Vancouver

• 1. Introduction

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  Vancouver sits on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, who have called this place home for more than 10,000 years. It is a city that didn't exist as a city until 1886 and then burned to the ground on the 13th of June of that very same year. Today it holds more than 662,000 people within its 115 square kilometres and ranks as the most densely populated city in all of Canada. It also ranks among the most expensive cities on Earth to live in, and Greenpeace was founded here in 1969. How did a makeshift tavern on the edge of a sawmill become one of the most globally diverse, densely packed, and expensive cities in the Western Hemisphere? And what does it mean to build a city this fast, on land this contested, in a place where the mountains and the ocean crowd the edges of every street? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Roots Before the City

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  Long before any European saw Burrard Inlet, the Squamish people called this place K'emk'emelay̓, meaning "place of many maple trees." That name referred specifically to a village where a sawmill would later be planted. The Musqueam, speakers of the Downriver Halkomelem language hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, carried no single name for the whole area. They held instead a dense web of names for individual villages and landscape features, each tied to intimate knowledge of the land. The Stó:lō, speaking the Upriver Halkomelem dialect, knew the region as Lhq'á:lets, meaning "wide at the bottom/end."

  Archaeological evidence places Aboriginal people in the Vancouver area from at least 8,000 years ago, with villages scattered across what are now Stanley Park, False Creek, Kitsilano, Point Grey, and the mouth of the Fraser River. The first European to see the coastline was José María Narváez of Spain, who explored Point Grey and parts of Burrard Inlet in 1791. One author has argued that Francis Drake may have visited in 1579, though this remains contested. The first-known Europeans to set foot on the site of the present-day city were Simon Fraser and his North West Company crew in 1808, travelling down the Fraser River as far as, perhaps, Point Grey.

  The city's name itself carries a genealogy. Captain George Vancouver of the Royal Navy explored the inner harbour of Burrard Inlet in 1792 and attached British names to the landscape. His own family name derived from the Dutch phrase "van Coevorden," denoting someone from the city of Coevorden in the Netherlands. His ancestors had come to England from there. So Vancouver's name is, at its root, a Dutch place name that crossed the North Sea, passed through an English family, crossed the Atlantic on a naval expedition, and was then gifted to a Pacific city by a railway company nearly a century later.

• 3. Gassy Jack and the Railway Deal

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  On the 1st of July 1867, a man known as Gassy Jack built a makeshift tavern on the western edge of a sawmill property. That tavern became the seed of a city. The sawmill itself, the Hastings Mill established by Captain Edward Stamp near the foot of Dunlevy Street, had already endured a failed first attempt at Brockton Point before difficult currents and reefs forced its relocation. Gassy Jack's settlement grew around it and came to be called Gastown. The Gastown steam clock still marks the original site.

  In 1870, the colonial government surveyed the settlement and renamed it Granville, in honour of the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Granville. Then in 1884, the site was selected as the western terminus for the Canadian Pacific Railway, to the bitter disappointment of Port Moody, New Westminster, and Victoria, all of which had competed for the honour. The CPR's choice came with a deal: the city would be renamed Vancouver in honour of Captain George Vancouver. The city was incorporated on the 6th of April 1886. CPR president William Van Horne arrived in Port Moody to establish the terminus, acting on the recommendation of Henry John Cambie. The transcontinental railway was extended to the new city by 1887.

  The city's population went from roughly 1,000 people in 1881 to over 20,000 by the turn of the century, and past 100,000 by 1911. The CPR was not merely the reason the city existed. It was the main real estate owner and housing developer within it, the engine of an economic expansion so rapid it compressed into decades what other cities took generations to build.

• 4. Labour, Exclusion, and Fire

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  The Great Vancouver Fire fell on the 13th of June 1886, just weeks after the city was incorporated, and razed everything. The Vancouver Fire Department was established that same year, and the city rebuilt with a speed that matched the ambition of the men who had staked their futures on it. But rebuilding was not the same as becoming just.

  The dominance of the CPR and other large companies generated a militant labour movement almost immediately. The first major sympathy strike came in 1903, when railway employees struck against the CPR for union recognition. Labour leader Frank Rogers was killed by CPR police while picketing at the docks, becoming what the movement called its first martyr in British Columbia. The tensions spread: Canada's first general strike broke out in 1918 at the Cumberland coal mines on Vancouver Island. By 1935, unemployed men flooded the city to protest the conditions of military-run relief camps in remote areas of the province. After two months of disruption, the relief camp strikers boarded trains to bring their grievances to the federal government in Ottawa, a march known as the On-to-Ottawa Trek. Police stopped them and arrested the workers near Mission, interning them for the remainder of the Depression.

  Other fractures cut just as deep. The Asiatic Exclusion League led a rampage through Chinatown and Japantown that prompted a federal investigation by the future prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who had been sent as the minister of Labour to assess damages claims. Two of the claimants were opium manufacturers; further investigation revealed that white women were reportedly visiting opium dens. A federal law banning the manufacture, sale, and importation of opium for non-medicinal purposes followed. The riot also exposed a growing fear of Japanese residents throughout the province. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, every Japanese-Canadian in Vancouver and across British Columbia was interned or deported. After the war, they were barred from returning to cities like Vancouver, and communities such as Japantown never revived.

  Mary Ellen Smith, a Vancouver suffragist and prohibitionist, became the first woman elected to a provincial legislature in Canada in 1918. Alcohol prohibition, which had begun during the First World War, lasted until 1921, when the provincial government took control over alcohol sales, a practice that remains in place today.

• 5. A City of Neighbourhoods

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  The 2021 census counted 662,248 people in the city of Vancouver, with 42.2 percent of them born outside Canada. The largest single country of origin among immigrants was mainland China, at 63,275 people, followed by the Philippines at 29,930, and Hong Kong at 25,480. Cantonese is the mother tongue of 77,435 Vancouver residents, or 11.8 percent of the population, making it the second most common mother tongue after English. Mandarin, Tagalog, Spanish, and Punjabi follow.

  The ethnic landscape of the city shifted dramatically starting in the 1980s, when anticipation of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China brought a significant wave of immigration. Combined with earlier arrivals from mainland China and Taiwan, this established one of the highest concentrations of ethnic Chinese residents anywhere in North America. Over 25 percent of the city's inhabitants are now of Chinese heritage. South Asian residents account for approximately 7 percent of the population; a small community had existed since 1897, but larger waves arrived in the 1950s and 1960s.

  Neighbourhoods in Vancouver reflect these layers of settlement with unusual clarity. Chinatown, Punjabi Market, Little Italy, Greektown, and the former Japantown each carry the marks of a distinct migration history. The West End neighbourhood, and particularly Davie Street, officially designated Davie Village, is the centre of a large LGBT community and hosts one of the country's largest annual pride parades. The neighbourhood of Strathcona was the historic core of the city's Jewish community. Hogan's Alley, a small area adjacent to Chinatown just off Main Street at Prior, was once home to a significant Black community.

  By 2016, visible minorities made up 52 percent of the city's population. In 1981, that figure had been 24 percent. The speed of the transformation is part of what makes Vancouver unusual: a city that is, by the measure of its own census, majority non-white, with a majority whose first language is not English, has maintained a population density higher than any other Canadian city and higher than any North American city except New York, San Francisco, and Mexico City.

• 6. Hollywood North and the Port

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  In 2021, $3.6 billion was spent on film production in Vancouver, ranking it as the largest production hub in Canada and the third largest in North America, behind Los Angeles and New York City. The city hosts approximately 65 movies and 55 television series annually and supports around 20,000 jobs. The nickname "Hollywood North" is one it shares with Toronto, and it reaches back nearly a century to the days of the Edison Manufacturing Company.

  The list of productions filmed in Vancouver is long enough to include The X-Files, Stargate SG-1, Supernatural, The Last of Us, Once Upon a Time, The Flash, Arrow, Riverdale, and Smallville, among many others. Most are set elsewhere, using Vancouver's urban landscape to stand in for American cities. The city's Marine Building, an Art Deco tower from the 1920s known for its ceramic tile facings and brass-gilt doors, is a favourite location for film shoots.

  At the waterfront, Port Metro Vancouver is the fourth-largest port by tonnage in the Americas, the busiest and largest port in Canada, and the most diversified port in North America. It does more than $172 billion in trade annually with over 160 trading economies. Port activities alone generate $9.7 billion in gross domestic product. Forestry remains the largest single industry. Tourism, fuelled by the city's location between mountains and ocean, contributes approximately $4.8 billion to the Metro Vancouver economy each year and supports over 70,000 jobs. Over 10.3 million people visited the city in 2017, and each year more than a million cruise passengers pass through on their way to Alaska.

  Greenpeace was founded in Vancouver in 1969. The city became the permanent home of TED conferences in 2014. The 1986 World Exposition, held here, drew over 20 million visitors and added $3.7 billion to the Canadian economy. It left behind the SkyTrain system and Canada Place, which still functions as a convention centre, hotel, and cruise ship terminal.

• 7. The Price of Livability

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  Vancouver has ranked at or near the top of global liveability indices for years, reaching number one on the Global Liveability Ranking before dropping to 16th in 2021. Forbes placed it as having the fourth-most expensive real estate market in the world in 2019. As of April 2010, the average two-level home in Vancouver sold for a record $987,500, compared with a Canadian average of $365,141. In 2012, Demographia ranked it the second-most unaffordable city in the world.

  Several forces drive this. One is the urban planning philosophy known as Vancouverism: a preference for high-rise residential towers set back from the street with open space, concentrated in walkable urban centres rather than spreading outward. This approach began in the late 1950s, when city planners first encouraged dense high-rise development in the West End under strict setback and green-space requirements. It led to the redevelopment of sites such as North False Creek and Coal Harbour from the mid-1980s onward. The result has been a compact urban core that has drawn international attention for what planners call its "high amenity and 'livable' development."

  Another force is capital inflow. Since the 1990s, high-rise condo development on the downtown peninsula has been financed in part by money from Hong Kong immigrants, clustering particularly in Yaletown and Coal Harbour. A policy the source describes as "snow washing" allows foreigners to buy property in Canada while shielding their identities from tax authorities, making real estate transactions an effective vehicle for moving money. The selection of Vancouver to co-host the 2010 Winter Olympics was an additional accelerant for economic development and for pressure on housing.

  A 2019 count found at least 2,223 people experiencing homelessness in the city, the highest number recorded since counts began in 2005. Of those surveyed, 28 percent reported having no physical shelter. Indigenous people accounted for 39 percent of all respondents. Three-fifths reported at least two health concerns, and 67 percent reported addiction to at least one substance. North America's only legal safe injection site at the time, Insite, opened in Vancouver following a landslide municipal election in 2002 won by the Coalition of Progressive Electors on a harm reduction platform.

• 8. Music, Trees, and What Remains

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  Bryan Adams, Sarah McLachlan, Carly Rae Jepsen, Michael Bublé, Tegan and Sara, and the punk band D.O.A. all came out of Vancouver. So did Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, and Strapping Young Lad. The independent label Nettwerk is based here, as are bands including The New Pornographers and Japandroids. When alternative rock rose in the 1990s, Vancouver contributed 54-40, Moist, the Matthew Good Band, and Econoline Crush.

  The Vancouver Art Gallery holds a permanent collection of nearly 10,000 items, with a significant concentration of works by Emily Carr. The Vancouver International Film Festival runs for two weeks each September, showing over 350 films, making it one of North America's most prominent festivals of its kind. The Museum of Anthropology at UBC is a leading institution for Pacific Northwest Coast First Nations culture.

  The city's trees carry their own history. Many streets are lined with Japanese cherry trees donated from the 1930s onward by the government of Japan, and their spring flowering is celebrated by the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival. The old-growth forest that once covered the area included Douglas fir, western red cedar, and western hemlock trees thought to be among the largest of their species on the British Columbia coast. The forest in Stanley Park, which at 404.9 hectares is one of the largest urban parks in North America, was logged between the 1860s and 1880s. Springboard notches cut into stumps by loggers of that era can still be found there today, an unassuming record of what was taken and when.