Vancouver in the Seventies

From the Introduction

In 1970, still years shy of its hundredth birthday, Vancouver was emerging from a post-war boom and rushing headlong into a seismic shift that would see a new political, cultural, and social consciousness competing alongside distractions like streaking, disco dancing, the Pet Rock, and Archie Bunker.

The seventies was the decade in which Vancouver left the unfettered sixties behind, along with the city’s long-held imprimatur as a hardscrabble working-class harbour town, embracing instead a growing maturity and an extraordinary metamorphosis from resource-dependent backwater to modern metropolis.

It was a decade, filtered through the clarity of hindsight, of promise and purpose for Vancouver, a time for pushing personal freedoms and questioning authority.

It was also a time of transition, when yippies were becoming yuppies, when the industrial dankness of False Creek was giving way to tony townhouses, when political upstarts and cultural initiatives were quickening the city’s pulse.

Around the globe, political and economic upheaval was tarnishing the sheen of decades of unbridled industrialization and prosperity that had so endowed North America after the Second World War. Inflation and unemployment, twin tidal waves of woe, along with OPEC ’s economy-crushing oil embargo, brought an unexpectedly harsh economic reality to North America.

Change crept into Vancouver from south of the border, too. America’s influence on pop culture and politics escalated, not just with the first Apple computer and the VCR, but with a fresh legacy of civil unrest, with Richard Nixon and Watergate, Kent State, the Pentagon Papers, and Three Mile Island all casting a dark shadow.

The political flashpoint that was the Vietnam War brought a flood of draft dodgers and deserters north of the forty-ninth parallel, along with a bold intellectual perspective that energized campuses and arts organizations around the city.

Across Canada, divisive issues like Quebec separatism, abortion rights, the October Crisis, and the rise of regionalism were dampening the Canadian spirit.

Vancouver, not immune to the change around it, was suddenly no longer just the country’s cornerstone of bountiful oceans and glorious mountains, but was the new national ground zero for radical unrest and direct action, as protesters took to the streets to fight for workers’ rights, aboriginal land claims, the homeless, affordable housing, the unemployed, gay rights, legalized marijuana, and gender equality.

Growing dissatisfaction with authority and discrimination provoked a clash between hundreds of youth and police at the Battle of Jericho in 1970 and the Gastown Riot in 1971. The Clark Park gang tangled with police at a Rolling Stones concert in 1972 and, over the decade, there were three riots and a deadly hostage-taking at the B.C. Penitentiary.

But perhaps nothing defined Vancouver in the seventies as much as the groundswell of the environmental movement, marked by the founding of Greenpeace, the fledgling organization that changed the ecological conscience of the world through a proselytizing rag-tag army of Cowichan-sweaterclad eco-warriors like Bob Hunter, Paul Watson, and Patrick Moore.

From Big Oil protests at Peace Arch Park to anti-logging blockades in B.C. forests, from high seas confrontations with Japanese whalers to sailing to Amchitka in denunciation of nuclear testing, Greenpeace was a grassroots green wave that swept across the globe, and today its millions of members in dozens of countries still lead the charge on fighting climate change.