CANADA: Vancouver’s Mayors

On Canada’s west coast is the Dominion’s biggest year round seaport and third biggest city with a corporate history going back only half a century. To celebrate Vancouver’s 50th anniversary this year is the job of its big, shrewd, bumptious Mayor Gerald Gratton (“Gerry”) McGeer. An Irish Protestant lawyer and one-time iron molder, Mayor McGeer’s pet plan for Vancouver is to push it into bankruptcy to reduce interest charges. Says he: “People think they can climb into Heaven with a Bible in one hand and a foreclosure in the other. .. . The boys who profit out of a Depression are the gang who are pleased to call themselves financiers. . . . The wages of money have risen while the wages of men have gone down.”

With free quotations from the Bible and Abraham Lincoln, Gerry McGeer won seats in the British Columbia Legislature and the Canadian House of Commons and the mayoralty of Vancouver with the biggest majority in history. Since the rise of Alberta’s Social Credit Premier William Aberhart in the next province, he has lost his self-assumed rank of “Canada’s Greatest Money Reformer.” Last winter he invited every celebrity he could think of to Vancouver’s two-month celebration, hoped for President Roosevelt. One invitation reached London’s Lord Mayor Sir Percy Vincent, a retired millinery manufacturer who, at 68, has little to do. To Vancouver’s astonishment, London’s 613th Lord Mayor accepted the invitation, promised to bring with him the Lord Mayor’s whole retinue, lord sheriff, macebearer, sword-bearer and city marshal. Last week Sir Percy Vincent & staff landed in Canada with an exact replica of the five-foot mace to present to Vancouver. Exploded Mayor McGeer delightedly: “Now what in Sam Hill would I do with a mace?”

Vancouver is a boom city as civic-conscious as the U. S. cities across the border. Fed, like them, by lumber, mines, wheat and fish, mainland Vancouver has grown fast, while older snobbish Victoria on Vancouver Island across the Strait of Georgia has hugged its reputation as “a little bit of England on the shores of the Pacific.” In 1885, when the Canadian Pacific Railway reached the coast, insular Victoria looked down on the brawling mill town of Gastown, named for a saloonkeeper, “Gassy Jack” Deighton. To the rage of Victoria’s aristocrats, Canadian Pacific officials renamed Gastown Vancouver. As the world’s trade with Japan and China increased and the Panama Canal made possible water shipment of Canadian wheat, Vancouver’s magnificent harbor became a key port. Today some of the West Coast’s toughest, smartest tycoons are Vancouver’s Harvey Reginald MacMillan (lumber, salmon), Austin Charles Taylor (oil, gold), the Spencer brothers (stores, gold).

Possessively proud of their London Lord Mayor, Vancouverites reluctantly granted Toronto’s request for a loan of him next month. But when Seattle in the U. S. asked for the London Lord Mayor, the Vancouver Sim shrieked: “No, no, a thousand times no! The nerve of them! The colossal gall! The effrontery of it. Seattle actually wants Vancouver to send the Lord Mayor of London down there … so they can have a look at him without coming up to Vancouver!

“Do our neighbors not realize that the Lord Mayor of London is something to see? Do they not realize that he is a big part of our show?

“What if we asked them to send their Art Museum at Volunteer Park up here, or to pack up their lift locks and shoot them over to us by air mail?

“Would they not give us the horselaugh? Of course they would.

“We do not mind sending a few small samples of the Jubilee over to Seattle now and then. But they cannot expect us to send them one of the main features.

“Hands off our Lord Mayor!”