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Land’s End
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The resource towns along the west coast of Canada—those that have survived, and those that haven’t—tell a story of land’s end, as a place and as a possibility.
In 1999, Christopher Grabowski, a documentary writer and photographer, read an article in the Globe and Mail, reporting that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans withheld a major study of economically devastated West Coast fishing communities and then released a sanitized version, omitting the criticism contained in the original report. He packed his notebook and camera and set out for the west coast of Canada, north of Vancouver, a vast, rugged mosaic of islands, peninsulas and waterways at the edge of the continent. There he travelled from place to place usually by water, because no roads can be built there and talked to people in towns and villages whose world had changed profoundly, almost overnight. That trip turned out to be the first of many over the next ten years.
The west coast of Canada, which extends 965 kilometres northwest of Victoria by air (about 27,000 kilometres of coastline), once supported scores of resource towns and other single-industry communities. Fish, forests and minerals were rich, abundant and conveniently located near myriad waterways for easy shipping to destinations near and far. These resources have been extracted in huge quantities for some two hundred years, faster and faster as each decade has brought new technology and new demand for the products.
Along the west coast, as in other Canadian hinterlands, most of this bounty has been obtained in resource-dependent towns: small, remote settlements built around mines, mills, fisheries, railways, smelters, etc., to accommodate the workers who extract and process the resources. Workers and their families moved long distances to settle in these small, isolated towns, which had access to the outside world only by steamship (and, by the 1950s, small aircraft), because the wages were good. But resource towns are precarious by nature: the raw materials can simply run out, and world markets (most products are exported) are unpredictable.
Even when exports are healthy, businesses and governments are vulnerable to the pressures of globalization and outsourcing, and residents have little or no control over the local economy.
The post-war boom in B.C.’s resource-dependent economy could not last forever. In the early 1980s the economy stalled and then plummeted. In only two centuries, a priceless trove of natural resources that had been maintained by indigenous people for thousands of years had been plundered; much of it could never be restored. Over the next decade, many small centres along the Pacific coast were devastated. Some towns managed to sustain themselves with other activities; some limped along in a smaller, slower economy; some were abandoned.
The story of these places that emerged for Grabowski years later, at the turn of the millennium, is about “land’s end” in the geographic sense. It is also about the end of an economy based on the assumption of infinite natural resources, and about the frontier communities that made the resource boom possible. It is a story about missed opportunities, but also the many opportunities that are yet to be explored, particularly the chance for all of us to look at British Columbia’s resource and single-industry towns—those that have survived and those that haven’t—from a fresh perspective.
Ucluelet, Winter Harbour, Sointula, Zeballos, Telegraph Cove—even the names of the places Grabowski visited point to a long, miscellaneous, rich history of settlement and livelihood. The two towns described here, Ocean Falls and Alert Bay, represent two very different perspectives on land’s end—as a place, as an idea, as a possibility.
Date Published:
November 9, 2009
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