British Columbia
Inside Canada's Monster Cannery
The Gulf of Georgia Cannery comes to life in the historic fishing village of Steveston, in Richmond, B.C.
By Christina Palassio
The first thing I notice as I walk through the doors of the Gulf of Georgia Cannery is the cold.
Perched on wooden pilings over the Fraser River, the Cannery has vaulted ceilings with high rafters stretching overhead. The doors at the water's edge face the river. The building is unheated so that, even on a warm afternoon, it's chilly inside.
© Parks Canada / Scott Munn
© Parks Canada / Scott Munn
Built in 1894, the Cannery is one of the most recognizable landmarks in Steveston, a historic fishing village that is now part of Richmond, British Columbia, and an important monument to the history of Canada’s west coast fishing industry.
Over the course of its 85-year operational history, the Cannery pumped out millions of pounds of processed fish and fish products, helping to establish the region as a centre of fish processing and export.
Today, Steveston remains the largest commercial small-craft fishing port in Canada, and the Cannery stands as the centrepiece — a national historic site that preserves the stories of the past.
Elizabeth Batista, Executive Director at the Cannery, is showing a group of us around the site. She tells the story of how the facility evolved technology to process around 2.5 million pounds of salmon per year destined for kitchen tables across the country and the world.
For years, she says, it was the largest salmon cannery on the west coast, once known as the “Monster Cannery”.
When she gets to the Boiler House, she pauses.
Pointing to the enormous boiler, which powered the steam-driven machinery that ran the canning line, she invites visitors to imagine what it would have felt, smelled, and sounded like to work next to the hot, loud boiler day in and day out. The noise and heat weren’t the only challenges: Workers had to carefully monitor fuel, pressure, and oxygen levels.
Any lapse could cause the boiler to fail or, worse, explode.
This is where the story deepens. Elizabeth describes how Japanese-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian, and Indigenous Peoples worked shoulder to shoulder while facing racial discrimination at the hands of white managers.
Pay and treatment varied sharply by ethnicity, a hierarchy enforced by managers who often pitted groups against one another, deepening the exclusion and discrimination workers already faced. The environment led workers to organize and strike for better pay and working conditions, paving the way for unionization in the 1940s, an important milestone in labour organizing in the sector and in Canada.
For Elizabeth, the role of the Cannery and its guides is to promote a multi-faceted understanding of history that includes previously untold stories.
“I feel very honoured to share histories that some people don't know,” she says.
She sees it as a space that has a responsibility to rebuild and strengthen community ties.
“We’re very intentional about continuing to hear stories from voices and people that may have not made it into history textbooks in schools,” she says.
One example is the story of the Exclusion Act that forced Chinese Canadians to pay exorbitant amounts of money, just to be able to stay in Canada.
“Everything we do is about uncovering those stories and saying, 'how are we going to do this safely, and in a way that respects that culture or that person?' We take care to record a lot of oral histories. We're very focused on training our heritage interpreters, so they can understand those stories and create dialogue with our visitors," Elizabeth says.
The Gulf of Georgia Cannery was declared a National Heritage Site in 1976, and ceased operations three years later. While it has been a landmark in Steveston for decades, the Canada Strong Pass has been bringing more and more visitors through its doors over the past two years.
“All of a sudden, that history has been even more accessible to people and people are interested in it,” Elizabeth says.
"Our ideal visitor is the one that's open to learn, open to enjoy an authentic experience, and open to having a conversation,” she adds.
Rosemary Georgeson grew up on Galiano Island in a Coast Salish and Sahtu Dene fishing family.
At the Cannery, she worked with sansei, taiko composer, and artist John Endo Greenaway to tell the story of the strong and respectful relationships that existed between Indigenous and Japanese-Canadian fishers — one that she saw firsthand as a teenager growing up on her father’s boat, seeing how he and the Nikkei fishermen shared catches, learnings, and stories.
In the 1940s, Canada's wartime anti-Japanese policies forcibly removed thousands of Japanese-Canadian fishers and cannery workers from Steveston and interned them in camps in the B.C. interior. The government seized their boats and sold them off or left them to rot.
Many families never returned to the homes, livelihoods, and communities they had spent generations building.
Some of their boats went to Indigenous fishers who'd previously been barred from commercial fishing. In 1952, Rosemary's father and grandfather bought the Georgeson Bay, which had been built by a Japanese boatbuilder and seized by the Crown in 1942 during internment. They took the burnt-out hull and rebuilt it.
Rosemary remembers learning to walk on its decks.
Another permanent exhibit at the Cannery is The Water We Call Home: Indigenous Women’s Connections to Water, Fish and Family around the Salish Sea. It shares a lesser-known story: that of female Indigenous fishers who played an important role in the west coast fishing industry. Rosemary developed the project with Dr. Jessica Hallenbeck and Dr. Kate Hennessy and several female Indigenous collaborators.
“My work has always been around fishing and water because that's what I know,” says Rosemary.
Through short films, photography, archival and family materials and interpretive elements, The Water We Call Home invites visitors to consider fishing history through Indigenous women’s perspectives.
“[The exhibit] allowed us to open up a whole other door of untold stories. The role that the cannery plays is so important to create that space. People cannot just hear the history, but experience it, which is unforgettable," she says. "And then they can continue to pass it on as well. The stories are more important now than ever, because if people my age stop telling these stories, it's a part of history that's going to be gone.”
Walking through the Cannery, history feels more alive and full than ever before, thanks to Rosemary, Elizabeth, and the community of people around the site.
“I hope for a way that Canadians and visitors can value how important, arts, culture and history is to our identity and to our national health,” says Elizabeth.
The Gulf of Georgian Cannery National Historic Site is located at 12138 Fourth Ave, in Richmond British Columbia, just 11 km south of Vancouver International Airport and 20 km south of Pacific Central Station.
Christina Palassio is a Toronto-based freelance journalist who writes about cycling, causes, culture, and communities for several publications in Canada and internationally.