Editorially speaking...
The thing that so many people seem to forget, or not to understand, is that history isn’t just about the past, the long ago—it’s happening all around us all the time.
We live in historical times and it’s all I can do to keep up with what’s happening in the news; everyday, something old in the news to be clipped, to be filed or to rate mention here in the Chronicles...
Where to begin?
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A sad coincidence to the current three-part series on the 1915 PCC Mine disaster, is last week’s coal mine explosion in Turkey; a reminder that coal has always been, always will be, a dangerous job for the men hardy enough or financially needful enough to have to earn their livings underground.
Another reminder of Vancouver Island’s historic coal mining industry was buried in a recent news story in the Nanaimo News Bulletin.
Workers restoring natural foliage in the Nanaimo River Estuary. —Estuary Resilience
The article described the work of the Nature Trust of B.C., Snuneymuxw First Nation and the Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans “to enhance [the] fresh water flow in Nanaimo Estuary” which has suffered from “plugging from historical land uses” over the past 170-odd years.
A single sentence alluded to one of the culprits of the Estuary’s industrial past as “a previous mining operation”. This is a vague reference to the Reserve Mine which operated two shafts in the Estuary from 1914-1930 and 1934-1939.
Many of the concrete structures of this mine, because it’s on restricted-access Reserve land, are intact, including the old paymaster’s office with its date of construction, 1914, inscribed in concrete. (It would make a great movie set although, I understand, new homes have been built on the site since my last visit more than a decade ago.)
Swimmers who frequent the Nanaimo River’s sandy beaches near the Cranbrook bridge likely wonder about the large rusted pipe that pokes up like a spear from the riverbed, midstream.
It’s a waterline from the Reserve Mine that, fortunately, hasn’t proved to be an environmental (or navigational) hazard in need of expensive remediation as has been the case in the Estuary where rock waste from the mining operation has harmed fish runs and has been expensive to fix.
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Another headline, this one in the Times Colonist, evokes images of another day and age: ‘Alberta promises more officers for small towns in provincial police plan’
Talk about turning back the clock to the day when most provinces, including B.C., had their own police forces rather than contracting out to the federal force. B.C.’s (1858-1950) was the oldest in Canada when it was disbanded in favour of the RCMP’s ‘E’ Division.
What began as an emergency response to maintaining law and order in the gold rush crown colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia became a truly provincial force upon B.C.’s entry into Confederation in 1971 and was later reorganized along para-military lines in 1923.
heirs was no easy task—B.C., if you haven’t noticed, is larger than all of California, half of Nevada and a slice of Oregon combined, and is still all but unsettled. Imagine having to patrol that on foot and by canoe! (And they did it, too, successfully.)
With a new premier who appears to be eager to take a confrontational line with Ottawa, it will be interesting to watch and to see if Alberta follows through with reinventing the wheel by recreating its own provincial police force.
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Progress?’
There’s talk of allowing mobile fast food vendors to set up shop along the phenomenally successful and highly trafficked Galloping Goose in Greater Victoria. Should this prove successful, I can see it now, “pop-up shops’ along our own former railway grades, the Trans Canada and Cowichan Valley trails.
Just think of the potential for a food concession at the Kinsol Trestle which, according to the CVRD, draws 100,000 visitors a year.
Would you like fries with that? —Toad Hollow Photography
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Alive and well?
Who can forget the fast ferries fiasco of the 1990s? Which begets the question, whatever happened to Glen Clark’s ‘fast cats” that were sold at less than fire-sale prices by the succeeding Liberal government?
In their own chequered way, these catamaran ferries made B.C. maritime history so it’s of interest to note that, in September, Michael Fearn, a vacationing Sunshine Coast resident, spotted two of them in Alexandria, Egypt. He said the ill-starred Pacific Cat Explorer and Pacific Cat Discovery appeared to be in poor condition.
Our tax dollars at work...
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