At the turn of the last century the city of Victoria showed all the signs of robust economic health: not only was Victoria the capitol of British Columbia, but Victoria was also the closest Canadian port to China, and later to the Panama Canal, and it was located in one of the resource-richest areas in the world. The city had a flourishing sealing, lumber, and fishing industry, and it also had a respectably-sized manufacturing and processing industry. However, by mid-century, through what apears to be short-sighted resource-management, Victoria found most of its industries ebbing away. It had also, by mid-century, lost its trading prominence to fast-growing Vancouver. By the 1980s, Victoria’s biggest employers were no longer found in resource- and manufacturing-industries, but in tourism and government. The Upper Harbour, home to manufacturing and industry, fell into decline. Today, there are initiatives to redevelop the long neglected Upper Harbour into “sustainable” communities based on desirable housing with “new urbanism” guidelines, green building practices, and ecologically friendly industries. Dockside Green, a current project, is the best example of these initiatives. But how will Victoria sustain industry, even hi-tech, given the city’s past history of slash-and-burn economics based on resource exploitation? In this essay I will endeavour to highlight some of this past history, which shows that Victoria went from an economically thriving city in the 1910s to one that went into steep decline in the latter part of the 20th century. Victoria is once again standing at the threshhold of an economic boom, and it is necessary to understand its past history to better plan a sustainable future.

The Golden Years

Vancouver Island and the surrounding waters have long been called idyllic. Sir Francis Drake, who led a secret expedition to find the Northwest Passage in the late 16th century, stopped here enroute and found what he called a “paradise.” Captain George Vancouver, who explored Vancouver Island in the 18th century, was equally enthusiastic. Most explorers agreed that the setting’s natural splendor was its most abundant resource. Before the arrival of Europeans in the 19th century the Strait of Georgia was home to many types of whales and other marine mammals such as seals and sea lions, as well as halibut, cod, herring, and of course salmon. Each year more than 100 million salmon used to spend their last days in the Strait of Georgia before swimming up nearby rivers to spawn and die. This, in turn, attracted vast schools of herring, flocks of seagulls and eagles, and bears. The waters around Victoria were also home to the most prized fur-bearing animal: the sea otter. Before they were hunted to near extinction, the sea otter would also have been seen playing amidst this “strait of plenty.”

Fort Victoria was founded in 1843 by James Douglas, Chief Factor for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Victoria remained a small town until the Fraser River goldrushes of the 1850s. By 1880, Victoria was a booming town fully exploiting the resources that were available to it: fishing, sealing, timber, and trade. Victoria’s Upper Harbor was the center of a shipbuilding industry, as well as the base of operations for the lucrative whaling and sealing industries. The whaling industry was abandoned in the 1870s when BC entered Confederation and was forced to accept the restrictions that were placed on the use of explosives. Prior to this, BC whalers used explosives to hunt whales. Since whales were now harder to kill, and since seals were more numerous, the whalers quickly abandoned whaling and became sealers. The sealing industry was ruthlessly pursued until Pelagic Sealing was banned in 1911. This treaty was the first international agreement protecting a marine species. The sealing industry is a good example of the resource industries that once sustained Victoria: seals were incredibly abundant, as the hunting results of the first few years show. Yet Victorians mismanaged the resource so badly that by 1911 they were catching fewer than 2,000 seals where they previously had caught 90,000. Once sealing was banned, whaling became profitable and worthwhile again. In fact, from 1912-64 Victoria’s Upper Harbour served not only as a port for BC’s entire whaling fleet, but also as its administrative headquarters.

Even though the sealing industry came to an end, other industries continued to ensure that the Upper Harbour was still a busy and lively part of the city. The shipbuilding industry was one such contributor. Point Hope Shipyards is one of the oldest companies still in operation in the Upper Harbour area. It was one of many such shipyards that, in the early 20th century, flourished in the Upper Harbour between the Johnson Street Bridge and the Selkirk water. This stretch of the waterway was the traditional industrial heartland of the harbour. Capitol Iron, as well as other companies, used to have their buildings here. Capitol Iron used its Upper Harbour facilities to take apart, among other things, old battle ships, which it then recycled for use in boat building. During the glory days of the Island’s lumber industry, there were also 50 sawmills operating in the Upper Harbour. A 1928 book, entitled Principal Ports of the World, gives a detailed acount of what Victoria’s Upper Harbour was exporting at the time: Victoria exported lumber (both logs and rough lumber); manufactured lumber such as doors, windows, and sashes; wood pulp; hides; raw furs; sand and gravel; cement; lime; fresh fish (salmon, halibut, cod, herring); canned fish (including canned salmon, clams, and pilchards); oysters; and whale guano. Most of these goods would have been proccessed, and exported, from the Upper Harbour. Like so many other Victoria industries, Victoria’s first oil refinery also had its roots in the Upper Harbour. In 1893, Imperial Gasworks, then the biggest Canadian oil firm, opened its first refinery in Victoria: its vast empire stretched from London, Ontario, to Victoria, British Columbia. Yet when you walk around the Upper Harbour today, you can hardly imagine what it must have looked like in 1928, with its factories and wharves, its noise and activity.

Decline and Revival

Victoria’s economic history sometimes resembles that of a fairy-tale kingdom gone horribly wrong: while the first explorers and settlers found a paradise with abundant natural resources, 19th and 20th century inhabitants have tended to squander that vast potential. When the Panama Canal was built in 1914, Victoria’s leaders were hopeful that the increase in global trade would also benefit the city’s harbour. After all, Victoria was the nearest Canadian port to the Canal, so it seemed natural that the traffic would grow. In order to handle the presumed increase in trade, the city built Ogden Point between 1913-1915. Sadly, the vision of Victoria as a trade center did not materialize, and the docks fell into decline. Furthermore, any hope of making that vision a reality was made impossible when Vancouver began to grow rapidly in the 1920s and ‘30s, usurping Victoria’s place as a center of trade. While it had once been inconsequential that Victoria was located on an island, it now became increasingly apparent that Victoria could not compete with Vancouver, because unlike that city, Victoria was not hooked up to the continental railway and highway grid. In the 19th century, this hadn’t mattered as much because Eastern and Western Canada were not yet as economically integrated. But in the early 20th century, that integration was a driving economic force, and the transportation system was crucial in cementing this integration.

Throughout its history, Victoria’s businessmen tended to exploit a resource, and once they had depleted it, they moved on to another. Ogden Point, for example, was built on speculation. It was intended to handle increased trade coming through the Panama Canal. When trade failed to materialize, Ogden Point became largely vacant. In fact, Ogden Point fell into disrepair. In the 1950s, a man named Hector Campbell convinced the Canadian National Railway to make improvements on the site, which in turn attracted about 50 lumber mill businesses to use the dock to ship their products. However, the “quick fix” usage of facilities suggests a lack of foresight and vision on the part of Victoria’s councillors, for the docks once again fell vacant after the lumber industry suffered a decline. The economic situation worsened when, in 1964, an earthquake changed the ocean currents so that the whales’ migration path was no longer within reach of Victoria’s trawlers. Bereft of its resource-related industries, and its manufacturing industries, which had by now moved to Vancouver, it seemed Victoria was doomed.

Until the 1960s, Victoria remained a primarily resource-exploiting and manufacturing oriented city. That resource exploitation was chronically mismanaged and contributed to the city’s decline. This changed when the Canadian National Railway, which owned Ogden Point in the 1950s and 60s, realized it could use the facilities as the entry point for tourist ferries. Victoria has always had a very beautiful setting, and some of its larger parks, such as Beacon Hill Park, were already protected by law. Over the next several decades Victoria’s tourism industry blossomed and flourished. It can safely be said that it was at this point that Victoria began to evolve into what we now call ”Victoria.”

The impact of the tourism industry on the Harbour has been immense. Most of the shoreline south of the Johnson Street Bridge was beautified and became the tourist heartland of the city. By the 1980s only the shoreline north of the Johnson Street Bridge remained an industrial sector. While the Harbour between Johnson Street and Humboldt Street flourished, the Upper Harbour fell into neglect. It was not used much by any industry. Today, however, all that is changing once again. The Upper Harbour along Tyee and Harbour Roads is now the site of new residential developments, among them the “sustainable” community of Dockside Green. The developers envision an Upper Harbour that will be gentrified into a swank residential and commercial center. But will it endure?

Conclusion

Victoria’s history shows a clear pattern: short-sighted management leading to industry failure, followed by a scramble to find a replacement. Too often it seemed there was no long-term plan in place for developing the city in a sustainable manner. Victoria’s entrepreneurs tended to live for the moment, recklessly depleting resource after resource. Victorians rest complacent that their relative prosperity will continue indefinitely because Victoria will always be a beautiful place. However, this beauty, which is a natural resource commented on by the earliest European explorers, is just as susceptible to reckless exploitation as our fishing and other industries.
Beauty, like all other natural resources, can be exploited. The exploitation which threatens beauty is overdevelopment. Because an area is “beautiful,” it becomes a commodity that people desire. In response to the demand, developers build projects that are out of scale with the surroundings, to fit as many people in as possible. However, like the whalers and the sealers, many do not seem to realize that by building these large developments they run the risk of destroying the natural beauty of the area. What the city needs to do is develop a detailed vision of Victoria: will the downtown be filled with high-density blocks, and will this then taper off as you leave downtown? Or will development be scattered, with apartment blocks few and far between, built because they could have been, not because they should have been? If the city does not develop a far-sighted plan, Victoria’s “beauty” will eventually be diminished and tourism might be the newest member of the long string of industries that failed here.

Because of its adherence to new urbanism, Dockside Green has commercial and light industry components. However, it remains a primarily residential complex. Yet most of the jobs that will be created will be in the retail sector, which is typically low-wage. The light industry, which includes jobs related to high-tech, is potentially much a higher-wage (and high skill) sector. Since Victoria has a booming population, as well as a skyrocketing real estate market, it becomes crucial to find out how the city can generate more high-paying jobs. Government and higher education provide two additional fields of employment. However, business innovation and growth typically doesn’t come from government bureaucrats, which leaves tourism as the only major private industry capable of generating broadscale employment. But if the only major employer in the private sector is the tourism industry, what sort of city will this shape given that tourism jobs are not high-paying jobs? In combination with our current real estate boom, we could end up with a city where the working class is forced to live far distances from the city heart since it can’t afford to live there. This scenario would contribute to increased traffic, congestion, and the need for more highways, potentially destroying the beauty that tourists come to see.

Given Victoria’s past history, where lucrative industries and businesses left Victoria for better opportunities elsewhere (eg., Vancouver), perhaps another major question is: will Victoria be able to retain the high-tech and high-paying businesses currently incubating? There are signs that this is not the case. In recent yeas, companies that were grown and nurtured locally have been bought by overseas investors or companies, and have subsequently moved their operations abroad. JDS Uniphase and Power Measurement are two examples: JDS Uniphase doesn’t exist here anymore after moving its operations into the US, while Power Measurement has been bought by a French company and it might be only a matter of time before it, too, is moved overseas. Biotech companies are also susceptible: recently Stressgen Biotechnologies Corporation downsizing from 103 jobs to 39. This shows that Victoria is still having difficulty retaining industry. Therefore, the two main problems Victoria faces are: will Victoria sustain its beauty and the tourism industry? And, how can Victoria retain its businesses? These questions, and their answers, will determine the future of Victoria in the years to come.

©Aurelian 2005-2006