Tin Cans and Iron Chinks
Canned salmon took the world by storm in 1894. That's when the Georgia Cannery opened and stood the fishing industry on its head with this brand new system of preserving the local salmon catch.

But the cannery made another claim to fame. It spawned one of the first multi-ethnic community in Canada. The diverse workforce of Japanese, Chinese, and First Nations people were imported for their skills with the gutting knife. They were strictly segregated along cultural lines..both at work and in their bunkhouses in the cannery complex.

Working conditions were grueling. Temperatures in the cannery were either very cold or very hot and always the stench of fish. Women worked with the babies strapped to their backs. And many workers lost fingers as they toiled for long hours gutting the salmon catch.

In its heyday, the cannery was one of 17 along the waterfront of Steveston. In the fishing season the population ballooned from 400 to 10,000. But in 1906 everything changed with the arrival of the first mechanical gutting machine known at the "Iron Chink" which did the work of 30 people. Automation was a boon to productivity but it also forced massive layoffs among the cannery's Chinese workers.

But the cannery industry now had to contend with a rapidly dwindling salmon fish stock that had slumped from 40 million fish to only one million. This coincided with the economic downslide of the 1930s Depression. Canada's bedrock industry, wheat farming, saw its income drop from $620 million to $177 million-a year. Unemployment in industry leapt from three to 20 per cent of the workforce. Canned salmon was a luxury that many people just could not afford and many canneries closed down.

The Gulf of Georgia only survived the decade by closing its canning plant and converting space into a raw fish station and fishing net storage loft. The canning lines only re-opened in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II. Canned fish were needed to supply allied troops. But wartime also brought with it the darkest chapter for the Japanese workers.

The Canadian government deported all Japanese people to the interior as a security risk.. Fishermen lost their boats, families were uprooted and moved without any possessions. One third of those uprooted were children who were in fact Canadian-born.

After the war repaid decline of all the fishing grounds spelled the beginning of the end. In 1979 the Cannery was saved from the wreckers' ball by local conservationists. Today its machinery hums again, but as a museum offering a snapshot of a life that was both hard and unremitting.