New digs for the Maritime Museum of B.C.?
As of this month it’s reported that the Maritime Museum of B.C. is hoping to have new and permanent waterfront quarters in time for the 150th anniversary of B.C. joining Confederation.
Evicted from its longtime home in the old provincial court house in Victoria’s Bastion Square in 2015, it has had to make-do with a paltry 3000 square feet of display space in Nootka Court on Humboldt Street.
Meaning that the bulk of its fantastic collection of artifacts is in storage and unable to be shown.
What a sad commentary that it has been up to volunteers to carry the ball over the years for an institution that should always have been fully funded by various levels of government.
Victoria and B.C.’s maritime heritage is nothing less than phenomenal and deserves telling to the present and future generations. Much of the province has been built through maritime commerce and the tales of wooden ships and iron men haven’t lose meaning through the ages; in fact, they’re a source of inspiration to those who are familiar with them.
Our marine history must be told and to do that requires a B.C. Maritime Museum big enough and equipped enough to tell that story for all time.
Here’s hoping that we don’t have to wait until 2021 for a new B.C. Maritime Museum.
Vancouver Island’s Last Logging Railway is No More
In November 2017 Western Forest Products announced the closure of its Englewood logging train, the last logging railway operation on Vancouver Island and the last of it kind on the entire B.C. coast.
Until trucks began to take over from the 1920s on, railways predominated in the woods; thousands of miles of track, much of it narrow gauge, criss-crossed the Island’s forests. The steam locomotives and the men who operated them became legendary and several of the locies have survived as museum pieces in various Island communities.
In fact, Duncan’s B.C. Forest Discovery Centre has made itself a destination excursion park for railway buffs—and particularly for children—who want to ride a real steam train. The special Easter and Christmas rides are sell-outs.
For Western Forest Products, based in Woss, about 75km from Port McNeill on northern Vancouver Island, it marked the end of an era; the decision to shut down came less than a year after a fatal derailment killed three workers and injured two more.
For WFP, moving logs by trucks was a business decision; for those who love trains it was tragedy compounded.
The 90 km logging railway had operated for a century, 1917-2017. It had never been a large operation; even at its peak it employed only 34 of a total company payroll of 3500 workers and contractors (some of them second and third generation) but it was a regional institution and a community lifeline.
In April it was reported that WFP and the Regional District of Mount Waddington were working to “mend fences”. A bone of contention between the two organizations was the closure of the Englewood logging train.
This had resulted in loss of employment in an area where few other job opportunities presented themselves for middle-aged workers. WFP promised to reinstate a five-day work week.
But no train.
Vancouver Apologizes to its Chinese Residents
The latest in a growing list of public mea culpas is the City of Vancouver’s formal acknowledgement of and apology for the sins of discriminatory laws and practices of past councils. (The City of New Westminster did so in 2010, the province of B.C. in 2015.)
There’s no denying that the treatment of B.C.’s ethnic minorities, primarily the Chinese as they were the most populous, was abominable. To read about the racial prejudices of our mostly British pioneers is nothing less than depressing.
In fact, it’s within living memory that Chinese Canadians were given the right to vote in B.C. Even then, the City of Vancouver barred them from civic employment for a further four years.
Discriminatory bylaws, support of the federal government’s infamous head tax, and segregation of public institutions such as swimming pools (and schools, originally) are just some of the many sins committed against these industrious and inoffensive pioners.
The reading of the apology, in two Chinese dialects, by two former councillors of Chinese descent attracted an audience of more than 500 people.
All of the above noted apologies followed that of the federal government in 2006 when families or surviving immigrants who’d paid the head tax were offered $20,000 in compensation.
For those who would argue, enough already, I counter that an apology is small enough acknowledgement of a century of racial discrimination that is a blot on our provincial heritage.
Pioneer Black Painter Grafton Tyler Brown Is In the News
Last month, too, it was reported that the Royal B.C. Museum had purchased a painting of Giant’s Castle Mountain, Enderby, B.C. for $44,000.
The RBC already has other Brown paintings but considers this one, dated 1882, to be the most significant. (Brown, an American artist born in 1843, is known to have painted 11 Canadian scenes.)
“We hope that the painting’s subject matter and history will lead to significant, perhaps challenging, conversations about the history of settlers in B.C., including immigrants like Brown,” the museum’s CEO Jack Lohman told the Times-Colonist.
The son of freed slaves, Grafton Tyler Brown pursued painting on the side while working as a hotel steward and porter. In San Francisco he found more suitable employment as an artist for a printing company that sent him around the country, drawing panoramic views that were converted into lithographs for wide distribution.
Upon his employer’s death in 1864, Brown took over the company and soon found himself producing colour labels for a B.C. salmon cannery.
By 1882, he was living in Victoria, had a studio in the Occidental Hotel and was painting and selling landscapes of B.C. Interior locales that he came to view personally by accompanying a geological survey party. The quality of his local works—the Gorge, Victoria and Esquimalt Harbours and Mount Baker confirmed Grafton Tyler Brown’s stature, to quote the British Colonist, “as an artist of more than local celebrity in California and elsewhere”.
Brown returned to the U.S. in 1884, first to Portland, Ore., then to St. Paul, Minn., and died in 1918.
It’s interesting to note that Grafton Tyler Brown was considered to be only half-black (mulato) when in California and white when he lived in Victoria!
Coal Mines Still Kill
Wouldn’t you think that by now they would have all but eliminated dangers above and below ground for coal miners?
For 90 years coal mining was the backbone of the Vancouver Island economy; it founded 10 Island communities; it killed almost 1000 men. How many more it maimed, how many families it devastated, who knows?
But that was back then. Today?
As recently as January, an explosion rocked a Teck Resources Ltd. coal drying plant at the Elkview Mine near Sparwood. Okay, accidents happen. But this wasn’t the first such mishap, according to the president of the United Steelworkers Local 9346; it was the third incident in a year.
Fortunately, there were no injuries.
In an industry that is still remembered for its appalling and unsafe working conditions of the past, one would think that safety would trump production every time.
Unless you’re a coal miner in West Virginia, it seems. In December, The Associated Press reported that federal mining regulators, at the urging of the Trump government, were “reconsidering rules to protect underground miners from breathing coal and rock dust…”
The breathing and resulting respiratory damage of coal dust, if you’re not familiar with the term, is called ‘black lung,’ and it has killed—slowly and painfully—many a miner in Canada and the U.S. over the past 200-odd years.
But imposing and maintaining safety standards, of course, costs time in production and revenue; it affects the bottom line. Hence the Mine Safety and Health Administration was reportedly seeking public input on whether mining safety standards “could be improved or made more effective or less burdensome by accommodating advances in technology, innovative techniques, or less costly methods”.
That means “less burdensome” to the corporate bottom line, of course.
Among the regulations that could be “streamlined or replaced in frequency” was that applying to coal and rock dust. The MSHA obviously was taking its cue from Washington because the Trump administration had expressed its unhappiness with federal pollution regulations that had “depressed the coal industry”.
Shades of the ‘old days’ when mine owners were allowed to deliberately cut costs at the expense of the safety of their workers.
Do we ever learn from history?
