By HAL GRIFFIN

n understanding of history

is perhaps too much to

expect of a premier who

construes the biblical story

of the loaves and fishes as

an example of “the entrepre-
neurial spirit this province needs to cut the
welfare rolls” and suggests that poor peo-
ple following his advice to seek Christ’s
help should pay a user fee for supplica-
tions after the first free prayer. This
obviously rules out government distribu-
tion of prayer wheels with welfare
cheques and indicates that if prayer to end
the need for food lines fails to produce a
miracle, Bill Vander Zalm is not inclined
to pay for it out of user fees.

Premier Vander Zalm’s substitution of
“cheeses” for “fishes” in expounding
upon the parable may not have been a slip
of the tongue derived from his Dutch
origin, but rather another expression of
his tendency to turn religion in to busi-
ness, whether in promoting Fantasy
Gardens or equating “balanced budgets”
with “eternal salvation.”

Confounding religion in his govern-
ment’s assault on the poor, the sick and
the elderly comes as easily to Vander
Zalm as confusing geography with his-
tory.

On March 23, after his meeting with
Gov. Booth Gardner of Washington, he
reiterated his opinion that “we really are
one region with much in common,”
adding that people in B.C. “tend to relate
easier to the south than they do to the
distant east.”

B.C. premiers have been meting with
their Washington State counterparts for
years, just as Premier David Peterson
hosted a dinner for Gov. James Blan-
shard of Michigan, Ontario’s largest trad-
ing partner, in Toronto earlier this month,
honouring the long tradition of meetings
on issues of common concern between
provincial premiers and governors of
neighbouring states.

Vander Zalm, however, was serving his
own purposes with his divisive remark
about “the distant east:” to exploit deep-
rooted anti-east feeling with the perennial
complaint about unfair federal treatment
of B.C., as voiced in the last throne
speech; and to promote the U.S.-Canada
trade agreement, as reflected in his state-
ment about the need for formal meetings
with Washington, Oregon, California and
Alaska to “‘work together on trade and
economic development and other issues.”

Had he consulted the records in the
provincial archives, he would have
learned that his complaint against “the
distant east” was a major argument
advanced in 1870 by advocates of annexa-
tion to the U.S. and against confederation
with Canada.

“We are so far separated from Canada
that she can only communicate with us by
telegraph through the U.S., and by ship
around the southern extremity of the
American continent,” asserted Montague
Tyrwhitt Drake in opposing confedera-
tion during the debate in the colonial legis-
lature.

As the member for Victoria City, he
said he was speaking on behalf of his
constituents, who included the merchants
comprising the majority of those signing a
petition calling for annexation to the U.S.
Like the transnational corporations sup-
porting the U.S.-Canada trade agreement
in seeking a larger market, they wanted to
ensure their access to the expanding San
Francisco market, even though it would
inhibit the development of industry in
Victoria.

Vander Zalm:
writing his own

istory and bible

arables to boot

AMOR DE COSMOS (above); NANAIMO, 1870 ... early colonists took B.C. into
Confederation despite the pull of geography and the merchants’ clamour for trade.

PHOTOS — PROVINCIAL ARCHIVES

Arguments against “the distant east”
had some validity in the confederation
debate when Dr. John Sebastian Helm-
cken, son-in-law of Sir James Douglas,
was contending that ‘““The people of this
colony, generally speaking, have no love
for Canada ... and care little about the
distinction between the form of govern-
ment of Canada and the U.S.” But, he
was wrong in predicting the ultimate
absorption of British Columbia and Can-
ada by the U.S.

Today, a century after completion of
the CPR bridged the distance, the argu-
ments, having lost all validity, serve only
the narrow, essentially anti-Canadian
interests of those who raise them. Air
travel has brought all Canadian cities
within a few hours flying time of each
other and even the Arctic coasts, where
explorers struggled for close to three cen-
turies to find the Northwest Passage, can
now be reached in a day.

Just as he uses the arguments of the
past to confuse the realities of the present,
so Vander Zalm recognizes only the geo-
graphy and ignores the history in assert-
ing that the Pacific Northwest is really one
region, as indeed it might have been
except for the aggressive U.S. policies that
stripped it from Canada.

British Columbia’s border might have
extended south to the Columbia River
had not the U.S., pursuing its expansion-
ist “Manifest Destiny,” abrogated the
agreement for joint occupation of Oregon
and, backed by an influx of American
settlers, laid claim with the slogan “54-40
or fight” to the whole Pacific coast, fore-
ing Britain to accede to the 49th parallel
boundary line.

Similarly, B.C. might not be denied
access to what geographically is its north-
ern coast had the British and later the
Canadian government heeded the far-
sighted appeals of Amor De Cosmos.
leader of the battle for confederation, at
last to acquire the Alaska Panhandle.
Instead, when the Alaska Boundary
Tribunal brought down its findings,
which the two Canadian commissioners
refused to sign, the British commissioner
joined the three Americans in accepting
their definition of the boundary.

In the shaping of Canada, the forces of
history, the rivalries of the colonial Euro-
pean powers, not the geography of natu-
ral regions, have determined its bound-
aries, and the continuing refusal of the
U.S. to recognize Canada’s sovereign
right to its Arctic waters is a modern
extension of a struggle that began when
our burgeoning sense of nationhood,
English and French, was born in success-
ful defence against U.S. invasion in the
War of 1812.

The colonists’ struggle to take B.C. into
the Canadian Confederation — a strug-
gle in which, as De Cosmos declared, “*...

it was the people who took this matter in.

hand (and) it is the people who will see it
through” — fulfilled the aspirations of
the new nation by extending Canada’s
boundaries to the Pacific.

To denigrate Canadians of “a distant
east” as more difficult to relate to than
Americans south of the border is to deny
the distinctive qualities that impel Cana-
dians of whatever province to wear their
maple leaf pins wherever they travel.

The U.S., in its decline, may no longer
be seeking to annex Canadian territory.
But the continental thrust for Canadian
energy, Water and other resources implicit
in the U.S.-Canada trade agreement is no
less a threat to Canada’s integrity.

Hal Griffin is a former editor of the
Tribune.

Pacific Tribune, April 27, 1988 « 15