Qualla: Gulf of Georgia Cannery

Gulf of Georgia Cannery: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ymblanter, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1897, the Gulf of Georgia Cannery packed more than two and a half million cans of salmon. The building had opened three years earlier on the lower Fraser River at Steveston, then a boomtown of canneries standing shoulder to shoulder along the water, and it was the largest in British Columbia until 1902. People called it the Monster Cannery, which was less a compliment than a description. A sockeye run arriving all at once gives a cannery a few frantic weeks to process a year's income, and in those weeks the place ran on hundreds of pairs of hands moving very fast in a building that smelled of fish, steam, and hot solder.

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Image: Ymblanter | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gulf of Georgia Cannery: Who Filled the Cans

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexey Golubev, CC BY-SA 4.0. The workforce each season was First Nations, Chinese, Japanese, and European, sorted by job and by pay in ways nobody at the time pretended were accidental. Indigenous women, many of them from communities up the coast who travelled down for the season, did much of the cleaning an...

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Image: Alexey Golubev | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gulf of Georgia Cannery: April 1942

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Quine, CC BY 2.0. By 1941, Japanese Canadians owned 46 of Steveston's 62 businesses, and their families made up much of the fishing fleet and the cannery workforce. Women processed the catch with babies on their backs. Within hours of Canada declaring war on Japan in December 1941, the government ...

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Image: Thomas Quine | CC BY 2.0

Gulf of Georgia Cannery: Herring in Tomato Sauce

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ymblanter, CC BY-SA 4.0. The last can of sockeye came off the Gulf of Georgia line in 1930, after which the salmon work consolidated into British Columbia Packers Limited and the building went quiet through the Depression. War brought it back. Capital and machinery poured in for a new product, canned her...

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Image: Ymblanter | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gulf of Georgia Cannery: Fishing a Population to the Floor

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit waferboard, CC BY 2.0. Herring reduction ended the way those industries usually do. Catches that had run into the hundreds of thousands of tonnes collapsed under their own weight, and in the late 1960s the government closed the fishery outright. A reprieve came in the 1970s, when a Japanese market for ...

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Image: waferboard | CC BY 2.0

Gulf of Georgia Cannery: The Building That Refused to Go

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yan Lau, CC BY-SA 3.0. Steveston did not let it be demolished. Through the 1970s and early 1980s residents lobbied every level of government they could reach, and in 1979 the federal government bought the property, transferring it to Parks Canada in 1984. Locals formed the Gulf of Georgia Cannery Socie...

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Image: Yan Lau | CC BY-SA 3.0