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 sa国际传媒 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 sa国际传媒 Ferries. Between Aug. 1 and Aug. 6, sa国际传媒 Ferries is expecting to handle 215,000 vehicles and 600,000 passengers.
But the first sa国际传媒 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 sa国际传媒 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 sa国际传媒 Telephone Company, but they ignore sa国际传媒 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 sa国际传媒 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 sa国际传媒 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 sa国际传媒 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 sa国际传媒 from London). There was another asterisk — the proclamation was only for the sa国际传媒 mainland, because Vancouver Island was a separate colony at the time. (They merged in 1866.)
Still, the first Socred government in sa国际传媒 had been sworn in on Aug. 1, 1952. Bennett once marked the anniversary with one of the most flamboyant stunts in sa国际传媒 history, the “burning of the bonds.”
Basically, he declared sa国际传媒 was debt free (it wasn’t), put a bunch of sa国际传媒 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 sa国际传媒 Day legislation in March, 1974. The idea was for all sa国际传媒 residents to remember the pioneers who Dave Barrett said helped make the province into “one of the finest places to live in the world.”
sa国际传媒 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 sa国际传媒
