On Thursday November 23, the Vancouver Historical Society hosts a lecture by Kate Bird on Vancouver's history of protests, riots, and strikes. The talk is at 7:30pm at the Museum of Vancouver. All are welcome and entrance is by donation. By Eve Lazarus.
Residents and sympathizers picketed on September 28, 1975, in the 2500 block of East Pender to protest a land assembly housing development and to demand an anti-blockbusting bylaw. Photo courtesy Peter Hulbert/Province.
On June 14, 1994, I started my afternoon shift in Surrey. My assignment for the Vancouver Sun was to wait until the end of the Stanley Cup final between the New York Rangers and the Canucks, catch the SkyTrain downtown, and report on what happened.
I crammed into a car with dozens of others who were openly drinking and yelling. The mood was intense. When we got out at Granville, the crowd flowed down the street, breaking the windows of the Bay and looting anything they could carry, including headless mannequins. Everyone drifted towards the epicenter at Robson and Burrard Streets. Later, the riot police circled the crowd firing canisters of tear gas, but neglected to leave an escape route.
Housing and Urban Development Report Protest, 1969.
Kate Bird’s latest book City on Edge: A rebellious century of Vancouver protests, riots, and strikes, brought all that back to me with one powerful newspaper photo. I would be surprised if anyone who has lived in this city for any length of time doesn’t feel a similar connection to this book.
For Kate, who moved to Vancouver from Montreal in the ‘70s, the connection was to the peace marches, solidarity, and the environment.
Kate helped manage the vast hard copy and digital photograph collection at the Vancouver Sun and The Province. Her book Vancouver in the Seventies: Photos From a Decade That Changed the City, was nominated for a 2016 British Columbia Historical Writing Award.
Selecting photos for City on Edge was a combination of events that she had researched in the past and great photos that needed more research.
Photo credit: Ralph Bower/Vancouver Sun.
“When I looked at all these images that I collected, I found some themes running through them,” she says. “Labour of course and anti-government, but also indigenous protests, social justice issues, the environment and hooliganism and riots.”
You might be surprised to learn that housing is a perpetual Vancouver problem. Themes such as affordable housing, evictions for luxury condos, homelessness, and land assembly run through almost every decade of the book.
But some things are better.
“Some people think we are still protesting over the same thing, but of course lots of things have changed. Things have improved for women, for LGBTQ and for labour.”
Vancouver, though does seem to have more than its share of protests, says Kate.
Photo credit: John Denniston/Province.
“Early in the 1900s, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) came up and got a real foothold here in the resource industries. In the ‘60s there were draft dodgers from the US and a lot of them stayed and got jobs at SFU and UBC as professors and got involved in politics. There was way more influence from the west coast than from eastern Canada.”
Kate is already working on her next book. This time she’ll be looking at Vancouver’s sports history. An exhibition at the Museum of Vancouver, based on Kate’s work will run until February 18, 2018.
The Vancouver Historical Society invites everyone to attend our monthly talks. Admission for non-members is by donation. Talks are held at the Museum of Vancouver, 1100 Chestnut Street (Vanier Park) at 7:30pm on the fourth Thursday of every month, except June, July, August and December. Learn more.
