On Aug. 2, 1858, the Colony of British Columbia was created in London, England.
One hundred and sixteen years later, it provided the impetus for a holiday Monday on the August long weekend, British Columbia Day.
The first B.C. Day was on Aug. 5, 1974, which means this is the 50th anniversary.
It’s now a staple of the calendar, the busiest weekend of the year for B.C. Ferries. Between Aug. 1 and Aug. 6, B.C. Ferries is expecting to handle 215,000 vehicles and 600,000 passengers.
But the first B.C. Day in 1974 wasn’t as big a deal as you might expect. After Dave Barrett’s NDP government made it a holiday in March, some companies didn’t give their employees the day off.
This led to a “personal protest” where two B.C. Tel employees who were denied the holiday dressed up in striped convict uniforms outside the U.S. consulate in downtown Vancouver.
“They call themselves the B.C. Telephone Company, but they ignore B.C. Day, the day honouring the province,” said protester Sidney Brewer. “They are treating us as second-class citizens.”
The Vancouver Sun didn’t even write a story about B.C. Day on Aug. 6, 1974 — it simply ran a big photo of sunbathers cramming Kits Beach.
(To be fair, there was more pressing news. U.S. president Richard Nixon was expected to resign after confessing that he ordered the Watergate coverup, six days after the break-in at the Democratic party national headquarters.)
In Victoria, the Daily Colonist didn’t publish on Aug. 6 to allow staff to observe the new holiday. An editorial published in the next edition suggested the holiday was at the “wrong time of year,” and suggested February or March instead.
It said the day brought “havoc on the roads and in recreation areas,” with at least 25 deaths — said to be a record — due to accidents over the three-day weekend across B.C. A report in the Victoria Times counted 18 traffic deaths, four drownings and two struck by a train while walking on the tracks.
People had been urging the government to have a holiday on the August long weekend for years, like they had in Ontario and Manitoba.
It would have seemed a natural fit for longtime Social Credit premier W.A.C. Bennett.
On the 100th anniversary of B.C. becoming a colony in 1958, the Socreds had launched a year-long celebration, capped by a ceremony at Fort Langley, where Gov. James Douglas had proclaimed the colony.
But that was on Nov. 19 (it had taken a few months for the news to reach B.C. from London). There was another asterisk — the proclamation was only for the B.C. mainland, because Vancouver Island was a separate colony at the time. (They merged in 1866.)
Still, the first Socred government in B.C. had been sworn in on Aug. 1, 1952. Bennett once marked the anniversary with one of the most flamboyant stunts in B.C. history, the “burning of the bonds.”
Basically, he declared B.C. was debt free (it wasn’t), put a bunch of B.C. bonds on a raft in Lake Okanagan, waited until nightfall, then sent a flaming arrow into the bonds. He missed, but a strategically placed RCMP officer lit the bonds up.
So it was the NDP that introduced the B.C. Day legislation in March, 1974. The idea was for all B.C. residents to remember the pioneers who Dave Barrett said helped make the province into “one of the finest places to live in the world.”
B.C. Day was a hit with the masses. And in 1975, most of the holdout companies gave their employees the day off.
— With a file from the Times Colonist
