The Hemisphere: CANADA: British Columbia at 100

IT is a year of carnival for British Co—Columbia. Vancouver sent invitations all around the world, played host to an army of actors, musicians and athletes in one festival after another. To Queen Elizabeth, the citizens of the province proudly dispatched a 100-ft. totem pole, and the royal family reciprocated by sending Princess Margaret to B.C. to grace the celebrations with her charm. All of this is part of Canada’s biggest birthday party: British Columbia is 100 years old, celebrating the day in 1858 when Queen Victoria, who had scarcely heard of the place, designated the land a crown colony and sent it down the road to union with Canada.

At 100, British Columbia has plenty to celebrate—and much more to look for ward to. Nearly half again as big as Texas, it is bursting with vitality, rippling with Bunyanesque muscles (see color pages). It is the forest province in a forest nation, the greatest fish supplier in a land of fishermen, the source of as much potential hydroelectric power as ten St. Lawrence power projects. British Columbians brag: “We are the right people living in the right place at the right time.”

Capsule of Canada. In a sense, B.C. is Canada in giant capsule form, a pioneer land where the frontiers are just starting to roll back. In the first 100 years British Columbians managed to plow only about 33% of the available farmland, utilize barely a fraction of their other known natural resources. Yet prosperity is a condition of life, to be greeted with the same calm pleasure as the monster 25-lb. brook trout (in the East a five-pounder is trophy size) hauled from the rivers.

The combination of climate, resources and pioneering enterprise produces a per capita income of $1,650, 23% above Canada’s average. Nowhere do more Canadians (i.e., a higher proportion) own their own homes; nowhere do they spend more money on education and welfare. British Columbians have little of the Easterners’ attachment to the major national parties. The province has not had a Liberal or Tory government for 17 years. It perks along with a public works-minded Social Credit movement, whose Premier William Andrew Cecil Bennett takes pains to assure potential investors that their dollars are coming to the right place.

Who has time to stew over politicians anyway? In a roughhewn society that plays as hard as it pioneers, anyone with a yen for variety can leave Vancouver in the morning, go skiing on nearby Grouse Mountain, play golf on the banks of the Fraser in the afternoon, then top off the day with a cooling dip in English Bay.

Straining Men’s Energies. From the start British Columbia has strained men’s energies. The first Briton to land there, Captain James Cook, put in at Nootka Sound in 1778 to gaze at the stands of tall timber, the schools of ocean salmon and herds of sea otter. Within a few years British merchantmen plied regular routes from the British Columbia coasts with cargoes of furs for China, Britain and the U.S. Pelts were only the beginning. The cry “gold” brought a clamoring horde of adventurers sweeping north from the U.S. to mining camps along the Fraser in the 1850s. By 1885, when a rail line stitched British Columbia to the rest of Canada, the province was already on its way.

For longer than British Columbians care to admit, trapping, timber and gold were enough to satisfy most of the immigrants. As late as 1939, the province had only two inhabitants per square mile of territory. The road system was primitive, the railroads—except for the transcontinental lines—a hoary joke. “You’ve got the scenery, you’ve got the timber,” went an old refrain, “but I’m going East where the money is.”

World War II provided the economic jolt that unlocked nature’s treasure house. Tall timbers crashed in a quickening tempo; new metal mines opened up. Commercial fishing became a patriotic duty—and a $45 million business. To operate the new industry, a flood of immigrants poured in from all over Canada and Western Europe. Population zoomed 60% in twelve years to 1,525,000; Greater Vancouver became a city of 665,000, with spreading suburbs of prosperous picture-windowed homes overlooking the broad, sun-splashed Pacific inlets.

Time of the Giants. Along the receding frontiers, the war and postwar years were a time of giant strides and the expenditure of staggering sums for new aluminum plants, paper and pulp mills, bridges and roads. One of B.C.’s fastest moving entrepreneurs is Frank M. McMahon, 54, who waited, checkbook in hand, one morning in August 1947, when the province opened a land office in Victoria, to parcel out oil prospecting rights in the untested Peace River country. Chairman of the board of Calgary’s fast-moving Pacific Petroleums Ltd., McMahon paid $1,800,000 for drilling rights on 3,000,000 acres, five years later brought in Peace River’s first producer. Today, Peace River ranks as one of the world’s great gas fields.

“The Poorest Boom.” The new need is electricity to power the province’s growth. Since 1946, British Columbia Electric Co. has quadrupled its sales of electricity; but even so, the populous lower mainland and Vancouver Island face the prospect of power shortages by 1962, unless some new developments are opened. One mighty project calls for tapping the swift-running Eraser River, which alone could provide enough power to meet British Columbia’s needs for years to come. A second idea is to develop the Columbia River, dammed at nine points in the U.S. and nowhere in Canada. The idea is to build a dam on the Columbia at Mica Creek, north of Revelstoke, B.C., to generate 1,250,000 kw.

Like the rest of Canada, B.C. had its share of recession this year. Capital spending for major pipelines, newsprint mills and hydroelectric projects tapered off last year; markets softened for lead, zinc and aluminum. Yet, typically, British Columbians spoke of the recession as “the poorest boom in years.” The province’s salmon fishermen had their best season in decades, and farmers, loggers and production-line workers were making—and spending—enough to keep income and retail sales at record levels.

Eyes Forward. The future, not the past or even the present, is where British Columbia sets its sights. Last year Premier Bennett announced that his government proposed to license Sweden’s Multimillionaire Axel Wenner-Gren (TIME, Oct. 21, 1957) to build a $400 million-to-$600 million hydroelectric project on the Peace River, wire the electricity 600 miles to Vancouver. Wenner-Gren would also study the possibility of building pulp and paper mills, mines and smelters in the undeveloped northland. Since then, Wenner-Gren has spent an estimated $10 million surveying possible dam sites, prospecting for minerals.

If Wenner-Gren carries out his grand scheme, it will pump new millions into British Columbia’s growing economy. If he does not, other investors will sooner or later pour in the necessary millions to unlock the northland’s treasure. No one mistakes the lessons of B.C.’s first century. It is only a hint of the possibilities for the next 100 years.