Beacon Hill Park is a sprawling 183-acre park, a short walk from Victoria’s downtown core. With views across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Olympic mountains, a rare Garry oak ecosystem, and meandering paths through camas meadows, it is considered the crowning jewel of the city’s park system. Since March 2020, it has also been the site of a protracted struggle between the city’s housed and unhoused communities, a fight that recently reached the Supreme Court of BC.

At the start of the pandemic, shelters and social services shut down, leaving an estimated 465 people to fend for themselves. In response, the City of Victoria temporarily suspended its bylaw prohibiting overnight camping. Then, through a series of police enforcements, the city pushed people from the highly visible downtown core into Beacon Hill Park.

In a never-ending game of not-in-my-backyard, the non-profit society Friends of Beacon Hill Park filed a lawsuit against the city, arguing that overnight sheltering is a violation of the 1882 Trust that governs the park.

One of the city’s co-defendants, Together Against Poverty Society, reminded the court that access to shelter is guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and that bans against overnight sheltering are illegal.1

But, the judge chose to ignore the question of Charter rights, saying that the “proceeding is not a challenge to the Trust’s legality, on constitutional or any other grounds.” Instead, the debate was confined to an interpretation of the Trust, and the judge agreed with the Friends of Beacon Hill Park that it “does not permit use of the Park for temporary sheltering by persons experiencing homelessness.”

His decision hinged on one particular line — that the park must be maintained and preserved “for the use recreation and enjoyment of the public.”

Essentially, the debate was: does emergency sheltering count as one of the public uses intended by the original authors of the Trust? In framing the debate this way, the court ignored a much more interesting and telling question: Who is the public, and whose use, recreation, and enjoyment are we maintaining and preserving?

With that question in mind, I want to explore the history of Beacon Hill and place the court’s decision within a larger historical context. Because I think the story of Beacon Hill reveals a much larger story, a story about Victoria, and about Canada as a whole.

MEEGAN

Before Europeans arrived, Beacon Hill Park was known by a different name — MEEGAN, a Lekwungen word roughly translated as “a place to warm your belly”. The result of careful land management over countless generations, the landscape was a productive food garden and one of the continent’s most densely populated areas. To this day, the meadows are filled with the purple flowers of kwetlal (camas) - the starchy root was, and continues to be, cultivated and valued as a food source unique to the region’s rare Gary oak ecosystem. Before extensive dredging and blasting that started in 1873, the inner harbour was a large mudflat and one of the most productive clam gardens on the coast. To the north, the Gorge Waterway was host to abundant seasonal runs of herring and Coho salmon.

Lekwungen laws and protocol worked to maintain a lush, cultivated landscape abundant with food, as an early colonist, James Bell observed:

“we are indebted to the Indians for a supply of everything in season …at very reasonable rates; They collect great quantities of Berries,…For a back load of Potatoes they charge one shilling; these they cultivate by simply burying the seed under the green turf; A fine salmon can also be purchased for one shilling; …Cod, Herrings, Flounders &c are always to be had cheap; A large Basket of Oysters one shilling; The market is also supplied with plenty of venison, Deer are quite plentiful, until the arrival of the American Hunters”

MEEGAN began to change dramatically when the entire Victoria area was “bought” in 1850 by James Douglas, the first Governor of the Colony of British Columbia. No money was ever exchanged in the purchase, as Douglas explains, “They were paid in goods, mostly blankets, from the Fort Victoria stores and the value to the Indians included a markup of approximately 300 per cent.”

With different cultural understandings of property and ownership, and negotiating terms through a language barrier, the Lekwengun people interpreted the treaty as a peace offering and an agreement to share the land. In 1934, Songhees Chief Davit Latass was clear that “never, never did the Indians sign away title to their land for just a few blankets.” In 2000, Songhees Chief Robert Sam reiterated that,

“This land, we did not forfeit to anyone. A treaty was signed for 147 Hudson’s Bay blankets for borrowing this land. The blankets that were shared with the Lekwammen Nation have long since disintegrated. We have never sold our land.”

Still, shortly after signing the treaty, MEEGAN was cleared, and the Lekwungen people were forced across the harbour to the newly established Songhees Reserve.

With little oversight from a distant colonial administration in Britain, Douglas was able to divvy up and sell the newly acquired Lekwungen lands as he saw fit. In 1850, Douglas had the property lines for Beacon Hill Park surveyed. The same year, he bought 300 acres of productive agricultural land along the park’s eastern boundary, which, in 1852, was expanded to 418 acres and another 24-acre parcel on the northwest corner of the park. Douglas wasn’t secretive about his intentions, as he wrote in a letter to a friend: “I am thinking of making a purchase of land on Vancouver’s Island…more as a speculation than with any serious intentions of settling.” The colony’s surveyor, Joseph Pemberton, confirms in a letter that “it was Sir James Douglas who made us rich by insisting upon our taking up land.”

It’s hard to escape the idea that, from its earliest inception, a primary function of Beacon Hill Park was to inflate nearby land values and make a few men rich.

To fast-forward to the present, what followed was years of gradual transformation of MEEGAN into a European-style park. Burial cairns were dug up, the Indigenous bones underneath collected and displayed as curiosities in fashionable Victorian homes. Familiar plants from England, like “cowslips and primroses and hawthorn hedges and all the Englishy flowers”, were planted and crowded out the native flora. As the city grew, the Songhees Reserve land became more valuable. The British Colonist published opinions, wondering:

“how much longer are we to be inflicted with the intolerable nuisance of having hundreds upon hundreds of hideous half-naked, drunken savages in our midst?”

In 1911, the reserve was moved even farther from the downtown core, to where it stands now in Esquimalt. On the forced relocation of the Lekwungen people, Douglas wrote that “the Town of Victoria will not be retarded by their unprofitable occupation of one of the most valuable portions”. Treaty rights stating that the Lekwungen could continue hunting, fishing, and food gathering forever were effectively denied, and traditional land management was criminalised. The criminalisation continues to this day — Songhees traditional knowledge holder, Cheryl Bryce, has shared how police have been repeatedly called on her for harvesting kwetlal at MEEGAN.

With the Indigenous presence effectively erased, or at least controlled, the enforcement of who is allowed to use the park shifted to a new class of interloper - “squatters and paupers.” Or, in modern terms, the unhoused.

the war on homeless people

My involvement with and interest in MEEGAN started around March 2020. Hundreds of people had been kicked out of shelters, pushed from the streets, and forced to shelter in the park. It quickly became clear that the city had no plan for how it was going to provide them with even basic services.

Into this vacuum stepped some of the most impressive and inspiring examples of mutual aid I’ve witnessed. Homeless campers looked after each other and organised weekly meetings. A care tent was established and run by volunteers to stock donations of sleeping bags, tents, first-aid kits, naloxone, and other survival supplies. A warming tent gave space for people to warm up and dry their clothes. With no hygiene facilities available, the community fundraised over $10,000 to build DIY portable shower stalls.

But the city wasn’t stoked. Instead of celebrating the community’s achievements, they gave notice that we were in violation of its bylaws.

By late fall, a team of roughly thirty police and bylaw officers showed up to impound the community care tent and shower stalls. Eventually, the care tent was given a temporary permit to operate nearby, outside of the park — but the community was left without a warming tent for weeks in the middle of winter, and countless donations and personal belongings were sent to the landfill by city staff. Despite our insistence that “the denial of access to water and sanitation by governments constitutes cruel and inhumane treatment, and is prohibited under international human rights law,” the city provided no alternative access to showers or hygiene facilities.

Which brings us back to the question,

who is the public?

The history of MEEGAN makes clear who isn’t considered the public - Indigenous people and the unhoused. But I’d like to take it one step further and suggest that I, and likely you, are also not members of the public whose rights the courts will defend.

The public is, and always has been, landowners and the wealthy.

Yet, over sixty per cent of us in Victoria are renters. With stagnant wages, high inflation, low vacancy, and runaway housing prices, the majority of us have more in common with the homeless campers at MEEGAN than with homeowners fighting tooth and nail for their property values.

1. I wrote that city council is considering significant service cuts, including closing the pool and reducing bus service. While the cuts were proposed by city staff (as possibilities to reduce tax increases) in the Draft 1 Financial Plan, they were never proposed or adopted by council.

2. I wrote that the city will dip into its reserve funds. While the city will dip into its reserve funds in the short term to smooth tax increases, the five-year plan sees a reduction in the city’s contributions to its reserve funds, rather than reducing the overall balance of the funds.

Still, the city’s long-term financial plan is unsustainable. As the most recent Draft 2 Financial Plan says, “the use of reserves and reductions in reserve transfers should not be considered as long-term solution for addressing revenue shortfalls. Ongoing taxation, other revenue sources and/or permanent cuts in expenses are needed to pay for ongoing financial impacts such as the Mill and the RCMP Contract over the longer term.”

Thank you for the feedback, dear blog readers. I try to be as accurate as possible, and welcome corrections

Like a lot of forestry towns, the City of Powell River is having money problems.

For over a century, British Columbia has been cutting down trees faster than they can grow back. Now, mills across the province keep closing. For the communities that depend on them, it’s an existential crisis. In 2021, when Powell River’s tiskʷat paper mill closed, the city lost over two hundred good-paying union jobs (already down from 2,600 jobs during its peak in the 70s) and over $3.8 million in annual tax revenue.

On top of that, the cost of running a city keeps growing. Powell River’s draft 2026-2030 Financial Plan paints a depressing picture of rising costs and shrinking revenues. A new collective agreement between the city and unionised staff accounts for a ten per cent increase to its operating budget. General inflation, another two per cent. The library is asking for a seven per cent increase.

It’s not just inflation. A lot of the city’s infrastructure was built back in the mill’s glory days, when money was easy and Powell River was one of the wealthiest municipalities in Canada. It’s starting to crumble. The rec complex, built in 1975, is nearing its end of life. The pool is in desperate need of a new roof, expected to cost $7 million. Pool staff and programming alone cost the city nearly a million dollars each year. Maintaining roads and transportation infrastructure, another $9 million.

Cops are getting more expensive, too. Historically, Powell River has only been responsible for seventy per cent ($2.4 million) of the local RCMP’s operating budget, and the federal government covers the rest. But, once the population hits fifteen thousand (which is expected in this year’s census), the city will be on the hook to cover ninety per cent. By 2027, the RCMP will cost Powell River $5 million annually.

Most urgently, we really need more housing. For years, the rental vacancy rate has been stuck below two per cent, allowing landlords to inflate rents. We’ve got homeless camps for the first time in generations. According to the city’s 2024 housing needs report, we need to build 1,771 new affordable housing units in the next fifteen years. There’s no shortage for rich people. Capitalism is doing its thing, and we’ve already “achieved 5-year and 20-year housing needs for market-rate rental housing and [are] on track to see sufficient construction of for-purchase homes for above-moderate and high-income households.”

It’s the working class, seniors, and people with disabilities who are left in the lurch. Their housing isn’t profitable enough for private developers. As the city’s report says, building affordable housing will “require substantial significant investment from senior levels of government.”

The problem is, senior levels of government aren’t doing much these days. They’ve been red-pilled by austerity. In its most recent budget, the Province permanently ended its Community Housing Fund, a $3.3‑billion program intended to help municipalities build affordable rental housing. The federal government is doing the same thing. Despite Carney’s big talk on housing, a recent Parliamentary Budget Officer report found the “Federal planned spending on housing programs is set to decline 56 per cent, from $9.8 billion in 2025-26 to $4.3 billion in 2028-29”

If we keep waiting for senior levels of government to meet our housing needs, we’ll be waiting a long time. As a 2024 report by the Union of BC Municipalities called “stretched to the limit” explains:

“Local governments are providing more and more public services in areas of provincial responsibility without a corresponding growth in revenue. They are increasingly stepping up to meet the needs of a growing population by filling gaps in provincial services while implementing costly new legislative requirements… Local governments require new revenue streams to address the gaps in provincial services, and to continue to support the Province in tackling the most pressing issues facing our communities: housing supply and homelessness, public safety, infrastructure deficits, and climate resiliency.”

history offers a solution

It’s important to recognise that the housing crisis isn’t new.

In fact, the political struggle over housing is so old that Dr Ricardo Tranjan, a Canadian economist, has argued there is no housing crisis. A crisis implies something unexpected or undesirable. But real estate speculation and landlordism are neither unexpected nor undesirable. They’re the foundation of our economy. Real estate, rentals, and leasing contribute over $56 billion annually to the provincial GDP - more than three times as much as mining, oil and gas, agriculture, and forestry combined.

The only people the system doesn’t work for are renters. In Tranjan’s words, “a housing system that serves all but one group is not in a state of crisis; it is one based on structural inequality and economic exploitation.”

British Columbia inherited its system of for-profit housing from Britain. The word landlord comes from the Old English landhlāford, a legal concept that dates back to the feudal system. Working-class Brits have been fighting against it for centuries. If we want to understand our alternatives, there’s no better place to look.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Britain’s situation wasn’t so different from ours today. It was the tail end of the Industrial Revolution, an era of inequality and economic stagnation — a country of Tiny Tims and Ebenezer Scrooges. Cities were flooded with poorly paid workers, and it was hard to find a decent place to rent. Landlords were price-gouging and making fistfuls of money.

Working people didn’t like being exploited. William Morris, the man behind the Arts and Crafts Movement, founded London’s Socialist League in 1885. Renters formed Tenant Defence Leagues. They organised rent strikes and demonstrations, and barricaded city streets to keep the cops out and save their neighbours from eviction.

Eventually, resistance coalesced into an organised political movement – municipal socialism. Shelton Stromquist’s recently published book, Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism, gives a detailed account of how “urban workers invented a local politics that promised to democratize cities they might themselves govern and reclaim the wealth they created.”

One of the big goals of municipal socialism was to build democratically run, city-owned housing. In Britain, it’s called council housing. By 1914, it made up a modest one per cent of Britain’s housing.

But demand for affordable housing was unrelenting and, slowly, more and more housing came under municipal ownership. By 1938, council housing made up ten per cent of Britain’s housing stock. At the end of World War II, it really took off. By 1979, council homes were the majority of all rental housing. A quarter of Britain’s population lived in over five million publicly-owned homes. Rent was affordable.

The story of what happened to council housing in the years since and why Britain is in a housing crisis again would be a long tangent. Basically, it was sold off to private owners. If you’re curious, check out this BBC documentary: The Rise and Fall of the Council House.

The point I’m trying to make is:

the City of Powell River can and should build council housing

It’s not that crazy of an idea. Britain has been doing it for over a century. Recently, Vancouver started dabbling too. In 2024, the city approved a new policy, Rental Housing on City-Owned Land - Public Benefits Pilot Rezoning Policy.

To be clear, it’s only a partial step toward true council housing. In classic Vancouver fashion, the city is still trying to extract as much profit from tenants as possible. All six of the city’s proposed developments will be 100% market-rate rentals. None of the units will be affordable. My favourite politician and fellow history nerd, Vancouver city councillor Sean Orr, has spoken against it, saying:

“I have serious concerns that this is using a corporate vehicle to deliver market rental and generate returns rather than focusing on permanently affordable non-market public and cooperative housing, which our community urgently needs. This is intention without direction. Housing is a human right, and it cannot be simply seen as a business venture or revenue stream.… I heard reference that this is like Vienna. This isn’t Vienna. Vienna was socialism. This is neoliberalism. This is London. This is New York. This is enclosure of the commons.”

Still, Vancouver proves that city-owned rental housing is possible.

Powell River could do better. By building affordable city-owned rental housing, we could create a new municipal revenue stream and ease the housing crisis.

Quick thought experiment: if the city built 1,771 units of affordable housing (the amount we need) and rented them out at an average of $972/month (the amount considered deeply affordable), it would bring the city over $20 million in annual revenue. That’s five times as much as the mill paid in taxes.

Of course, building that much housing is expensive. But our city has a lot going for it.

For starters, the city doesn’t need to buy land. It already owns lots - one hundred and forty-seven properties totalling nearly fifteen hundred acres, to be exact. Many of them are just sitting vacant and unused. Some could be sold off to finance the development of others.

The city has other advantages. It can streamline permitting and waive development charges. It could probably still wrangle a grant or two from the Province. Also, it still has money in the bank.

We don’t need to keep homeowners’ taxes artificially low. Homeowners can afford to pay more property tax. There’s a telling statistic buried in the city’s housing needs report – a whopping one in three renters are spending thirty per cent or more of their income on housing each month. For homeowners, it’s only one in twenty.

Aside from property taxes, there are other ways the city can raise funds. For example, it could tax parking. That’s how Vancouver funds its bus service and incentivises efficient land use. As a bonus, an absurd amount of the parking in our town is owned by Jimmy Pattison, the richest man in BC. He can afford to pitch in a bit.

in conclusion,

Powell River is in a tough spot. The mill is gone, there isn’t enough housing, and things keep getting more expensive.

But the city still has savings, property, assets, and taxable wealth.

We have a choice. We can keep property taxes low, cut services, and slowly dwindle our savings. Maybe in a few years, the Province will have money again and will finally build us the affordable housing we need. Maybe a data centre will move into the old mill site, create hundreds of jobs, and generate millions of dollars in revenue for the city. Maybe the old-growth forests will grow back.

Or, we could accept that the status quo doesn’t work anymore. We could stop waiting for senior levels of government to solve our problems and start doing things for ourselves. I can’t think of a better strategy than investing in affordable, city-owned rental housing.

Instead of paying someone else’s mortgage, tenants could help keep the pool open, buses running, and the library operating. Minimum wage workers, seniors, and people with disabilities could have stable and dignified housing.

With a bit of confidence and vision, Powell River could continue being one of the most affordable and attractive places to live on the West Coast.

Understandably, some people are uncomfortable with the city’s name. After all, Powell was a die-hard assimilationist, a supporter of BC’s residential school system, and a notorious thief of Indigenous ceremonial and sacred belongings.

So it wasn’t too surprising when, back in 2021, Tla’amin Nation formally asked the City of Powell River to change its name.

Still, locally, it was a big deal. It quickly turned into a fight over history and how we understand it.

A group formed to resist the name change, calling themselves the Concerned Citizens. They felt they were being made ashamed of their heritage. A rival group, The Name Matters, was formed to educate people about colonization and advocate for inclusive place names.

With battle lines drawn and two sides entrenched in their positions, the name change decision became a political hot potato, hucked further and further down the road. The city hired consultants and organised public engagement meetings. But nothing really happened. After a few years of inaction, the issue seemed to slowly fizzle out. People’s focus moved on to other issues facing our community.

Until recently.

At a meeting on February 5, the mayor revived the issue with a seemingly innocuous proposal that “Council postpone any further action regarding the request to change the name of the City of Powell River” until a new council is elected.

The crowd that showed up for the meeting was inexplicably fired up and ignored multiple calls for order. Their disruptions continued until the mayor ordered the RCMP to kick them out. Still, they refused to leave. Council was forced to move their meeting to a private room, only allowing the public to watch via livestream.

For some reason, the dial on public discourse in this town has been cranked all the way up to eleven. Senior citizens are flirting with civil disobedience, yelling at city councillors, and spamming social media with personal attacks. They’re convinced this is their Tiananmen Square.

how did shit get so weird?

A few years ago, the grievance-media machine caught wind of the controversy around Powell River’s possible name change. It has all the elements of a good story, or at least the kind that seems to resonate well with a certain demographic. Indigenous overreach, woke authoritarianism, wasted tax dollars…

So, fishing for engagement, shoddy journalists started chumming the already muddy waters with more and more inflammatory content.

Frances Widdowson, a former professor at Calgary’s Mount Royal University who was fired for harassing her colleagues, published a YouTube documentary called WHAT REMAINS: Exposing the Kamloops Mass Grave Deception’s Impact on Powell River. Juno News, founded by Candice Malcolm and white supremacist Keean Bexte, published articles like Powell River’s nasty name change debate and reconciliation used to bypass local democracy. C2C Journal published a weighty thinkpiece, Collaboration No More: How the Powell River, B.C. Name-Change Debate Turned Nasty. Rebel News wrote a revisionary hagiography of Ted Vizzutti — an elderly paramedic fired for his racist Facebook posts — called, hometown hero called racist and cancelled from paramedic duties after advocating to save Powell River’s name.

Somewhere along the line, the name change debate stopped being a local issue.

Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms

The third time the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) got involved, I started thinking to myself – someone’s got to be funding this.1 JCCF is a Calgary-based legal advocacy group founded and run by John Carpay, a former lawyer who was disbarred in both Manitoba and Alberta for spying on a judge back in 2021.

Their first time dabbling in Powell River politics was in June 2024, when Diane Sparks (a local realtor) booked a library space to host an anti-name-change event. The library hesitated, saying they would need consent from city council before confirming her booking. Suspicious that the library might be considering cancelling Sparks’ booking, the JCCF sent the chief librarian a warning, “urging the Library to respect citizens’ Charter rights.”

The library allowed the event to go ahead.

Two months later, JCCF followed up with a strange, exhaustive fifty-six-page legal letter to the city.

It was a serious escalation, accusing council members of silencing dissent and violating citizens’ Charter rights. It claims “that Council appears to have largely lost its legal jurisdiction in connection with the name change.” Amazingly, it claims that four of Powell River’s six councillors are “irredeemably biased” and “must recuse themselves from further debate and decision-making in connection with the name change.”

Last week, JCCF sent another letter to the city, reiterating its demand that “council fundamentally alter the manner in which it is approaching the Tla’amin Nation’s demanded name change.”

The thing about lawyers is, even if they’re ineffectual, they’re still expensive.

who’s paying?

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is a registered charity, funded by private donations. They’ve got eight full-time staff, an annual operating budget of over $5 million, and received over $2.3 million in donations in 2024 alone.

The Canada Revenue Agency doesn’t require charities to disclose where their funding comes from. So, unless they get audited, it’s next to impossible to figure out who’s donating to the Justice Centre. But there are clues. JCCF has disclosed to the CRA that it received donations valued at $10,000 or more from donors outside of Canada. At least some of that (and likely more) is coming from the American-based think tank that creates think tanks - the Atlas Network.

It’s something they try to keep on the down low. For a long time, the JCCF was listed on the Atlas Network’s website as one of their “Global Partners.” It’s since been removed. One of their former directors, Marco Navarro-Génie, is a former Atlas employee. Carpay himself admitted back in 2015 that, “we have a small annual grant from Atlas.”

the Atlas Network

The Atlas Network was founded in 1981 by Antony Fisher. Born in 1915 to a wealthy coal mining family, he grew his family fortune into next-level riches when he introduced battery cage poultry farming to England.

By cramming chickens into tiny cages, he managed to eliminate wasteful behaviours like wing flapping, dust bathing, and foraging. Feed needs went down twenty-five percent. Floor space by seventy percent. Fisher started raking it in. His competition, still practicing traditional free-range farming, had to hop on board with the new way of doing things or go belly up.

Things went well for Fisher until the Second World War shook things up. He started getting nervous about the emerging post-war consensus that favoured strong unions, heavy regulation, and high taxes. It went against his values and threatened his growing profits. So, he tried to change society’s mind. He started pumping his considerable wealth into free-market, small-government propaganda.

In 1955, he founded the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. In 1974, he founded the Fraser Institute in Vancouver. By the time he was an old man, Fisher had a dozen think tanks to his name, spreading his neoliberal gospel around the world. In 1981, he created the Atlas Network in San Francisco to connect them all into a coordinated, international network.

a not-so-shadowy cabal

In Powell River, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is just the tip of the Atlas iceberg. Once you know to look for it, it’s hard not to notice their grubby little fingers tugging away at every loose thread in the city’s fraying political fabric.

Dr. Frances Widdowson, a well-educated political scientist, has emerged as a leading voice against the city’s name change. Since getting fired, she’s been on a crusade against wokeism and what she calls the Aboriginal Industry. Her essay in the influential and controversial book, Grave Error, was published by True North. She gets legal support from JCCF, documentaries produced by Juno News, and articles published by the C2C journal.

All of which are connected to the Atlas Network.

The C2C journal is a partner in the Canada Strong & Free Network (formerly the Manning Centre), a think tank founded by Preston Manning. Readers might remember Manning as the founder of the Calgary-based Reform Party, an anti-establishment populist party focused on Western alienation. Manning’s stated goal is the creation of a coalition corridor. He’s orchestrating a “co-ordinated response from governments, companies and Canadians” to get pipelines built from the Pacific to the Atlantic to the Arctic.

Gwyn Morgan, named “the most powerful man in Canada’s oil patch” by Maclean’s magazine, sits on the journal’s board. Their editor-in-chief, George Koch, used to work as a speechwriter for Alberta’s Minister of Energy. Significantly, the Canada Strong & Free Network lists the Atlas Network as partners on their website.

Juno News (formerly the True North Centre for Public Policy) is a Calgary-based charity, founded by Candice Malcolm. Before founding Juno News, Malcolm spent eleven years working at the Washington DC based Center for a Secure Free Society, a branch of the Atlas Network. Notably, oil tycoon Gwyn Morgan also sits on the board and has donated at least half-a-million dollars of his own money to the organisation.

The Canadian Taxpayer Federation is another member of the Atlas Network that’s active locally. Most prominently, it helped launch Aaron Gunn’s career - promoting him to executive director of their Generation Screwed campaign in 2013, where he taught students about the wonders of deregulation and organised youth leadership retreats with the Manning Centre in Calgary.

John Carpay, founder and president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, spent four years as the Alberta director of the Taxpayer Federation. He’s a great example of how permeable boundaries are at the Atlas Network. He’s a member of the Canada Strong & Free Network, a regular contributor to the Fraser Institute, the C2C journal, Juno News, and a former candidate for Manning’s Reform Party.

The Atlas Network, the big boys behind it all, have a long list of powerful backers that you can read about here. To summarise, it’s all the usual suspects: fossil fuel magnates, finance bros, hedge fund managers, and big tobacco. Prominent donors include Exxon Mobil, Philip Morris, and the Koch family.

So, we have an idea of who is funding the name change hysteria. But why do American billionaires and Alberta oil executives want to get people in Powell River riled up about what we call our town? What do they gain by fracturing our community?

Wexit and the BC Prosperity Project

The Atlas Network isn’t secretive about what it wants. Limited government and unregulated industry. They dream of a world where corporations can do what they like, unencumbered by Indigenous rights, labour laws, or environmental protections. They’re clear that:

“The Atlas Network vision is of a free, prosperous, and peaceful world where the principles of individual liberty, property rights, limited government, and free markets are secured by the rule of law.”

In pursuit of their vision, they’ve perfected a time-honoured strategy. Divide and conquer.

Six years ago, The Guardian wrote an exposé called, How the right’s radical thinktanks reshaped the Conservative party. It explains how Atlas managed to infiltrate Britain’s Conservative Party, set the national agenda, and even place its members into key positions in Boris Johnson’s cabinet.

Their goal? Britain’s exit from the European Union - aka Brexit.

In 2017, three years before the UK officially left the EU, Atlas published an article in its magazine, Freedom’s Champion. In shockingly candid terms, it explains how “Brexit provides us with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to radically trim the size of the state and cut the regulatory burden.”

So, I don’t think I need to put on my tinfoil hat to say - it looks like they’re doing the same thing here.

On February 3, the BC Prosperity Project hosted its inaugural event in Campbell River. It had a mediocre turnout - about a hundred people reportedly showed up. But their Facebook page, created just two weeks ago, already has over sixteen thousand followers.

The BC Prosperity Project is BC’s chapter of the Alberta Prosperity Project, a group trying to get Alberta to secede from Canada. Their vision is for Alberta (and also BC and Saskatchewan?) to become “the least governed, least regulated and lowest taxed nation in the world.”

Despite getting called out by a fellow Member of Parliament to “clarify [his] position on separatism,” Aaron Gunn has refused to condemn the event in his riding.

Aside from Gunn’s apparent ambivalence toward treason, there are other hints that the Atlas Network might be behind the sudden uptick in separatist propaganda.

Bruce Pardy, a professor of law at Queen’s University and a board member of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, recently published a thirteen-page legal manifesto in the C2C Journal. It’s called “Articles of Freedom: The Blueprint for a Stateless Alberta.” Notably, in his utopian vision for the province, Aboriginal title is erased, and former reserves are transformed into private property.

here’s my theory:

The controversy around Powell River’s name change is being used as a building block in a narrative that’s becoming increasingly mainstream. The idea is that Indigenous rights are being used as a smokescreen by a global Marxist elite. Powell River being forced to adopt an Indigenous name is another step down a slippery slope that’s leading us toward authoritarianism, the abolition of private property, and the end of representative democracy.

That’s what the Concerned Citizens are fired up about. That’s why city council meetings are growing increasingly hostile and toxic.

The Atlas Network's aggravation of the name change debate is a small part of a broader strategy to create, seek out, and amplify division across the province. Their goal is to destabilize government and give extractive industry unrestricted access to our resources.

American billionaires and Alberta oil and gas executives don’t particularly care what we call our city. It just happens to be a wedge issue that keeps us divided.

“You gave everything to the Indigenous, now you’re giving away our heritage building?”

Public input from Powell River’s Committee of the Whole Meeting, January 20, 2026.

Powell River hasn’t had an emergency shelter since March. Now, deep into a damp coastal winter, things have got pretty bad. Makeshift camps are visible across town, and people are sleeping rough with little more than cotton sleeping bags and cheap Canadian Tire tents. The new 40-bed temporary emergency shelter on Barnett Street, promised for this winter, is still under construction and likely won’t be open until March.

We all saw the problem coming. Just before the Christmas break, hoping to avert disaster and give some dignity to people living outdoors, the city council resolved “that staff be directed to activate city space in partnership with community partners to open a warming centre.”

With council's direction, city staff began looking for a building that could serve as a warming center. It needs at least two bathrooms, controlled access to outdoor space, and room for twenty beds. The city doesn’t own that many buildings, and the search was exhaustive. The staff’s report to council shows that the Rec Complex, Wildwood Firehall, units above the library, and even council chambers were considered as possible options.

But, as staff considered the logistical challenges, they found that most buildings don’t meet their criteria. They’re either too small, need additional staffing to make them secure, already leased to someone else, located in a residential neighbourhood, or are too far from services.

Ultimately, the basement of Dwight Hall emerged as the only city-owned building that checked all of the boxes for an emergency weather shelter. As the report explains,

“its location in Townsite is closer to the City’s central core where many of those experiencing homelessness are drawn to for other services. It is also further removed from schools and residential properties. Lastly, while it only has one washroom, the limited number of entrances (compared to the former Wildwood Firehall which has many) would make it much easier to manage the access and egress of guests.”

Once the city’s plan became public knowledge, the reaction was hot and fast.

not in my heritage building!

Powell River’s council meetings are usually a pretty mild affair. Not so on January 20, 2026.

During the Public Input Period, one person after another spoke against using Dwight Hall as an emergency weather shelter. The temperature of the room slowly rose to boiling. It culminated in one woman shouting at city councillors to “put them [homeless people] on a bus and get them the hell out of town.” Another man claimed, to wild applause, that the council is corrupt and someone’s slipping them cash under the table. When told to leave, he refused to step away from the podium and insisted on being removed in handcuffs.

Dramatic stuff.

Two days later, a petition called “Stop the Extreme Weather Shelter in historic Dwight Hall” was widely circulated. It explains that,

“Dwight Hall holds a special place in our hearts as a cornerstone of our community’s history and culture. Situated in the heart of our beloved small town, Dwight Hall has been the setting for countless cherished moments and serves as a cultural hub where we gather for various community events. From celebrating Remembrance Day at the cenotaph and singing Carols by Candlelight during Christmas, to hosting weddings that unite families, this historic building is woven into the fabric of our lives.”

It’s a beautiful picture. You can almost hear the harmonies of Joy to the World washing over the soft crackle of candle wicks. Not a crackhead in sight.

Diana Collicutt – president of Townsite Ratepayer Society and past director of the Townsite Heritage Society – added her voice to the chorus of those against the warming shelter. In her words, Dwight Hall was “built by the hands of community with more than just plaster and wood. Heart and soul have gone into this building.”

Diana, like many concerned about the inappropriate use of a heritage building, claims to speak for the generations past who built and left their mark on the hall. The problem is, she’s fundamentally mistaken about who those people were. Dwight Hall wasn’t built by innocent carolers and pearl clutchers who would leave their neighbours out in the cold.

Dwight Hall was built by socialists who fought to make housing a fundamental human right

Dwight Hall was built in 1927, two years before the Great Depression. It’s named after the American lumber baron, Dr. Dwight Brooks, who founded the Powell River Company. For decades, he ran the company town with an iron fist from his headquarters in Minneapolis. Every attempt by the mill workers to unionise was crushed. Rebellious workers, along with their families, were regularly evicted from their homes and blacklisted from mills across the country.

Dwight Brooks may have paid for the hall, but the majority of workers who built it — the carpenters, electricians, painters — were socialists.

In 1932, the Socialist Party of BC joined forces with various labour and farmer groups to form a new party - the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). Their goal was to fight back against the unchecked power of capitalists like Dwight Brooks. In their words, “no C.C.F. Government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation the full programme of socialized planning.”

They believed housing should be a public good and a human right - not a commodity for the wealthy to trade.

Ernest Bakewell was an engineer from the Ocean Falls mill and the CCF’s provincial candidate for Powell River. Leading up to the 1933 election, he gave a speech to a packed crowd at Dwight Hall. It was reported the next day in the Powell River News and is worth reading in full. It’s a real case of the more things change, the more they stay the same:

“In spite of an increasing output we are faced with a lower standard of living. We see the sword of Damocles s suspended above our heads and those still employed have the uneasy feeling of not knowing whether they will be the next to join the ranks of those on the street…

[Bakewell] spoke of the situation of the farmers who were producing at less than cost. Decreasing standard of living. The growing army of unemployed - 2,000,000 still out of work. The business of the nation was paralysed. Export and import trade had dropped alarmingly. Reduced wages had not remedied matters…. Debts, private, municipal, and governmental had increased. This condition was not only confined to Canada but was universal. The cause (Capitalism) was universal and this is the kind of fruit it raised. Our schools, colleges and universities were turning out 250,000 graduates every year, prepared to take their place in life. They found there was no place for them. The nation which failed to meet the requirements of youth was doomed.

The capitalistic system was dying. It had broken down and he would not repair it if he could. It had been a great producer. It succeeded in producing but could not distribute.

Loud applause greeted the close of his address.”

Bakewell won the riding by a landslide.

It wasn’t a one-off. Over the next several decades, the people of Powell River would consistently elect socialists to represent their interests in the legislature.

After Bakewell was Herbert Gargrave (Powell River’s MLA from 1941-49). He was the secretary of the National Painters’ Union, a member of the Socialist Party of Canada, and a founding member of the Young Socialists’ League. He was only (narrowly) defeated in 1949 when the Liberals and Conservatives formed a coalition to keep the socialists out of office.

In 1952, his younger brother Anthony Gargrave, also a socialist, was elected. He served five consecutive terms and represented the people of Powell River until 1966.

These are the people who put their heart and soul into Dwight Hall.

They would understand the crises of homelessness and addiction we’re facing today as the inevitable result of unregulated capitalism. They would know that the only solution is for working people to band together and fight for a more just world. It’s a safe bet they’d be stoked on using Dwight Hall to help the community’s most vulnerable survive another winter.

For decades, the Crofton Mill has been the beating heart of North Cowichan’s economy. Each year, it contributed around five million dollars in property taxes and good-paying union jobs to over three hundred and fifty workers.

Unfortunately, the gravy train has run dry. In December, Domtar (the company that owns the mill) announced its plan to permanently close, citing a “lack of access to affordable fiber.” Tuesday will be the mill’s last day.

Crofton isn’t the only mill town going through hard times. Grand Forks, Vanderhoof, 100 Mile House, Prince George, Chetwynd, Houston, Fort St. John, Mackenzie, and my own town of Powell River have all lost their mills in the past few years.

Clearly, British Columbia’s forest industry isn’t doing so hot. The question is,

why are all the mills closing?

After Domtar’s announcement, Aaron Gunn, MP for North Island—Powell River, was quick to point his finger at the NDP and environmentalists, saying:

“This decision is the result not of general economic conditions, but of specific government policies. In particular, a series of anti-forestry, activist-driven policies implemented by the NDP that have restricted access to an economic and predictable supply of fibre.”

Earlier in the year, Gunn and a handful of coastal politicians1 travelled to Victoria to offer their solution to the crisis. In an open letter to David Eby, they wrote:

“We need urgent leadership to cut red tape, restore investor confidence, and ensure our world-class forestry workers can continue providing for their families… Government needs to streamline permitting, restore legal and regulatory certainty, abandon ideological, one-size-fits-all land-use frameworks like 30×30, and support a predictable fibre supply so Canadians can get back to work.”

Domtar’s annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission mirrors what the Conservatives have been saying.

It warns that in the future, they “may have difficulty obtaining wood fiber at favorable prices, or at all.” It lists “environmental litigation and regulatory developments, activist campaigns and litigation advanced by Indigenous groups” as its main obstacles.

Ravi Parmar, the NDP’s Minister of Forests during the industry’s collapse, is in a tough spot. Facing calls for his resignation, he’s thrown a word salad at the wall, hoping something will stick. He names “volatile markets, low pulp prices, shrinking fibre, climate-driven wildfires, conservation measures and punishing Trump duties and tariffs” as reasons for the Crofton Mill closure.

Somehow – while everyone else is getting dirty tossing around blame – the owner of the Crofton Mill, Indonesian multi-billionaire pulp and paper scion Jackson Wijaya, has managed to stay conspicuously clean.

why isn’t anyone talking about Jackson Wijaya?

In 2006, twenty-six-year-old Jackson Wijaya founded Paper Excellence (renamed Domtar in 2024) with the purchase of the Meadow Lake Mill in Saskatchewan. Within a decade, he’d expanded his empire to include six pulp mills in BC, two in France, one in Brazil, and a corporate office in Richmond.

But Wijaya was just getting started. His most recent rise in the pulp industry can only be described as meteoric. In three years, he bought Catalyst Paper (2019), Domtar (2021), and Resolute Forest Products (2022) - making him the largest private forest manager in Canada. With permission from every level of government, he now owns dozens of mills and controls over 22 million hectares of Canadian forest, an area seven times the size of Vancouver Island.

For years, there’s been speculation that Wijaya’s money, and the real control of his company, comes from Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) - a subsidiary of his daddy’s business, the multinational conglomerate Sinar Mas.

It’s been hard to prove. Neither APP nor Domtar are publicly listed, and their corporate structures are a maze of numbered companies and offshore accounts. In 2023, a year-long investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found evidence linking Domtar to APP and the Chinese state-owned China Development Bank. In response, Parliament invited Wijaya to appear before the Standing Committee on Natural Resources to clarify his corporate structure and aims in Canada. Wijaya declined to appear, but issued a weak sauce statement insisting that “Paper Excellence is separate and entirely independent from APP.”

He didn’t stick to the bit for long. In 2024, Wijaya went – psych! – and replaced his dad as the sole owner of Asia Pulp and Paper. With the once blurry lines between his two companies fully erased, Wijaya is now the undisputed GOAT of a global half-trillion-dollar pulp and paper industry.

The problem is (for Canada), Asia Pulp and Paper’s reputation is trash.

It’s been called a “notorious rainforest destroyer,” and “the worst of the worst.” And it’s not just tree-huggers and hippies talking shit. Citing “substantial, publicly available information that APP was involved in destructive forestry practices,” the Forest Stewardship Council – an international body that regulates sustainable forestry – disassociated from APP and revoked its certification back in 2007. Despite repeated attempts to repeal the decision, APP remains uncertified. Even famously evil guys like Nestlé and Walmart refuse to do business with them.

Yet, somehow, without anyone seeming to notice or care, they’ve taken over Canada’s pulp and paper industry.

the fibre grab

Lobbyists on Wijaya’s payroll met with BC officials fifty-five times last year. Their disclosure statements always say the same vague thing - they’re discussing “solutions targeted toward solving for general forestry sector issues, tenure, and fibre supply challenges.”

Whatever it is they’re whispering in officials’ ears, it seems to be working. Domtar has received millions of dollars in public funds, including an $18.8 million grant that was intended to help retool the Crofton Mill and transition it to producing water resistant paper packaging and cutlery. The Parliamentary Secretary for Forests bragged,

“This investment in the mill at Crofton is exciting. Not only will it put people back to work, it is an example of how investment in our forestry infrastructure can help reduce emissions, encourage innovations, reduce waste and make sure we get the most value from every tree harvested.”

Embarrassingly, that’s not what happened. Instead, five months later, Wijaya laid off 100 workers, curtailed operations, and the government had to fight to get its money back.

It’s kind of weird. Who turns down $18.8 million? Other things are hard to understand. Like, why did Wijaya buy the Crofton mill in the first place, if he was just going to shut it down a few years later? Why did he do the same thing in my town? 2

Asia Pulp and Paper’s corporate vision statement offers the best clue I can find. It states, plainly, that their goal is to become the “world’s premier fully-integrated sustainable forestry, pulp and paper conglomerate.”

Integration is the clue. It’s a concept that traces back to Gilded Age industrialists like Carnegie and Rockefeller, who built massive empires based on a single resource (steel and oil, respectively). Their innovation was to harness the power of consolidation. Buy up the competition, squeeze the margins, and concentrate as much of the supply chain as possible under the control of a single owner.

Wijaya’s buying up and shutting down of mills in BC, seen from the perspective of integrating supply chains and stomping out competition, starts to make a bit more sense.

For the most part, Wijaya has been buying up mills that produce northern bleached softwood kraft pulp (NBSK). It’s a long-fibre pulp produced by northern conifers, and an essential ingredient in making quality paper. And buddy, does Canada have conifers. We make more NBSK than anyone else, producing one-third of the world’s supply.

APP, on the other hand, doesn’t produce NBSK. Based in Indonesia and China, their plantations are mostly fast-growing tropical trees that produce a short-fibre pulp which doesn’t have much tensile strength (grippy power) until it’s mixed with long-fibre pulp.

So, until Wijaya started buying up BC forests, APP had to compete on the open market to buy our pulp. And they buy a lot of it. Last year, three-quarters of BC’s pulp and over half of its raw logs were exported to Indonesia and China.

APP wants our fibre. But that doesn’t mean they want our mills. After all, they’re expensive as hell to run. Unionised Canadian mill workers are some of the highest-paid blue-collar workers in the world - the average employee at the Crofton Mill was pulling in over $100k a year.

Without straying too far into the realm of speculation, it’s a safe bet that APP would rather be processing fibre in their Chinese or Indonesian mills, where labour is cheap. There isn’t much reason for them to support British Columbian jobs or the communities that depend on them, let alone esoteric concerns like the environment.

Their expansion into BC is plain old-fashioned extractivism, what whistleblowers have called a “fibre grab”.

PART TWO

how BC handed its forests over on a silver platter

“An epoch, sir, is drawing to a close, the epoch of reckless devastation of the natural resources with which we, the people of this fair young Province, have been endowed by Providence—those magnificent resources of which the members of this Government and this Assembly are but temporary trustees. That rugged, rudimentary phase of pioneer activity is doomed to end.”

- MLA William Roderick Ross, in a speech to the Legislature, January 1912

In its earliest days, logging in BC was a free-for-all. There was little regulation, and the government sold timber leases for pennies an acre. Logging towns rose and fell in an endless cycle of boom and bust.

It was a bad system, and people started getting pissed. We must “chop the tentacles off the monster that is leaving a wasted country and a mangled humanity along their roads to profit,” wrote the union magazine BC Lumber Worker at the height of the Great Depression.

By the end of the Second World War, eight million hectares (mostly on the coast) had been clear-cut and left unplanted. The Province was ready to intervene and appointed Gordon Sloan to lead a two-year investigation - the first Royal Commission on Forest Resources. Sloan’s report laid the foundation of our modern tenure-based forestry system.

It proposed giving private companies long-term, exclusive tenure over Crown lands. Crucially, in deciding who would get access to timber, Sloan was a bigger-is-better kind of guy. He thought that big companies were better capitalised to sustain BC’s remote mill towns. As he said,

“In award of management licences, first priority must be given therefore, in my opinion, to the pulp and paper industries and other large conversion units, especially the great integrated organizations.”

Strangely, he wasn’t worried about the disappearance of old-growth forests, something that was already well underway. Opposite, actually. He thought it was a good thing:

“The vast extent of our productive Coast acreage now occupied by mature and overmature timber illustrates the unbalance of our forest resources. These virgin forests are static and making no net growth and must be replaced by growing trees if we are to progress to within any reasonable distance of the ideal or normal forest cover.”

Sloan’s system of liquidating old-growth worked - for a while. Those old trees were worth a fortune, and for a moment in the mid-1970s, the coastal mill towns of Powell River and Port Alberni had two of the highest per-capita incomes in the entire country.

But old-growth forests don’t last forever, and cracks were starting to show in the foundation. In 1976, Peter Pearse, a forestry professor at UBC, headed a third Royal Commission on Forest Resources. He recognised that the allowable annual cut was set way too high, but the getting was too good. So he put the problem off to the future, saying:

“Allowable cuts should not be set immediately at long-term sustainable levels, but should take advantage of the higher harvest rates possible in high volume old-growth forests.”

To fast-forward a few decades, the Province has stuck to Sloan’s strategy – encourage giant corporations to liquidate old-growth forests – for nearly a century. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a realistic long-term plan.

A recently leaked report found that “throughout the province we’re cutting almost at twice the rate of what is considered sustainable… We’re running out of wood.” Take a look at a satellite map, or out the window next time you fly - it’s hard not to notice.

Making things worse, corporate consolidation has snowballed beyond anything Sloan could have imagined. By the 1990s, fifteen companies controlled half of the province’s forest tenures. Today, it’s just five companies (one of which is Domtar / Asia Pulp and Paper). They have the Province’s balls in a vice.

there was another path

“The newly inaugurated system of ‘Management Licenses’ is patently inadequate. Its end result can only be the concentration into the hands of a few large corporations the entire forest resources of the province”

- MLA Robert Strachan, carpenter and one-time Powell River boy, testifying at the second Royal Commission on Forest Resources, 1957.

Sloan’s recommendations only passed into law by the narrowest of margins.

The socialist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) had a radically different vision for BC’s forest industry. Their goal was to “eradicate capitalism and put into operation the full programme of socialized planning.” This was Tommy Douglas’ party, the reason we have universal healthcare, and they came within spitting distance of forming government in BC.

In the 1941 provincial election, the CCF won the popular vote but narrowly lost to the Liberals. In 1945, they won the popular vote by an even wider margin and would have formed government if the Liberals and Conservatives hadn’t formed a coalition to keep them out of office.

Colin Cameron, MLA for Comox and the CCF’s forestry critic, testified at Sloan’s first Royal Commission in 1945. He saw private companies destroying public forests, and a few men getting rich. He wanted to expropriate forest tenures from the private companies and transfer control to the public. In his words,

“My party believes that all the requirements of sound forest policy - social, economic, technological - can be satisfied only through establishment of a public agency, charged with the planting, nurture, harvest, and sale of our raw forest crop. Under that proposal all forest lands and rights would be transferred step by step, from the Crown and private owners to a Crown-owned corporation, to be known as the B.C. Forest Commission… Our goal is the establishment of a distinct forestry system in British Columbia which would eventually absorb all the timber lands of the Province.”

The CCF maintained its position in Sloan’s second Royal Commission on Forest Resources in 1957. Unfortunately — because of the Red Scare, corporate lobbying, capitalist propaganda, all the usual suspects — the CCF’s vision for a Crown-owned Forest Commission was slowly watered down and eventually forgotten.

Today, we’ve come so far down the path of handing our forests over to massive corporations that it’s hard to imagine anything else. But, if we’re going to salvage our forest industry, expropriating tenure from foreign-backed multi-billionaires like Jackson Wijaya seems like a pretty good place to start.

I got a little sloppy citing my sources in this historical section. If you’re a nerd and want to dig deeper, most of what I learned was gleaned from these two papers: The Pearse Commission and the Industrial Organization of the British Columbia Forest Industry (1979) and Sustaining sustained yield: class, politics, and post-war forest regulation in British Columbia (2007).

“These are profound issues that are hard to consider in the absence of the real people … the homeowners, the business owners, who will be affected by this decision. I want the court to look into the eyes, metaphorically speaking, of the people who will be directly affected by this decision and understand the impact on certainty for business, for prosperity and for our negotiations with Indigenous people.”
- Premier David Eby, September 2025

In August, the longest trial in Canadian history wrapped up. For nearly five years, dozens of lawyers fought over the rights to eight square kilometers of industrial land on the bank of the Fraser River.

The judge’s decision is long - almost nine hundred pages of dense legalese and debate over historical minutiae. Ultimately, she decided in favour of the Quwuts’un Nation, recognizing their right to their traditional village of Tl’uqtinus. In the process, she declared Canada and Richmond’s title to the land “defective and invalid.” For individual property owners in the area, she found that their title coexists with the Cowichan’s.

It’s the first time a BC court has acknowledged that Aboriginal title and fee simple title can coexist.

It’s a groundbreaking ruling. For the non-lawyers, fee simple is private property. Aboriginal title is a right to the land which, when recognised, acknowledges an Indigenous group’s “right to possess the land; the right to economic benefits from the land; and the right to proactively use and manage the land.”

Some people are stoked on a big win for Indigenous rights. Others are pissed. They don’t want their private property coexisting with Aboriginal title. Most people, it seems, are simply confused about the ruling and unsure if, or how, it will impact their lives.

Fundamentally, the Cowichan decision challenges our understanding of land.

the land question

A lot has happened to Tl’uqtinus since it was sold in 1871.

The guy who first bought a piece of the village was Richard Moody, the Chief Commissioner of Lands and Works for the Colony of British Columbia. It was a shady sale. As Commissioner, he was supposed to establish reserves around Indigenous villages to protect them from land speculators. Instead, he decided to land speculate himself. To quote the judge,

“Moody acted in his own self-interest and contrary to Douglas’ express directions and colonial policy, taking appropriated Indian settlement lands for himself.1 He did so covertly, through a land agent. His failure to take steps to stake out an Indian reserve at the Cowichan’s village resulted in a personal benefit to him — the acquisition of part of the Cowichan’s waterfront land at Tl’uqtinus. As the plaintiffs put it, the very Crown official clothed with the task and responsibility of protecting the settlements of the Indigenous inhabitants, surreptitiously took part of the Lands of Tl’uqtinus for himself.”

The village has long since been subdivided and parcelled out. Gone are the longhouses, blueberry fields, eulachon, and freshwater streams that once defined the area.2 In their place stands an Amazon Fulfillment Center, a Coca-Cola bottling facility, a golf course, and forty-five privately owned homes.

It’s a big deal that the Cowichan were able to get their village back after such significant private development. For over a century, the Province has acted as if Aboriginal title vanishes the moment the land is sold to a private owner.

What the Cowichan decision recognises is - private property doesn’t erase Aboriginal title and hasn’t since 1763, when King George III proclaimed that all land in North America is Aboriginal land until ceded by treaty. BC has been breaking the law for a long ass time. Check out this newspaper article from 1877:

“First and foremost, there is a question of the unextinguished Indian Title in the soil…. It would cost a great sum of money to extinguish the Indian title here…. The practical difficulties in settling this question are so great that it has not been raised at present…. But what guarantee can there be that the Indians themselves will not raise it at some future, perhaps not distant, time?”

British Columbia’s problem of “unextinguished Indian Title” has been kicked down the road for generations. Now, the fate of millions of dollars of real estate in the industrial heart of the Lower Mainland is on the line.

The chickens have come home to roost.

Complicating things, there are a lot of people with a lot of power who have a lot of money tied up in real estate. They don’t like to see their investments threatened.

They’re sounding the alarm. Corporate media is on a tear, publishing opinion pieces with incredible headlines like: “First Nations have said they don’t want to seize homes ... but they conceivably could.” Social media is thick with untruths. It’s important to note that, despite claims to the contrary, the court’s decision doesn’t invalidate any private homeowners’ title. Only lands owned by Canada and Richmond have been returned to the Cowichan.

Still, Indigenous rights are creeping close to BC’s favourite investment vehicle. It’s got homeowners and investors nervous. Who will compensate them if the unthinkable happens, and their property values decline?

the foundation of our democracy

The Cowichan decision has politicians tearing off their orange shirts and scrambling over to team private property.

On one end of the spectrum, there’s Vancouver MLA Dallas Brodie, who posted a video to social media that calls the decision “nothing more than a brazen land grab by Indigenous people, ripping apart the very fabric of British Columbia as we know it.” Leader of the Opposition, John Rustad, is warning that “property values are at risk… and investors will start running, not walking, out of British Columbia.”

But even the NDP, once proud champions of reconciliation, are hard backpedaling. They “disagree strongly with the decision,” and are “committed to protecting and upholding private property rights.” Instead of negotiating in good faith with the Cowichan, as the judge ordered, they’re lawyering up and appealing the decision.

There’s one guy in particular who’s been riling up the propertied class. That’s Malcolm Brodie, former lawyer and current mayor of Richmond. Shortly after the decision was released, his office sent letters to private property owners in the newly declared Cowichan Title Lands.

It grumbles that the Cowichan’s title was granted “over lands that the plaintiff’s ancestors had abandoned roughly 150 years in the past.” It blasts Canada and the Province (Richmond’s co-defendants) for not backing the city in its argument for extinguishment, an outdated legal concept that’s been consistently rejected by the courts for over thirty years. It blames the Cowichan for not warning private landowners that their title may be “negatively affected” by a recognition of their Aboriginal title (something Richmond didn’t do either). For good measure, Brodie also tagged on an op-ed by Robin Junger, former Deputy Minister of Energy, Mines & Petroleum Resources.3

The Cowichan Tribes responded to Brodie’s letter, saying his “statements are, at best, misleading, and at worst, deliberately inflammatory.” The Union of BC Indian Chiefs chimed in, saying that “framing this decision as a threat to private property stokes fear and unfairly scapegoats First Nations.”

Still, with elected leaders of all stripes rejecting the court’s ruling, it’s hard to know what to think. After all, the overwhelming majority of the province is unceded and potentially open to similar Aboriginal title claims. Is private property at risk? Has reconciliation gone too far?

I’m focusing on Malcom Brodie’s letter because, buried in the muck, is a key to understanding what all the fuss is about:

“The court’s decision… to dismiss arguments based on the Land Title Act and the sanctity of the Registry under British Columbia’s Torrens system, introduces enormous uncertainty into the security of any title in British Columbia.”

the sanctity of the Registry

SANC’TITY, noun

1. Holiness; state of being sacred or holy.

2. Goodness; purity; godliness; as the sanctity of love
   - Webster’s Dictionary

“All clues point to young Torrens inventing the new system of land registration, which now bears his name, in order to complete the dispossession of the Aboriginal people.”
- Dr. Sarah Keenan, legal scholar at the University of London

The Torrens system is how land ownership is managed in BC. It’s named after Robert Torrens, an English bureaucrat who invented the system in 1858 to simplify land sales in the new colony of South Australia.

Before the Torrens system, South Australia, like British Columbia, used a deeds registration system to manage property ownership. Every time a property was sold, the title had to be painstakingly proved by tracing the chain of ownership back to its original owner. It was slow, expensive, and there was no guarantee of the title’s validity.

A big problem for early settlers in the colonies of South Australia and British Columbia was that most of the land had not been surrendered by treaty. The historic-minded deeds system validated Indigenous claims to the land and cock-blocked the Europeans who wanted to buy it. As John Helmcken (Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Vancouver Island) said in 1860, we must “quiet the Indian claim to lands in this Colony… no doubt ought to exist in the mind of any person, whether or not he can occupy the land he buys; and so long as there is doubt people will not buy.”

That’s where Torrens’ new system came in clutch. Instead of relying on a cumbersome chain of title to prove ownership, the colonial government created and controlled a new, written land registry. Through a legal sleight of hand, historic claims to the land were erased. Now, if your name is in the registry, you own the land. It’s simple, effective, and clean.

The system gave investors the confidence they needed to stake their claim to land on unceded Indigenous territories. As the new legal regime spread across the British Empire, colonies boomed with a speculative fever. Fortunes were made wheeling and dealing real estate in the freshly opened markets – Irish estates bankrupted by the Potato Famine, rubber plantations in Malaya, sheep pasture in South Australia – the world was for sale.

In 1870, the Colony of British Columbia joined the frenzy and adopted the Torrens system. One year later, Moody bought his property on the Quw’utsun village of Tl’uqtinus.

what’s sacred about land?

“For Indigenous Peoples, our Aboriginal Title and connection to the Land is certain, it is in the bones of our grandmothers buried in the earth, and in the blood which beats in our hearts”
- Union of BC Indian Chiefs, 1998.

Malcolm Brodie is absolutely spot on that the Cowichan decision has fouled the sanctity of the Torrens system.

But Aboriginal title is hardly the first, or only thing to violate a private owner’s right to their land.

For example, you don’t own the subsurface rights to your property in BC. Mining companies have the right to force you from your home and strip mine your land. The same goes for oil and gas. The government regularly expropriates land from private owners to build highways, roads, and public works. Municipal bylaws limit how tall we can let the grass grow on our own lawn.

So, why are people freaking out over the threat of Aboriginal title, but meekly accept the limits of our current, partial claim to ownership?

By naming the Torrens system, Malcom Brodie hints at an answer. What’s sacred, what’s foundational to our democracy and country, what fires up the people who have money and power - isn’t the land itself, or the inviolability of our homes, but the right to accumulate profit from owning land.

Aboriginal title challenges that.

It’s a legal right that exists outside of the speculative tradition. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal People found that Aboriginal title doesn’t include “the right to alienate or sell land to outsiders, to destroy or diminish lands or resources, or to appropriate lands or resources for private gain without regard to reciprocal obligations.” The Union of BC Indian Chiefs agrees, saying that Aboriginal title “prevents Indigenous Peoples from viewing the Land as a commodity to be bought, sold or traded.”

The naysayers aren’t wrong - by recognising the existence of Aboriginal title on private property, the Cowichan decision presents a challenge to land ownership as we understand it in British Columbia. Specifically, it asks us to consider values other than the accumulation of private wealth.

For some people, that's a scary idea.

“Please give a damn about our town and not bring in another of these buildings. These people will never work, they have never tried to clean up. We do not have the facilities to help them find a healing and we can not sustain the amount they are damaging this town, with their actions and habits. The current one is NOT working. A second one would be even worse.”
- September 2024 letter to mayor and council

In the spring of 2023, BC Housing conducted a homeless count in Powell River. Over the course of twenty-four hours, they identified one hundred and twenty-six people who didn’t have a place of their own to sleep at night.

For a small town, that’s a lot of people.

And that’s just people who are obviously homeless. It doesn’t include the “invisible” homeless - people who sleep in their cars, stealth camp in the bushes, or couchsurf with friends. Not to mention the growing number of people who work, but fork out the majority of their pay to a landlord each month, leaving barely enough for groceries. By every measure, times are tough. Visits to the local food bank have doubled since 2019. Crime in the regional district is up thirty-three percent, and violent offences have nearly doubled since 2014.

But we don’t need stats to know there’s a problem. It’s the question of what to do about it that’s divided the town.

shelter problems

In 2021, Lift Community Services (a local non-profit) received funding from BC Housing to set up an emergency shelter on the commercial stretch of Joyce Avenue.

Lift operated the shelter until March 2025, when new owners of the building declined to renew their lease, forcing Powell River’s only emergency shelter to close its doors indefinitely. With nowhere else to go, the building’s former residents migrated to a park next to Lift’s supportive housing building, one of the few places in town still providing homeless services.

Suddenly, for the first time in a long time, Powell River had a homeless camp. It didn’t take long before open drug use, out-of-control campfires, and a proliferation of sketchy-looking dudes started to freak people out.

As one landlord, who owns a five-bedroom home in the neighbourhood, wrote in a letter to city council:

“Despite literally tens of thousands of dollars in upgrades, we have yet to rent to anyone but ‘new comers’ from other cities and provinces. We have been unable to sustain a long-term tenant, and though we keep our home immaculate and securely monitored, we’ve been informed it is ‘too close to the drug house.’ Even when we were connected with a qathet staff member responsible for arranging temporary housing for health care workers during COVID, we were ultimately rejected due to location… The result has been recurrent, persistent vacancies and a significant financial burden. Overall, this may appear inconsequential to the community, and yet I urge you to consider how disturbing it is that we cannot consistently rent a large, clean, well-serviced, well-priced unit when so many indicate a struggle to find housing. Any further development anywhere within the current hospital area will be catastrophic to property values, safety, and the sense of community.”

In response to the growing housing crisis, the Province has proposed the rapid development of two new projects. One is a supportive housing building and emergency shelter on the hospital grounds, near the current homeless camp. The other is a forty-bed shelter and overdose prevention site that will be built on city property next to the Town Centre Mall.

But not everyone’s happy about the plan. Not long after the announcement, a petition circulated, and dozens of people wrote to city council voicing their opposition. The consensus is that supportive housing will “bring more street crime,” and that drug users “being provided with a home by the taxpayers is not a right if they disrupt the neighbourhood.”

westview ratepayers’ society

“We believe that any new building should be located in a different area of the City”

-Westview Ratepayers Society position on BC Housing’s supportive housing proposal, September 2024.

The most organised voice to emerge in opposition to the proposals has been the Westview Ratepayers’ Society. Boasting an all-star roster of local political heavyweights, it was formed to represent the interests of property and business owners during the early days of the pandemic. Its founder, Ron Woznow, became mayor in 2022. Earlier this year, Robin Murray took a temporary leave from the board to manage Conservative MP Aaron Gunn’s Powell River campaign. The group’s current president, Rick Craig, is a retired law educator and also serves as president of the North Lake Association on the lower coast, where he has a lakeside property.1

In response to BC Housing’s proposed projects, the society put together a supportive housing subcommittee.

At first glance, it appears to support supportive housing – an interpretation their spokesperson, Sherry Burton, encourages – never missing a chance to mention how her group “ardently supports shelters, housing and programs for individuals experiencing adversity.”

But, in practice, they do the opposite. They have been laser-focused on the singular goal of excluding drug users from the community and restricting their access to shelter. Their vision of community is one where poverty and addiction are eradicated, not through support and care, but by the sheer force of collective intolerance. As Burton says, “we have already experienced six years of housing-first, and that is not working for the community.”

This summer, they presented their demands to city council. Their first was that the terms of the lease between the city and the shelter operator “must protect the community.”

Who is, and who isn’t, a part of the community wasn’t elaborated.

They went on to request that the shelter be drug-free and its overdose prevention site removed - even though seventy-two percent of homeless people in the region report struggles with addiction. Finally, without concern for winter approaching, they “urge council to postpone permits until community concerns are prioritized and addressed.”

A week later, Burton was at a qathet Regional Hospital board meeting.

A retired paralegal, Burton brought with her a copy of the lease agreement between the hospital and BC Housing (who finance Lift’s supportive housing building on Joyce). In a vaguely threatening legalese, she drew the board’s attention to the Terms of Instrument, section 7.1, which states “the Tenant will not bring onto the Leased Area or suffer or permit to be brought onto the Leased Area any Hazardous Substance.”

She continued,

“Activities such as smoking or inhaling hazardous substances, drug and sex trafficking, theft and coercion, are occurring on the leased premises. These activities are not only illegal, they fall outside the lease’s permitted uses and directly violate its nuisance and hazardous substances provision… We urge the Hospital Board, as Landlord, to ensure compliance with the Terms of Instrument.”

Or, in other words, kick out the crackheads.

The ratepayers want drug users to go away; they threaten businesses, make people feel unsafe, and bring down property values. Seniors are afraid to leave their homes. The stakes are high, and emotions are too. One curious resident who attended the ratepayers’ general meeting in February was so rattled by what he saw that he wrote an op-ed in the local paper, saying that:

“Rarely have I been in a room with such a collection of disgruntled, angry and unhappy people. Most of the animus in the room was directed at four city councillors, with Lift Community Services a close second. The personal animosity held toward these two groups surprised and disturbed me.”

I attended a meeting in September, and the vibe I picked up was fear. Fear of what’s happening to the town they care about. Which is fair. Things are pretty bad, and people should be upset. The problem is, the ratepayers don’t have an explanation for what’s causing the problem.

They’re quick to blame city council, supportive housing management, or harm reduction programs. But they ignore the fact that these problems aren’t only happening in Powell River, or even the province; that homelessness is a crisis across the country with roots that sink deep into our past.

Conspicuously absent from their list of culprits are the ratepayers themselves - the property owners and landlords who have been making an absolute killing off the skyrocketing costs of rent, land, and housing.

PART TWO

The last time British Columbia saw a homeless crisis this bad was during the Great Depression. Things got pretty bleak. Unemployment went as high as thirty-one percent, and homeless camps – or “hobo jungles” as they called them – cropped up in towns across the province. There were an estimated twelve thousand homeless people in Vancouver alone.

The cities of Burnaby and North Vancouver were forced to declare bankruptcy, declaring “the situation in Vancouver is beyond our control.” Small towns were hit, too. The mayor of Kamloops wrote to the Province, saying his “town is being overrun by beggars and panhandlers.”

The provincial government at the time, headed by Simon Fraser Tolmie, believed in small government and applying “business principles to the business of government.” So, instead of raising taxes to lift people out of poverty, they turned the police on the problem. Hobos were picked up and charged with vagrancy. Homeless camps were evicted, cleared, and burnt to the ground.

Leo Olsen, namesake of the Olsen Valley off Powell Lake, remembers the harassment he faced while tramping around, looking for work during the Great Depression:2

“Every time we came to a town, the police tried to get rid of us as quickly as possible. The town police were pretty nasty with the hobos. Anyone brought before a magistrate had to empty out their pockets. Whatever money they had on them had to be handed over. The magistrate would then declare this pocket change a “fine”. Consequently, as we now had no money, we were charged with vagrancy!”

Back then, there was no welfare, healthcare, employment insurance, public pension, or social housing. Employers cut the average wage in half, unions were illegal, and workers were regularly fired without cause. It was clear that the government existed to serve the interests of property and business owners, not the working class. As the depression wore on, people increasingly saw capitalism as the problem, and membership in socialist, labour, and communist organisations boomed.

Concerningly for the government, many of the homeless were combat veterans, hardened in the trenches of Europe. The potential for revolution was palpable. As General McNaughton, Commander of the Canadian Army, described it: “in their ragged platoons, here are the prospective members of what Marx called the ‘industrial reserve army, the storm troopers of the revolution.’”

duck lake unemployment relief camp

The jails couldn’t possibly fit all the homeless and would-be revolutionaries.

So, in September of 1931, the Tolmie government set up “relief camps” in remote parts of the province. One was set up on the south end of Duck Lake in Powell River. Access could be easily controlled – since the Union Steamship was the only way in or out of town – making it an ideal spot to sequester some of the more radical hobos.

Conditions in the camps were rough. Men lived in cramped bunkhouses and were paid twenty cents a day for backbreaking labour.3 They built roads, planted trees, and cleared brush. While attendance was technically voluntary, the alternative for most was a jail cell.

As part of the government’s effort to eradicate communism, men in the relief camps were denied their right to vote. Stuart Lambert, of Myrtle Grove Goat Dairy, lived nearby and made friends with some of the men in the camps. He remembers how:

“The men at Duck Lake marched into town to vote. The officials refused to let them vote; however, they soon changed their minds when their leader shouted out, ‘In that case, boys, let’s take the place apart.’”

Still, officials didn’t include the homeless vote in the final count.

Ultimately, trying to suppress radicalism by concentrating hobos in camps probably wasn’t the best strategy. As one old-timer remembers, “in those bunkhouses, there were more men reading Marx, Lenin and Stalin than there were reading girlie magazines.”

Arthur “Slim” Evans, a carpenter and communist, organised thousands of the campers into the Relief Camp Workers’ Union. In April 1935, they called a general strike. Thousands of homeless men converged in Vancouver and spent several months in protest and riot, eventually culminating in the legendary On to Ottawa Trek and Regina Riot.

Despite popular resistance, the government didn’t budge from its law-and-order approach to poverty. The relief camps ran for eight years, only closing at the outbreak of World War Two.

how was the crisis solved?

After the war, homelessness pretty much disappeared.

The days of pure capitalism and small government were over. To manage the war, the government had expanded massively, and a new post-war consensus emerged. Suddenly, the government was doing previously unimaginable things - introducing heavy regulation, raising taxes, and generally creating a welfare state.

Problems that seemed impossible during the Great Depression were no big deal. The government built thousands of standardized “victory homes” to address the housing shortage; a monthly “baby bonus” was paid to families with children under sixteen; an old-age pension, unemployment insurance, and public healthcare were introduced.

This was possible because rich people paid lots of tax. The marginal tax rate topped out at ninety-four percent; wage theft was a criminal offense; there was an inheritance tax. As a result, the top 1% controlled a modest ten percent of Canada’s wealth.

Over the past few decades, rich people have been chipping away at their chains. Now, the top 1% control nearly a quarter of Canada’s wealth. They got rid of the inheritance tax, brought the top marginal tax rate down to thirty percent, decriminalised wage theft, and stashed billions in tax havens.

The rich got richer.

Meanwhile, the local living wage is $23.3 an hour, and the median wage is only $17.11 an hour. The rest of us don’t have enough money.

Wealth has concentrated in the hands of property owners. Property values have doubled in a few years, and the net wealth held by homeowners in their principal residences across Canada has grown to $5.8 trillion. For those who own property, it’s been an incredible ride.

Homes have been treated as commodities to be bought and sold, rather than as a basic human need. As a result, there’s no shortage of homes for the wealthy. Powell River “has achieved 5-year and 20-year housing needs for market-rate rental housing and is on track to see sufficient construction of for-purchase homes for above-moderate and high-income households.”

It’s a different story for the young and working-class. We still need a whopping 430 new units of housing by next year to adequately house the very low-income, low-income, and moderate-income households that make up sixty percent of Powell River.

a final word to the ratepayers

"We have ‘sketchy’ people wondering [sic] around at all hours. When we moved here I felt our neighbourhood was perfectly safe. Not anymore. I now avoid certain areas if I’m by myself. This is no longer the neighborhood we moved into.”
- September 2024 letter to mayor and council

I believe the ratepayers are genuine when they say they want to get rid of homelessness and addiction. They’re desperate for a return to the old Powell River.

The trouble is, they aren’t championing any of the things that solved the issue in the past: building public housing, funding social programs, or raising taxes on the rich. Instead, they’re pushing for the lock ‘em up strategy of the Great Depression.

Their understanding of things is all jumbled up.

They don’t seem to get that their property value doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s created by, and a measure of, the community’s collective wealth. Prospective homebuyers choose a property based on its neighbourhood and proximity to public goods like schools, libraries, and parks. Location, location, location. Curb appeal doesn’t mean anything if your neighbourhood sucks.

The incredible gains that property owners have seen over the past few years haven’t come out of thin air. They’ve been extracted from the community in the form of rent, stagnant wages, and inflation. The problems we’re facing are the result of rich people taking too much and not contributing enough. If the ratepayers want safe neighbourhoods and high property values, they need to help raise the value of the entire community.

Homelessness and addiction are the symptoms, not causes, of community collapse.

If Powell River has an origin story, it goes something like this:

The city was founded in the early 1900s by Dr. Dwight Brooks, Anson Brooks, and Michael Scanlon (owners of the Powell River Company), who built a uniquely livable community based on the principles of the Garden City Movement.

As the Townsite Heritage Society, a local nonprofit dedicated to historical education and preservation, explains:

“The essential components of the Garden City Movement were grounded in basic respect for the humanity of the individual worker and their family.… Brooks and Scanlon drew from these philosophical movements in the creation of Powell River. The town was preplanned, complete with public gardens and tree-lined streets, all maintained by the Company… The uniqueness and significance of Powell River today can be greatly attributed to the philosophical perspectives of our early cofounders.”

In this telling, the owners of the paper mill are imagined as the city’s founding fathers and generous patrons of the working class.

It’s an image that Brooks and Scanlon cultivated. From its earliest days, the Powell River Company organised an annual garden competition for its employees with prizes ranging from cash to a month’s free rent or vouchers for the company store. At the height of its garden-mania, the company had a whopping fifty-five gardeners on its payroll - a small army responsible for maintaining the company golf course, manicuring executives’ yards, and generally keeping the town immaculate.1

The Townsite Heritage Society has dedicated itself to maintaining this idyllic vision of the town. In 1992, it revived the company’s long-neglected garden competition. In 1995, it petitioned the federal government to recognize the mill and surrounding townsite as a National Historic Site of Canada. In their words:

“We felt we had to save this area of the district from becoming a slum; we owed it to our founders Brooks and Scanlon and their successors, Scanlon nephews, managers Harold and Joe Foley.”

It’s noteworthy that Joe Foley, president of the Powell River Company from 1936-59, left the Society “a very sizable sum” when he died in 2001.2 The same year, the Society bought Henderson House, the first doctor’s residence and one of the oldest buildings in Powell River. After eight years of restoration, it’s now a living museum and the society’s period-accurate headquarters.

The Heritage Society doesn’t stop at organising garden competitions or installing commemorative plaques.

In 2016, Powell River was in a housing crisis. With vacancy rates hovering around one percent, landlords were taking advantage of high demand and jacking up rents, causing the city’s average rent to nearly double in just a few years. Local wages weren’t keeping pace, and a growing number of residents (over two thousand, many of them children and seniors) were classified as low-income by the government census.3

In an attempt to increase the rental supply and lower rents, the city proposed a bylaw amendment to allow carriage homes on private property. The Townsite Heritage Society protested, arguing that “carriage homes are not in keeping with the Garden City Movement that the Townsite was modeled after,” and the “National Historic District designation could be put at risk if carriage houses were permitted within the neighbourhood.”4

As a result of their lobbying, the city granted an exception to Townsite. Even though a majority of the neighbourhood’s lots are big enough to accommodate a carriage house, the new bylaw bans them, denying families rental income and contributing to the issue of housing scarcity in the region.

what was the Garden City Movement?

“The land around Garden City is, fortunately, not in the hands of private individuals: it is in the hands of the people: and is to be administered, not in the supposed interests of the few, but in the real interests of the whole community.”

— Ebenezer Howard, 1898.

Ironically, the Garden City Movement developed in response to another housing crisis, one that was ravaging London at the turn of the 19th century. A result of the Industrial Revolution, London’s population doubled from three million to over six million in a single generation. Landlords were price-gouging, and the city was a dense tangle of overcrowded slums and homeless encampments.

It was in this context that Ebenezer Howard published his 1898 book, Garden Cities of To-morrow, and laid out his vision for a utopian city, free from the squalor of London.

Despite its title, the book doesn’t have much to say about gardens. Only one of its thirteen chapters concerns green space or the ideal layout of a town. The other twelve chapters dive into the weeds of how a Garden City should function in terms of governance, finance, and administration. The book’s original title, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, gives a better sense of its scope.

Howard cites the English revolutionary Thomas Spence as inspiration for his ideas, although he’s careful to distance himself from Spence’s more radical calls for the abolition of private property (ideas that landed Spence in a London prison for treason a century earlier). Instead, Howard advocates for the “abolition of landlord’s rent,” suggesting that an elected board would replace private landlords, and the profits redistributed for the benefit of the community.

Essentially, his vision was socialist, emphasizing local government and co-operation over private ownership and monopoly.

It makes sense, since Ebenezer’s buds were socialists and anarchists.

Before Howard became known for his Garden Cities, he presented an unfinished manuscript, Common-sense Socialism, at a meeting hosted by the anarchist group, Brotherhood Trust. The Brotherhood was receptive to, and helped refine, Howard’s ideas. They ran two industrial communes, established by blacklisted union workers who transitioned to building bicycles and repairing electrical goods in a worker-owned co-operative.5 According to their newsletter:

“The organisation is entirely Anarchist & Communist in character. Each man receives according to his needs, on the basis of a common agreement, without the aid of any laws or rules. The profits from the business are to be devoted to its extension and ultimately to the establishing of a regular Community Colony – an oasis is the desert of commercialism”

When Howard founded the Garden City Association in 1899, some of its earliest members came from the Brotherhood Trust.

The first Garden City to be built – Letchworth Garden City in 1905 – was designed by Raymond Unwin, an Arts and Crafts architect and member of William Morris’ Socialist League.6 The experimental city was a hotbed of radicalism. Its first residents were recruited from the Brotherhood Trust and the Christian-socialist Labour Church. The city’s newspaper, the Letchworth Gazette, was run by the Independent Labour Party - a newly formed “big tent” leftist party.

Housing reform was at the heart of the Garden City Movement. Aside from their involvement at Letchworth, the Socialist League and the Independent Labour Party organised renters in London’s slums into Tenant Defence Leagues. Rent strikes and direct action were their tactics of choice against exploitative landlords. As the Socialist League’s Commonweal newspaper put it:

“When a black flag bearing the words ‘no rent’ floats over a single slum, when streets are torn up and barricaded, when from the windows and roofs of the houses there comes a shower of hot water and storm of stones and brickbats, what can the police or bailiffs do?”

who were Brooks, Brooks, and Scanlon?

Knowing what the Garden City Movement was, it’s hard to take the Townsite Heritage Society’s claims seriously.

As I’ve written about before, Brooks and Scanlon were union-busting businessmen, hostile to the labour movement and opposed to anything that resembled socialism. A more accurate description of them would be: wealthy Gilded Age lumber barons who were expanding their empire westward after having decimated the boreal forests of their native Minnesota.

In 1899, a year after Garden Cities of To-morrow was published, the Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company built the largest sawmill in existence in Cass Lake, Minnesota. Producing over 115 million board feet of lumber per year, within a decade it had “completely exhausted the supply of standing timber” and was abandoned.7

Flush with cash, the company started expanding across the continent. They ran their mills around the clock, three shifts a day, cutting over 1.3 billion board feet of longleaf pine in one Louisiana mill alone. By 1920, they were the largest landowner in Florida. They owned railroads, lumberyards, mills, power plants, and a shipping company. They had holdings in Minnesota, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Cuba, the Bahamas, California, Oregon, and British Columbia.8

Despite their local image as founding fathers, neither Brooks, Brooks, nor Scanlon ever lived in Powell River. The pulp and paper mill was only a small part of an international empire that they managed from their headquarters in Minneapolis. Still, they exerted an incredible amount of control over the daily lives of the town’s early residents.

They owned every building in Townsite and deducted rent and groceries from their employees’ paycheques. Shifts at the mill were long, and Sundays were the only day off. If anyone asked for an eight-hour day, better pay, or other communist things, they were watched closely. Many ended up fired, blacklisted, and evicted from their homes.

Merve Wilkinson worked at the mill in those early days. Later in life, he was recognized by the Order of Canada for his pioneering work in sustainable forestry. His biography is an incredible source of insight into early life at the Powell River Company:

“Every department had a private detective hired to keep track of possible labour unrest. They were supposed to be deep undercover, but they all came from the same detective agency and usually wore the same sort of clothes. The men spotted them quickly and made a game of feeding them false information. If someone were a real company man - a ‘suckhole” as he was called - the men would tell the detective about him, “Hey, you’d better watch that one. I think he’s a communist.”

The company’s biggest beef was with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) - a socialist party that openly boasted of its goal to eradicate capitalism.9

As Jack Dice, a mill worker during the Great Depression, tells it:

The mill manager, Joe Falconer, had his orders to fire anybody suspected of belonging to the CCF. All that was needed to get someone fired was to tell Joe that a certain employee was CCF. Joe then removed that employee’s punch timecard; this action informed the employee he was fired. The employee was not only fired by the Powell River Company but he was blacklisted by all other companies, throughout Canada…

Met an electrician that had been fired recently by the Powell River company. His story was that after his last shift he had been called into the office of Dick Woodruff, assistant super. He was asked to take a promotion to Mr. Hanson’s job. His answer was that if he accepted the job, he would be accused of turning in Mr. Hanson as a CCF member so he turned down the promotion. When he went to work the next day, his punch timecard had been pulled. He had been fired and blacklisted for turning down a promotion!10

The atmosphere of fear and reprisal was ripe for abuse:

The superintendent didn’t much care about anything other than having the men working at breakneck speed. He also had the rather nasty habit of calling around at a new man’s home while he was working and telling the wife that her man would be out of a job unless she was very nice to him. His nickname was “Papa.”

When Merve first heard it, he couldn’t figure it out.

“Why do you call him Papa?” He asked one of the men. “He’s one of the most unlovable men I’ve ever met.”

“You’ve got the wrong end of the handle,” the man said, “we call him Papa because he’s got so many illegitimate children in town.”

Despite the company’s efforts, Powell River workers elected the CCF to the provincial legislature in eight out of ten elections between 1933 and 1966.11 Decades of agitation paid off. By 1973, 2,233 of the mill’s 2,600 workers were unionised, and the oppressive days of Brooks and Scanlon were all but forgotten.

Scanlon’s ghost, or, why I’m dunking on some sweet old timers

“The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.”
— William Morris

I’m writing this with respect for the Townsite Heritage Society and its members, who are my fellow local history nerds. It might seem trivial, and no doubt it’s a silly fight to pick, but the Garden City myth isn’t just harmless nostalgia.

How we remember Brooks and Scanlon matters. Income inequality is at an all-time high, historic labour gains are being stripped away, and the housing crisis shows no signs of slowing. How we understand our past informs how we will respond to the present.

Thanks to a generous inheritance from Michael Scanlon’s nephew, the Townsite Heritage Society has an outsized role to play in setting the terms of our collective memory. By choosing to obscure the true legacy of the mill and its founders, the Society is distorting our understanding of who we are.

Things improved, not because Brooks and Scanlon were great guys, but because workers and tenants fought back against their greed. That’s the lesson of the Garden City Movement, and that’s the legacy of the Powell River Company.

Over the past two decades, an average of twenty-five newspapers have closed each year in Canada.

Growing parts of the country no longer have journalists covering their communities. According to a recent study, two and a half million Canadians live in a “state of constant news deprivation,” their region covered by one or no local news outlets. As old-fashioned newspapers and traditional models of journalism collapse, social media, conspiratorial thinking, and corporate propaganda are seeping in to fill the void.

In my town, Powell River, we only have one weekly paper - the Peak. It’s owned by Glacier Media, a news conglomerate that publishes dozens of other papers across BC, including the Daily Oil Bulletin, Oilweek, The Northern Miner, Western Investor, and Real Estate Works.

While Glacier’s publishing record hints at an interest beyond community journalism, its parent company, Madison Venture Corp, makes no bones about its profit-motive.

Madison was founded by Sam Grippo, a reclusive investor who made his fortune during Vancouver’s real estate boom around Expo 86. He founded Glacier Media shortly after, buying up small daily and weekly newspapers across BC, eventually growing it into the province’s second-largest newspaper chain. To this day, Grippo presides over his real estate/media empire as chairman of both Glacier Media and Madison Pacific Properties.

Aside from being owned and managed by a real estate developer, Glacier’s profits depend on the real estate market. As Glacier explains in a recent investor information document:

“Certain operations are tied to both the commercial and residential real estate markets. A downturn in real estate markets, from events such as rising interest rates, economic uncertainty, and government regulations can influence the related revenue generations in the operations.”

My question is, what happened? Why does a real estate developer own our only local newspaper? It wasn’t always this way. Despite being a small town, Powell River once supported several independent papers.

This is a brief history of those papers.

Company Era: Powell River Digester

“Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do which must be done, whether you like it or not. Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will broaden your temperance, self-control, diligence, strength of will, content, and a hundred virtues the idle will never know.”
- from the Powell River Digester, Sept 1922.

Powell River is a mill town. Its first newspaper, the Powell River Digester, was owned and operated by the Powell River Company, itself owned by three American lumber barons.

The first issue was published in 1922, a decade after the mill was built. Even though Powell River’s population was only about two thousand at the time, the paper employed a staff of twenty full-time reporters. For five years, they were the only source for local news in Powell River.

At the time, mill employees worked 13-hour shifts, six days a week, making as little as 22.5 cents per hour. In 1913, they went on strike, demanding an eight-hour workday. The Powell River Company refused to bargain.

In 1921, the workers struck again. In response, the company fired them, brought in strikebreakers, and reduced wages by 16%.

In 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Powell River elected Ernest Bakewell (a socialist) to the provincial Legislature. In response, the company fired three hundred and fifty employees on suspicion of having voted for Bakewell. On top of losing their jobs, the fired workers were booted from their company owned homes, and their families blacklisted from employment at mills across the province. An untold number got caught up in the purge for simply being foreign or vaguely left-wing.

The Digester didn’t cover any of this. Instead, all you’ll find in the archive from the era are puff pieces about mill management, rosy depictions of community life, and the occasional racist joke.

It wasn’t until 1927 that Powell River got its first independent press, and workers’ grievances were finally given voice in the public record.

Independent Era: Powell River News and The Town Crier

The Powell River News, founded in 1927, was the town’s first independent newspaper. The Town Crier was established shortly after by Al Alsgard, a former mill worker.

By the 1940s, the Town Crier had emerged as the town’s leading daily paper. It moved out of Al’s Church Street attic and into a new office on Cranberry Street. Equipped with a printing press, linotype machine, and bindery, it was a self-sufficient shop that turned out thousands of newspapers daily. By 1945, Al’s business had grown big enough that he bought out his competition, the Powell River News.

Al was ambitious. Aside from his Powell River papers, he founded the Sechelt Peninsula Times and Coast News, covering the lower Sunshine Coast.

Reading through his papers’ archives, I’m struck by the sheer volume of news that used to be published in Powell River. Even though our town's population has doubled since Al’s days, we only have one weekly paper today - a shadow of what we used to have.

Unlike the Digester, which avoided mentioning the class conflict raging across British Columbia, Al’s papers didn’t shy away from complex issues. For example, in 1949, the Powell River News sent one of their journalists on a month-long tour of Saskatchewan to report on Tommy Douglas’ experiment in socialism - the first socialist government in Canada. The half dozen essays from the trip were eventually compiled into a short book, The Saskatchewan Story. It’s an impressive (and expensive) piece of investigative journalism that’s hard to imagine coming out of a Powell River newspaper today.

Beyond quality journalism, Al’s paper was printed locally and gave the community dozens of well-paid, union jobs.

Corporate Era: Southam News

“Look at who has taken control of the newspapers here. Southam News. I mean, Jesus. Southam News wouldn’t know truth if it kicked them up the arse. They’re not in it for news. It’s just part of the thing that makes them some money. And yet most people don’t even realize that Southam News almost has a stranglehold on what is news around here. They don’t just own The Sun and The Province. Here in Powell River we have this Powell River News and the Town Crier. It’s virtually the same goddam newspaper out of the same goddam office but it comes under two different titles. They’re both owned by the Southam News chain.”

- Anne Cameron, local novelist and poet, in a 1987 interview with BC Bookworld.

Powell River’s era of local, independent news ended when Al Alsgard sold his newspapers in 1970. By then, Canada’s four largest newspaper chains controlled a majority of the market, and the remaining independent papers were getting swallowed up.

Eventually, through a series of hard-to-follow mergers and acquisitions, Powell River News and the Town Crier came under the control of Southam News.

By 1980, Southam was Canada’s biggest newspaper conglomerate - over half the country’s newspapers were owned by Southam and its competitor, Thomson Newspapers. On August 27, 1980, a day remembered as “Black Wednesday” in the newspaper industry, Southam and Thomson simultaneously closed their competing daily papers in Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Vancouver. Overnight, the already powerful chains now had monopolies on daily news in their respective cities.

In response, the police launched a criminal investigation and raided Southam and Thomson’s offices. Eight charges were filed, accusing the chains of conspiracy, unlawful mergers, monopoly, and destruction of documents. Beyond the investigation, a Royal Commission on Newspapers was formed to investigate the growing concentration of media ownership.

The Commission proposed legislation to “prohibit any future chain from acquiring more than five papers,” “require the break-up of regional monopolies,” and “prohibit purchases where the value of the purchaser’s non-newspaper assets exceeded the value of the newspaper.” Significantly, the last proposal was an attempt to prevent industry (real estate, for example) from controlling the media.

Unfortunately, the Commission’s recommendations were never enacted, and all charges against Southam and Thomson were dropped. Corporations won. As of 2017 (the most recent study I could find), only six percent of Canada’s daily newspapers are independently owned.

We see the result everywhere. Newsrooms are “pale shadows of what they used to be.” Complex issues are flattened, their causes obscured. Paranoia and conspiracy are mainstream. But, an underappreciated impact of the corporate victory, particularly for a union town like Powell River, is that the century-old fight between capitalism and socialism disappeared from the public eye, practically overnight.

Newsless Era: Glacier Media

In 1995, the town got a new paper, the Powell River Peak. Initially distributed for free, it undercut the paid subscription model of the Town Crier, and Powell River News. The old papers, printed locally and run by a full-time staff of union workers, couldn’t compete and folded in 1999. In 2015, Glacier Media bought the Powell River Peak.

Like Southam and Thomson in the 1980s, Glacier Media and Black Press Media (BC’s two biggest newspaper chains) swapped dozens of papers throughout the 2010s, giving each chain monopolies in their respective markets.

Even with a monopoly, Glacier is struggling. As profit margins shrink, they’ve been laying off workers and selling assets. As a result, their papers get worse, less people read them, and they make more cuts. Decades into the spiral, they’re sucking the final drops of blood from their shrivelled papers and dumping the bodies.

In 2020, Glacier closed the historic Vancouver Courier (est. 1908). In 2023, the worst year on record for the loss of local print media in Canada, they closed Alaska Highway News (est. 1943) and Dawson Creek Mirror (est. 1930). Last month, they closed three Metro Vancouver papers - Burnaby Now (est. 1983), New Westminster Record (est. 1981), and Tri-City News (est. 1985) - leaving each community newspaperless.

Unifor, representing Glacier’s most recently laid-off workers, issued the following statement:

“Unifor is deeply concerned about the announcement of Glacier Media’s digital community newspaper closures affecting the jobs of Unifor members at Local 2000, in the communities of Burnaby, New Westminster, Port Moody, Anmore Village, Belcarra Village, Coquitlam and Port Coquitlam, contributing to the troubling news deserts in Metro Vancouver.”

To be clear, Glacier Media may be a vampiric machine extracting wealth from a dying industry, but this is not an attack on their workers. Operating under corporate restraints and slashed budgets, they're providing an essential service to the communities they serve.

Each time Glacier shuts a paper down, they’re leaving another community without access to vital information.

Conclusion

“Freedom of the press is not a right of property owners. It is a right of the people.”

- from the final report of the Royal Commission on Newspapers

A century ago, Powell River mill workers fought for fair wages, union recognition, and reasonable hours. They knew the boss’s newspaper wasn’t telling their side of the story.

So, in the thick of the Great Depression, they founded their own paper. Nurtured by the community, it grew into a trusted daily that served the town for nearly seventy years.

Things aren’t so different now. We’re back to having one newspaper, owned by industry. Only real estate has replaced forestry.

Over the past decade, property values across the province have exploded by more than two hundred percent, making investors and corporate landlords like Sam Grippo (the owner of Glacier Media) incredibly rich. Meanwhile, the rest of us are overextended, crushed beneath rent and mortgages that have grown out of all proportion to our stagnant wages.

Why aren’t our papers telling us about tenants’ unions, rent strikes, or other effective ways communities have responded to the crisis? Why aren’t they covering the real estate industry’s ongoing attack against Indigenous rights? Why don't they expose the funders behind the real estate propagandist who just became our member of Parliament?

It’s time to start our own independent local paper, again.

Thanks to Bob Hackett, retired professor of communication and member of our local qathet Climate Alliance. His insights and feedback helped inform this article but the opinions expressed are my own

A lot of attention is being paid to Aaron Gunn’s history of racist comments.

But little has been said of the fact that his career is financed by Vancouver billionaire Chip Wilson and some of the greasiest dudes in Western Canada.

If you’ve read some of my older posts, you’ll recognize a recurring theme: the connection between real estate speculation and BC politics. With Gunn, we’re seeing the same old story playing out in real time.

For the past eight years, his only job has been making YouTube videos about Canadian politics. He’s made over two hundred of them. But who’s funding them?

I did some real basic research, taking screenshots of the credits on his YouTube videos and then Googling the producers.

Here’s who they are:

Brett Wilson

Brett is a Calgary based, multi-millionaire investment banker. If you’re a fan of CBC’s Dragon Den (seasons 3-5), you’ll recognise Brett as one of the panellists. He also enjoyed a brief moment in the public light when he called environmental activists “slimy bastards” and repeatedly suggested they should be hanged for treason.

He made his fortune in Alberta’s oil and gas industry. Before the business went belly-up in 2017, he was the single largest shareholder of Forent Energy.

In 2020, the Alberta Energy Regulator ordered Forent to clean up their thirty-one abandoned oil wells. Instead, Wilson’s business dumped sixteen wells onto the publicly funded Orphan Well Association, leaving taxpayers to foot a $1.1 million cleanup bill. His company still owes $44,000 in unpaid property taxes and an estimated $3.7 million in liabilities for its remaining fifteen abandoned wells.

Despite his legal troubles, he has an estimated net worth of $300 million. As well as producing several of Gunn’s documentaries, Wilson donated the maximum individual contribution limit to his nomination campaign in 2023.

Angelo Isidorou

Angelo is the BC Conservatives’ executive director and campaign manager.

In an attempt to embarrass the BC Conservatives, the (now defunct) BC United party leaked a seven-page report titled "Angelo Isidorou's Extremism" a few weeks before BC’s 2024 provincial election.

Aside from glowing tweets about Donald Trump and Surrey’s very own white-supremacist celebrity Lauren Southern, the most embarrassing revelation from the document is about Isidorou’s failed defamation lawsuit against former Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart.

In 2021, Isidorou was the director of Vancouver’s right-wing municipal party, the Non-Partisan Association (NPA). At the time, the NPA was running Fred Harding as its mayoral candidate. Fluent in Mandarin, a former cop, and a successful real estate investor, Harding got in trouble for promoting luxury Vancouver real estate in China during his campaign.

Stewart claimed that public statements by Isidorou demonstrated the NPA’s "open support for hate groups." When the NPA sued for defamation, the courts agreed with Stewart’s assessment of Isidorou and the NPA and awarded Stewart $100,000 in legal costs.

Frankie Basso and Grant Woods

I couldn’t figure out who Frankie Basso is. sorry guys. Maybe this realtor from Guelph?

Grant Woods is the owner of Woods Media Company - a business that creates videos and graphics for the political right. He’s a young guy and a frequent collaborator of Gunn’s.

Significantly, many of his videos are produced by Chip Wilson’s corporate lobby group, Pacific Prosperity Network (PPN).

Chip Wilson

Chip is savvy enough to keep his name off Gunn’s credit roll, but his fingerprints are all over the guy.

Chip Wilson is best known as Vancouver’s billionaire founder of Lululemon, but in 2015 he was pushed off the board for his offensive comments about women. Since then, he’s pivoted into real estate, development, and right-wing political advocacy.

His new company, Low Tide Property, is on a mission to build a real estate portfolio worth $1.5 billion by 2030. They’ve been bullish, buying up property in East Vancouver neighbourhoods. Their strategy is to evict low-income tenants, charities, musicians, and artists - then turn their homes into revenue-generating condos and storefronts.

In 2022, Chip founded the PPN with a $380,000 donation. PPN is a free-enterprise lobby group that advocates for the interests of Chip’s real estate empire. This hints at their motivation for sponsoring the premiere of Gunn’s viral documentary, Vancouver is Dying - a documentary that argues for using police to clear homeless people from valuable sections of the city’s downtown core.

Chip also owns the Facebook page BC Proud, which he uses to get around Election BC’s third-party advertiser laws since (even though he’s paid for followers) social media posts don’t count as advertisements.

From 2017 to 2020, Gunn was on Chip’s payroll as a senior contributor and board member of BC Proud.

Conclusion

This has been a break from my usual history writing.

I live in Gunn’s riding and am frustrated that no one else has connected the dots between his campaign and the real estate industry.

People are struggling to get by right now. Undoubtedly, many voters are willing to overlook Gunn’s anti-Indigenous racism if he can do something about the cost of living - if he can bring down rents, cut taxes, and help people drowning in mortgage payments.

The thing is, he won’t. His backers are real estate speculators, corporate landlords, and oil executives. He’s going to be looking after their interests, not yours.

“The Sunshine Coast reality is that 5% of our population have assumed at least 50% of the power in determining how the rest of us live. And they’re abusing it. The shìshàlh have shown a pattern of indifference to our community’s values and residents are justifiably concerned about what lies ahead. This shìshàlh council can’t be blamed for past blunders, but they are responsible for current resentment. And they should be ashamed.”

Brian Lee, editor of the Harbour Spiel, January 2024.

The Pender Harbour and Area Residents Association (PHARA) is a nonprofit, volunteer-run organisation on BC’s Sunshine Coast. Generally, they’re a pretty innocuous group. They host annual trash bashes and ocean cleanups, award volunteers, and maintain a handful of community gardens.

On September 11th, 2024, they took a sharp turn from their usual community-building and submitted a petition to the Supreme Court of BC. Citing “longstanding concerns about the role the province has given the shíshálh Nation in decision-making,” they're demanding that the Province repeal the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA).

At the heart of their beef is the shíshálh swiya Dock Management Plan - an agreement between the Province and shíshálh Nation that regulates the size and location of private docks on the Sunshine Coast.

The BC Assembly of First Nations has responded to their lawsuit, saying that:

“PHARA, and its members who support the Petition, have demonstrated that they value private docks and dock permits over the realization of the fundamental human rights of the shíshálh Nation and all First Nations peoples in BC, a shocking and regressive view that must be directly and vigorously opposed.”

Overturning DRIPA would be a big deal. It was passed in 2019 by a rare unanimous vote in the legislature and "constitutes the minimum standards for the survival, dignity and well-being of the Indigenous people of the world."1

So far, media coverage of the lawsuit has been sparse. No one’s bothered to ask basic questions like - who’s funding the lawsuit, and what are their motives?

Origins

The devil, who had appeared to sleep throughout all of 1861, began to show himself in 1862.

- Reverend Leon Fouquet, missionary to the shíshálh, in a letter to Reverend Father Superior General Jolivet.2

Before Europeans arrived, an estimated 20,000 people lived in shíshálh swiya - a coastal territory just north of Vancouver, stretching from Roberts Creek to Lang Bay.3

Their livelihoods were intertwined with the ocean. Weirs were used to trap migrating siyánxw (salmon) and slháwat’ (herring). In tidal flats, cultivated sea gardens provided an abundance of stl’élum (cockles), sk’áyi (butter clams), smét’áy (horse clams), skw’éts’kw’íts’ (sea urchins), and xéyék (crab).

Two successive waves of smallpox devastated the shíshálh and disrupted their traditional patterns. The first was in 1780, a decade before direct contact with Europeans.

The second outbreak started in Victoria in 1862 and was made much worse by the colonial government's mismanagement. Public hysteria blamed Indigenous encampments for spreading the disease. Newspapers demanded the government "remove the entire Indian population" and bring them "to one of the islands in the Straits—there to rot and die with the loathsome disease which is now destroying the poor wretches at the rate of six each day.”4

Police emptied the camps at gunpoint, burnt them to the ground, and forced some 300 Indigenous people (many of them infected by smallpox) to evacuate back to their home communities.5 Within a year, two-thirds of Indigenous people across BC died. A government census in 1875 found only 175 shíshálh, less than one percent of their population from a century earlier.6

It wasn’t long before Canadians started claiming the land.

From the get-go, shíshálh villages were coveted by speculators for their value as luxury real estate. In 1892, Herbert Whitaker bought 260 acres in ch'atelích (Sechelt) where he built two hotels and a series of stores, wharves, and rental cottages. The Rogers family, of sugar refinery fame, built vacation homes in kálpilín (Pender Harbour). Seattle aviation executive Thomas Hamilton built a resort for yachters, the Malibu Club, in swiwelát (Princess Louisa Inlet).

But, the shíshálh were still around - an inconvenience to the yachting class. As anthropologist Peter Merchant wrote, “harassing shíshálh families, then burning their homes was the preferred method of pre-emption during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”7 Thirty-six petitions were submitted by the shíshálh to the Royal Commission on Indian Affairs between 1913 and 1916:

When the first white man went there he burned our houses and settled himself there, and so please take this man away and give him another place. (Paul)

Our island in Pender Harbour is only a heap of stones, no water is there and no wood to be had. Now there is a spring on the mainland, about 300 yards away from our island. Now we have used this spring-water for time immemorial, we even had formerly our houses near-by. The white man, that owns the land and the spring now chases our women away, when they want to take water there. Is that right, is that Christian? We cannot use saltwater for cooking and drinking. Please, let us have the use of this water, as our forefathers have had. (Johnson)

Today, shíshálh Band Lands (reserves) cover 0.15% of their territory. The rest is a patchwork of timber leases, Crown land, and private property.

The dock management plan

“The resources of our swiya have sustained our people since time immemorial. We have cared for and stewarded these resources to provide for abundance for our people for many generations. Through development, including dock development, we have seen an incredible decline of these resources. Collectively, we must address the impacts and pressures on the resources to provide for future generations. At the heart of the dock management plan is protection of and restoration of these intertidal resources and cultural belongings.”

-lhe hiwus Joe, Chief of shíshálh Nation

As Canadians continued to settle on the Sunshine Coast, the shíshálh found themselves increasingly hemmed in by private property. In 2005, concerned about their vanishing access to the foreshore, the shíshálh secured a temporary moratorium on new dock permits and entered into negotiations with the Province.

Focusing on the culturally significant village of kálpilín (Pender Harbour), the Province conducted an archaeological survey. It found that “any development in the project area has the potential to destructively impact archaeological materials; with many impacts having already occurred.” An environmental study found that “increased number of docks had adverse effects on algae diversity, kelp cover percentage, fish abundance, and eelgrass presence.”

In 2018, the Province released the Pender Harbour Dock Management Plan (DMP). Its application was limited to kálpilín and only to the foreshore, not private property. Docks were still allowed - so long as they were less than 40 m³ and didn’t block access to the foreshore. Existing dock owners had three to ten years to come into compliance.

Still, this was too much for PHARA. Their spokesperson, Sean McAllister said that “civil disobedience isn’t out of the question.”8 Defiant signs appeared along the coast, declaring “This is our land, not Sechelt land” and “Our marine assets will not be given up without a fight.” A pamphlet called the Pender Patriot circulated, complaining “that the playing field will no longer be level and there will be different rules based on race."9

The Province received over 1700 letters of concern from the community.10 Nearly all of them mention property value:

The enforced removal of private boat houses and docks, as stipulated by the proposed plan, will not only significantly devalue our property but also strip away the very essence of our family's lakeside living experience. These docks and boat houses are more than mere structures; they are integral to our way of life, facilitating countless family activities and memories formed over generations

It’s wrong for people who own or have purchased property in good faith to have their rights, traditional practices, and property values diminished due to DMP.

People that don’t even live here, have never paid taxes, now have the say in how our paradise is run. Pender Harbour has always been known to be a place to live as very special. Our property value now has gone downhill, boaters have been envious of our special place, don’t even wish to drop in for visits!

It’s worth noting that the average value of a waterfront home with a dock on the Sunshine Coast is $1.7 million. The DMP is expected to reduce some property values by 15 to 35 percent - by comparison, property values across BC have increased over 200 percent since 2010.11

Disregarding the public’s concerns, the Province went ahead with enforcement of the new rules. In 2022, sixteen landowners received notice to remove their nonconforming docks. The next summer, government contractors removed the remaining docks under the supervision of an RCMP escort.12

In 2023, the Province upped the ante with a draft amendment, renamed the shíshálh swiya Dock Management Plan, that expanded the plan’s reach to include all of shìshàlh Nation’s traditional territory.

Significantly, the shìshàlh are still negotiating an agreement under DRIPA that may give them, rather than the Province, authority over dock permits on Crown land.13

The lawsuit

PHARA wants to make sure that doesn’t happen. In September 2024, they filed their petition to the Supreme Court of BC. They make two basic arguments:

1. DRIPA conflicts with section 35 of the Constitution Act.

2. Indigenous governing bodies shouldn’t have decision-making authority over non-Indigenous persons.

It’s hard to imagine the courts will agree. The federal government, in its own UNDRIP legislation, is clear that:

“The protection of Aboriginal and treaty rights — recognized and affirmed by section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 — is an underlying principle and value of the Constitution of Canada, and Canadian courts have stated that such rights are not frozen and are capable of evolution and growth.”

Their second point is an embarrassing double standard. Non-Indigenous governments have been claiming decision-making authority over Indigenous people since day one. It also goes against the precedent set in court by Haida (2004), Tsilhqotʼin (2014), and most recently Wolastoqey (2024).

To argue their case, PHARA has retained some big-shot lawyers - Robin Junger and Joan Young. Robin, a Harvard Law School graduate, has served as the Deputy Minister of Energy, Mines & Petroleum Resources, and as Chair of the Oil and Gas Commission.

No doubt, the lawsuit’s gonna be expensive. How is a small-town, volunteer-run nonprofit paying for it?

Turns out, that’s a surprisingly hard question to answer. Nonprofits aren’t obligated to disclose their funding and PHARA is a black box. Their website claims they draw their “main funding from a $30 membership per family per year,” but they also solicit donations for a litigation fund. I emailed to ask which individuals or organisations have contributed, but they declined to comment.

But, there are clues. For example, their president, Peter Robson is the editor of Cottage Life West and Pacific Yachting magazines, as well as the author of Pender Harbour Landing: History With a View - a book he describes as a “project to promote Pender Harbour Landing estate properties.”14

Waterfront Protection Coalition

PHARA isn’t the only group simping for yachters on the Sunshine Coast. The Waterfront Protection Coalition was founded shortly after the DMP was released. Their goal is to “advocate for all waterfront communities in Canada who face similar unfair legislation without representation.”

They’ve got money. Their GoFundMe raised $100,000 in its first six days and is currently shy of a half million. Most of the donations are anonymous sums of $10,000 to $25,000.

They’ve hired a PR firm and a lawyer. Their lawyer, Roy Millen’s past clients include: LNG Canada, Denison Mines, Seabridge Gold, Arctic Canadian Diamond, and Pure Gold Mining.

One of their directors is Jim Stewart, a Nanaimo-based realtor. Previously, he served as Director of the BC Liberal Party (under Gordon Campbell, 1999–2012), president of the Vancouver Island Real Estate Board (2011-13), and president of the BC Real Estate Association (2017-19).

But their president, Denise Brynelsen, is the cherry on top of a greasy cake. A Sechelt-based realtor, Denise was the subject of a recent BC Financial Services Authority investigation. In October 2024, they found she had “committed professional misconduct” and ordered her to pay a $100,000 fine, $2,500 in enforcement expenses, and take a remedial education course.

The scandal is juicy. It reveals not only Denise’s stake in denying the DMP but, more broadly, the stake of the luxury real estate industry as a whole in denying Indigenous governance across British Columbia.

In 2017, Denise acted as a dual agent, representing the buyer and seller of a property in Pender Harbour. Her listing described it as an:

“Absolutely one of a kind low-bank waterfront property with private moorage. The completely renovated beach cottage sits right above the shore and faces South with sunshine all day and gorgeous ocean views. Outside you can keep your boat at the private 50’ dock with protected, year round deep water moorage & explore the 2.44 acres of wilderness & privacy.”

What the listing didn’t reveal, is the fact that the foreshore tenure had expired and the “completely renovated beach cabin” was an illegal structure. This was a deliberate omission. Before posting the listing, Denise had received an email from the Province clarifying that:

“the cabin is currently not legalized and the use is non-conforming to our policies. Given that the dock management plan is not final yet, I can’t say for certain if we could legalize it after the plan comes into effect. However, generally speaking such a use on Crown foreshore is contrary to provincial policies and likely would not be approved.” (emphasis in original)

Without disclosing this information to her clients, in September 2017 Denise sold the property for $900,000.

Within a year, the new owners received a letter from the Province demanding they remove their cabin from the foreshore. They tried relocating it inland but discovered that it had been renovated illegally and would have to be brought to code before they could move it. In 2021, they decided to demolish the cabin at their own expense, and have a new house built on the property.

Denise gambled that the DMP would be toothless - that she could sell an illegal dock and cabin to unsuspecting buyers and the Province wouldn’t do anything about it. Proven wrong, she’s become a martyr and leader in the fight for waterfront property values.

It’s realtors all the way up

In 2023, real estate contributed over $56 billion to the provincial economy—more than three times as much as mining, oil and gas, agriculture, fishing, hunting, and forestry combined.15 Powerful interests are at play.

Leading up to the 2024 provincial election, Kevin Falcon was the leader of BC United (formerly BC Liberals) and a probable candidate for Premier. Previously, he’d spent a decade as Vice President of Anthem Capital, a multinational corporate landlord that uses artificial intelligence to manage their properties and “maximize quarterly distributions to investors.”16

A few months before the election, he posted a video on Facebook claiming that the DMP threatened private property rights across the province and must be stopped.

The next day, his party announced Sechelt realtor Chris Moore as their candidate for the Powell River-Sunshine Coast riding. Chris is a member of both the President’s (RE/ MAX - Top 1%) and Chairman’s (Royal LePage: $500K-$1M) Clubs for top producers and, if elected as MLA, one of his “five bold missions” was to overhaul the DMP.

Even John Rustad, leader of the BC Conservatives, got in on the fun - promising to “stop the NDPs assault on land rights and repeal UNDRIP,” calling it “an assault on your private property rights and our shared rights to use Crown Land.”17

Chip

Clearly, there are a lot of rich people who aren’t okay with Indigenous people telling them how big their docks can be.

But there’s one billionaire real estate mogul in particular who has the money, motivation, and such a specific, personal vendetta that it’s nearly impossible to imagine he isn’t involved.

Chip Wilson is best known as the founder of Lululemon, but in 2015 he was pushed off the board for his offensive comments about women.18 Since then, he’s pivoted into real estate and development.

His new company, Low Tide Property, is on a mission to build a real estate portfolio worth $1.5 billion by 2030.19 They’ve been bullish, buying up property in East Vancouver neighbourhoods. Their strategy is to evict low-income tenants, charities, musicians, and artists - then turn their homes into revenue-generating condos and storefronts.

At the same time, Chip got political. With a $380,000 donation, he founded the Pacific Prosperity Network, a right-wing lobby group. They own the Facebook page BC Proud and use it to get around Election BC’s third-party advertiser laws since - even though they’ve bought followers - social media posts don’t count as advertisements.20 They campaigned for both Kevin Falcon and John Rustad.

Chip was also a major force behind developer-friendly Ken Sims getting elected Mayor of Vancouver.21 In return, Ken named October 3^rd the city’s official Chip Wilson Day.

Chip’s involvement with the DMP started in 2013 when he submitted a dock proposal for his $9 million vacation home in Middlepoint Bight, halfway between Pender Harbour and Sechelt. The proposed dock was 2,498 ft² - big enough for the seasonal moorage of his two 24-foot boats, 47-foot yacht, and various small watercraft. The proposal also included two 3,106 ft² breakwaters.

His neighbours were pissed. Unhappy about the prospect of losing their swimming zone and worried about the impacts on eelgrass meadows and bird habitat, they wrote letters of concern to the district. The council unanimously opposed the project.22 shíshálh Chief Calvin Craigan demanded consultation, saying "If this fella [Chip] is planning on building a dock, he has to approach the Sechelt band.”23 It made headlines across the province.

Trolling the haters, for April Fools 2015 Chip put up a fake development notice in front of his Vancouver mansion. It proposed building an obnoxiously large, 8000 square-foot heliport dock off his backyard into English Bay.

In the end, neither the shíshálh nor the regional district could stop Chip from building his dock. The DMP was still in development and only the Province had decision-making authority over the foreshore. After moving the dock 20 meters to avoid an eelgrass bed, it was approved in 2017.

Eight years later, and Chip could be forced to demolish his dock. One of PHARA’s main grievances with the DMP is that it doesn’t allow for the grandfathering of existing docks.24

It’s a class war, not a race war

Nearly everyone involved in the fight to cancel DRIPA is a realtor, a yacht owner, or both.

To advance their interests, they’re working hard to stoke the flames of centuries-old racial tensions on the Sunshine Coast. They want us to believe they’re the good guys, standing up against Indigenous rights on behalf of all Canadians.

Because, as long as we’re worked up about Indigenous people coming after our rights, we won’t notice that it’s the yachting class who are taking them away. That it’s their oversized docks blocking our access to public land, their obsession with property values fueling our housing crisis, their yachts guzzling gas and polluting our water, and their excessive wealth going toward a hateful lawsuit rather than literally anything else.

“I don't care if we're First Nations people, we're Chinese, we're Japanese, we're German, we're whoever we are, we all need to take pride in our own history. I'm not saying we're the only ones, as First Nations people, that we should be proud of our history. We all should have that.”

Dr. Elsie Paul, Written as I Remember It: Teachings (Ɂəms tɑɁɑw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder  

In August, the Union of BC Indian Chiefs sent a letter to Powell River Council specifically calling our town out for “the deeply troubling trend of Residential School racist denialism” and an “unwillingness to accept historical fact and the work of experts.”1

It’s clear that, as we grapple with the reality of colonialism, our community is going through something of an identity crisis. In a way, it’s understandable. As we learn about the darker side of our past, we're faced with a hard choice: do we shrink in shame, or insist that things weren’t really as bad as they say?

Elsie Paul points us towards another option. Can we hold the fullness of our town’s history without guilt or denial, but with pride? This is my attempt - the story of Powell River from the perspective of the workers who built it.  

The Boss’s Town

In 1874, land speculator Robert Rithet purchased Lot 450, a 2,775 acre timber lease on the BC coast. The Tla’amin people who live there were not consulted, and protested the sale and subsequent logging of their land.2 They were ignored, and within a few decades the former village of tisk^wat would become the world’s largest newspaper mill.

In 1909, having “completely exhausted [the] supply of standing timber”3 at their Minnesota mill, the American businessmen Dwight Brooks, Anson Brooks, and M.J. Scanlon began looking west for new forests to fall. With a seemingly endless supply of old growth, a river for hydropower, and ocean access for easy transportation, they saw the economic potential of Lot 450 and founded the Powell River Paper Company. By April 1912 their new mill was turning out its first rolls of paper, and the beginnings of a townsite was taking form. The newly built employee houses were clean, well constructed, and boasted modern amenities like telephones, plumbing, and cheap electricity. At the edge of green lawns, the streets were boardwalked and tree-lined. There was a community playing field and an asphalt tennis court - all built by the company.

But, despite the company’s benevolence, not everyone was happy. The basic wage for mill work was only 22.5 cents per hour4 ($6.20 per hour in 2024 dollars). Employees were expected to work a physically demanding job for 13 hours straight, six days a week - Sunday was their only day off. Wages trickled back into the company’s pockets every time they paid rent on their company-owned home, or bought groceries at the company-owned store (which was literally called The Company Stores, at the site of the current Townsite market). Isolated and removed from the rest of the province, the company effectively owned and managed nearly every aspect of community life in early Powell River - as one local historian put it, “the entire town was on the company payroll.”5 

In 1913 there weren’t yet any laws that protected workers’ right to form unions. Regardless, many of the mill workers risked their livelihoods to join the International Brotherhood of Paper Makers and push back against the company rule. Their main objective, in line with a growing international labour movement, was the adoption of an 8 hour work day. The Powell River Paper Company, confident in its power, refused to bargain and locked the union out.

In 1921 union workers, now members of the International Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulfite and Paper Mill Workers, struck again. This time they wanted company recognition, better wages, and a union shop. In response, the company fired the union workers, brought in strikebreakers from Eastern Canada, and reduced wages by 16%.6

The Mill Loses it Over Ernest Bakewell

Organised labour wouldn’t manage to pose a serious threat to The Powell River Company until the Great Depression shook things up. Tough economic times meant layoffs, dangerous working conditions, and an increased disregard for the environment. There was a growing understanding among workers that the unchecked greed of the rich was to blame for their misery. We must “chop the tentacles off the monster that is leaving a wasted country and a mangled humanity along their roads to profit” wrote an editor of the union magazine, B.C. Lumber Worker.7 Class consciousness was at an all-time high.

It was in these troubled times that Powell River elected Ernest Bakewell, an engineer at the Ocean Falls mill, as their MLA. Bakewell was a member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a democratic socialist party that pulled no punches. As the official opposition in the provincial legislature, with 32% of the vote, they openly boasted that “no CCF Government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism.”8 

Despite his party’s bold rhetoric, during his tenure in the legislature, Bakewell was an advocate for modest reform. His policies included a reforestation tax on logging companies, government-sponsored salmon habitat restoration, job training for unemployed fishermen, and a transition from clearcutting to selective logging.9   

The Powell River Company, facing the prospect of government regulation for the first time, was out for blood. In retaliation, they fired 350 of their employees on suspicion of voting for Bakewell - although an untold number got caught up in the purge for simply being foreign or vaguely left-wing. On top of losing their jobs, the fired workers were booted from their homes, their families blacklisted, and the company even tried to forbid the remaining employees from associating with their old coworkers.10 One old timer remembers how “Giuseppe (Joe) lost his job at the mill in the early 1930s, along with many others, because they said that he had voted for the CCF. He wasn’t a Canadian citizen and had never voted. He was very hurt by this and never forgot it.” 11

There Will Be Blood - the Battles of Ballantyne Pier and Blubber Bay

Emboldened by the election of the CCF into the legislature, new provincial laws that recognised (some) union rights, and general public sympathy - the 1930s saw epic battles across the province as organised labour increasingly threatened employers’ chokehold. Powell River was right at the heart of it. 

By 1935 unions had effectively organised nearly every port in BC. Vancouver in particular was headquarter to some of the most militant unions and workers won victory after victory as they struck against the bosses.

Powell River, isolated from the progress of Vancouver unions, was still in the throes of the Great Depression - “about half of the workers there worked only fourteen days a month, the other half eked out an existence by fishing, the odd day’s or hour’s work, relief and loafing.”12 Laid-off employees, desperate for work, accepted contract work at a fraction of their old wages. In solidarity, members of Vancouver waterfront unions snuck into town and, meeting away from prying company eyes, helped fifty-one Powell River dock workers form their first union - The Powell River and District Waterfront Workers Association. When the new union asked management to match their wages with Vancouver dock workers, the company refused and locked them out.

This pissed the unions right off. Longshoremen in Vancouver, Port Alberni, and Seattle refused to unload ships coming from the non-union dock in Powell River. Industry bosses were ready for the fight and retaliated by locking out 900 union dock workers in Vancouver. With protection from armed police escorts, the shipping industry brought in strikebreakers to continue unloading Powell River cargo. 13  

On June 18, 1935, over a thousand striking longshoremen and their supporters marched down Vancouver streets toward Ballantyne Pier to “talk to the non-union workers.” But, before they could get to the docks, they were stopped by a wall of baton-wielding police and machine guns aimed directly at them. Undeterred, strike leader Ivan Emery bad-assedly said: "In the war, many of us faced the guns of the German army. Now we are faced with a squad of mounties with machine guns behind them. I believe there are enough returned men among us willing to listen to the rattle of machine gun fire again."14

The battle lasted three hours, saw the first non-military use of tear gas in Canada, and ended in the hospital for many. The legacy of the fight is ambiguous, with no meaningful resolution of tension between workers and bosses. 

Texada Island in the 1930s, like Powell River, was under the thumb of a monopoly - the Pacific Lime Company. A mining and mill operation, Pacific Lime owned virtually all of the facilities in Blubber Bay. In 1938, organised under the International Woodworkers of America (IWA), workers struck and took Pacific Lime to court. In legally binding arbitration, Pacific Lime conceded to wage increases and a promise not to fire any union workers. A few weeks later, Pacific Lime fired twenty-three union workers. On June 2, two-thirds of Pacific Lime’s employees walked off the job.

Rather than enforcing their government’s labour laws, the Provincial Police worked hand-in-hand with Pacific Lime to escort non-union workers that the company brought in by steamship from Vancouver. For months, workers picketed and whenever fresh strikebreakers arrived at the Blubber Bay wharf a skirmish would break out between the strikers, company thugs, scabs, and police.

By mid-September tensions boiled over into a full-blown riot. While it’s unclear who started it, eleven strikers ended up in the Powell River hospital and twenty-three were arrested. Among those arrested was local vice-president Robert Gardner who was “taken into a private room and beaten by Constable Andrew Williamson, suffering four broken ribs.”15 

The next day, forty members of the Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulfite and Paper Mill Workers travelled over from Powell River and warned police to back down - or else four hundred of them would be back “and we won’t fool with you bastards.”16 While badass, the threat wouldn’t come to anything - after eleven months, the Pacific Lime strikers were worn out. Charged with rioting and unlawful assembly, twelve were sentenced to 4-6 months of hard labour. Gardner was among those convicted and, still weak from his injuries, died while serving his sentence in Oakalla prison.

Despite violent repression and blatant collusion between the police and company bosses, workers didn’t give up the fight and continued to chip away at company power. In 1946 the IWA won a historic victory - a 40-hour work week. In 1958, unionisation in BC peaked at 54% of the workforce. By 1973, 2,233 of 2,600 Powell River mill workers were unionised. 

Marxist Catholics?

Like a lot of Powell Riverites, I bank with First Credit Union. As the name suggests, it was the first credit union in BC - founded in 1939 by Father Leo Hobson and Walter Cavanaugh, a chip screen tender at the mill. Cavanaugh, like a lot of mill workers at the time, didn’t qualify for a mortgage from a traditional bank. Undeterred, after researching his options he stumbled onto the idea that a worker-owned credit co-operative was a way that workers like him could bypass the gatekeepers at the traditional banks, and directly finance their own loans and mortgages. 

Revealing of the town’s character is how Cavanaugh’s radical and socialist ambition of a worker-owned bank found meaningful support in the community and was nurtured into reality. He found his strongest ally in Father Hobson at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, who agreed to help Cavanaugh in his goal. Hobson’s church soon grew into a meeting place for some 140 workers who helped organise and turn the cooperative vision into reality. The diverse group of Catholics, Protestants, Conservatives, and Socialists all squeezed into the small church to hear Hobson’s class-conscious sermons. Notably, Hobson drew on the Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII Rerum novarum,17 or "Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor” which, amongst other anti-capitalist sentiments, taught that:

“The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves, and stand less in need of help from the State; whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon, and must chiefly depend upon the assistance of the State. And it is for this reason that wage-earners, since they mostly belong in the mass of the needy, should be specially cared for and protected by the government”

Conclusion

As time passes, so does our understanding of history. But, as we tear down the old historical myths, we can’t forget to remember our real history. It seems that a lot of us don’t know who we are, and how we got here.

I’ve pointed toward a handful of local historical figures that I feel proud to be connected to, and inspired to continue in their tradition. There’s Father Leo Hobson, a class-conscious preacher, and credit cooperative pioneer; Robert Gardner, a martyred union activist who died at the hands of police in the fight for fair wages; Ernest Bakewell, an unabashed socialist who advocated for labour rights and the environment. There are countless others, and they’re not all white men (it just happens that white men’s stories are well-recorded and easy to find). I hope that we can shine a light on their stories too.