers,
women left their homes
and entered the industrial workforce.
[Campbell] And for the first time,
many women are earning salaries
that are much higher than they've ever earned
because they're doing jobs that were considered male jobs.
[Mickleburgh] And they hired lots of women.
And the women worked in the yards.
They put on the overalls, and they were part of the union.
[Campbell] They're learning how to weld.
They're learning how to be a machinist
in a factory.
These were jobs
that were largely protected by unions
for men.
And women take on those jobs,
and they show that they're very capable
of doing that work.
[Strong-Boag] You see women serving
in various roles within the navy
and the air force, and the military,
as well as nurses and doctors.
[Mickleburgh] And, of course, the Second World War ended,
and Johnny came marching home.
And sadly, most of the women were laid off,
just like that.
It was the largest mass layoff of women workers
in the history of Canada.
And it was tough for them,
but it changed the nature of the Canadian workforce,
and it changed the nature of women workers.
[Jonathan Peyton] Thousands of young men
are coming back home
with an expectation
that the privations of their wartime experience
would be rewarded,
that they would begin to have better lives.
[Sheffield] And it's not just that they'd been away at war.
We also have to keep in context the 10 years of depression
before that.
If you served in the Second World War,
you were probably born sometime in the 1920s,
which means you maybe didn't have any memories
prior to the Depression.
You could never remember a time
when home was not a place that was threatened in some way.
And so that search for suburbia, for home security,
was part of that drive.
New subdivisions start to sprout like mushrooms.
Veterans came home with veterans' benefits.
And often their spouse,
who had been working through the war,
had been putting away money.
And so they had nest eggs to buy that house in suburbia,
to buy that car.
[Peyton] People begin to expect to have refrigerators,
for instance,
or washing machines.
People begin to expect to have a car.
People's understanding of consumption changes.
They expect to be more comfortable now.
[Sheffield] And I think probably the baby boom children,
who grew up in the '60s and '70s,
never really understood
their parents' love of the gardens
or the white picket fences
that surrounded those little postwar bungalows.
But that's because they hadn't gone through
those 16 hard years of depression and war,
and had a drive
to find a safe, secure, normal life.
[Koyczan] Striving for a safe, normal life
isn't something that is limited to the people already here.
The dream of a better life possesses a gravity
that has drawn people from elsewhere,
making British Columbia
one of the most diverse provinces
in Canada.
Unfortunately, that same diversity
has also led to inequality and conflict
between people of different backgrounds.
The story of British Columbia continues
with the immigrant experience.
[♪♪]