Peoples Essay

Since the first contact between Europeans and the Musqueam at the close of the 18th century the territory at the mouth of the Fraser River that was once inhabited only by the Musqueam, Squamish and other Coast Salish nations has become home to the people of the world. Now called by the name adopted by its European settlers, Vancouver has grown into a cosmopolitan, culturally diverse community.

But it wasn’t always that way. Almost from its start as a frontier town in the 1860s Vancouver made Asian newcomers feel unwelcome. About a year after the city’s incorporation months of mounting intolerance—given voice in local newspapers—culminated when a mob descended on a Chinese work camp in the West End and chased the inhabitants out of town. Although Chinese Canadians later returned to the city and the incident angered the provincial government enough to send in a special police force to maintain law and order the attack sent out a clear message of intolerance to prospective Asian immigrants. That attitude was reinforced as Vancouver politicians and community groups lobbied for restrictions on Asian immigration and supported retention of laws that prohibited Asian Canadians from full participation as citizens.

In the late 1940s, however, a massive demographic change started to take place in Vancouver. As refugees from a devastated Europe began arriving, Vancouver’s essentially British character and outlook became increasingly less dominant. Immigrants from the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia and Scandinavia were pushed by the lack of opportunity at home and pulled across the Atlantic by a labor shortage caused by the post-war economic boom in Canada. By 1967 all references to ethnicity or country of origin were removed from the Immigration Act and regulations, a move which finally put immigrants from Asia on the same footing as immigrants from European countries. Between 1981 and 1991 some 18 per cent or 28,585 immigrants to the Lower Mainland were from Hong Kong, 14.1 per cent (22,405) from China, 9.3 per cent (14,845) from India, and 6.9 per cent or 10,910 from the Philippines. Immigrants from Great Britain dropped to fifth place at 5.8 per cent or 9,295.

Statistics Canada records 68 ethnicities of people living in the Vancouver region ranging from to Haitians as the smallest to the English as the largest at 257,020.

More immigration has helped create a more tolerant, open society in Vancouver. In the 1980s as public officials grappled with cultural diversity, schools began recognizing the importance of teaching tolerance and understanding of cultural diversity by expanding curriculums to include cross-cultural material.

And while a more ethnically diverse population has led to some distinct shopping areas such as Little India at Main and 49th, for the most part immigrants and refugees have dispersed themselves throughout the region. Getting barbecued duck, for example, no longer means having to make the trek to Chinatown but merely of popping into one of several suburban shopping malls, especially in Richmond. Greek, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Italian, Thai and South Asian restaurants, to name but a few, can be found not only in Vancouver but throughout the Lower Mainland. In most supermarkets bok choy has become almost as ubiquitous as broccoli.

As Vancouver enters the 21st century its people have grown much more diverse than the city founders could ever have imagined. In a little more than a century Vancouver has been transformed from a British settler society to a multicultural Canadian city that still retains a strong British flavor. The changes over the next century are likely to be as dramatic.