1940 was a nervously busy year in wartime Greater Vancouver. Local shipyards were building corvettes and minesweepers for action in the Atlantic, and converting passenger ships for wartime use. (One converted cruise ship, the Prince Robert, promptly went into service in 1940, seizing a German freighter off the coast of Mexico and bringing her to Esquimalt as a prize of war.) …
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A tiny spot in Stanley Park has a long and pleasant history. Native people had been passing by for centuries, but around 1860 the Royal Engineers made a small clearing there for a survey post. A fellow named Johnny Baker, who’d married a local native girl, built a shack in the clearing and moved in with his family. He made the clearing larger, put in a little garden and started keeping pigs. …
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Chances are good that if you work in downtown Vancouver, or attend a performance at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, or take in a Lions game at BC Place, or settle down to read at the Vancouver Public Library, you’re being warmed by the folks at Central Heat Distribution. …
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On December 4, 1972 the minimum wage for adults in British Columbia was set at $2 an hour, the highest in Canada.
Economic doom was predicted, especially when the NDP government promised a further boost to $2.50 an hour by mid-1974. Even more alarming, the new bill applied for the first time to women as well as men.
Not too much information is available about the early years of the settlement of Vancouver…
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