Qualla: Qualicum College

Qualicum College: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit w:en:Kjfmartin (talk, contribs), CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2021 the town council of Qualicum Beach voted to take the heritage designation off a building specifically so that it could be knocked down and replaced with a replica of itself. The original had stood since the 1930s: a long Tudor-style block with timbered gables, built as the main hall of Qualicum College, a boys' boarding school that ran for thirty-five years and then spent another fifty in a slow second life as a hotel and finally as condominiums. When the machines were finished, the empty ground went on the market for $6.6 million. Whatever replaces it will look much the same from the road. It will not be the same building, and everyone involved knew that going in.

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Image: w:en:Kjfmartin (talk | contribs) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Qualicum College: Cane and Cadets

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD, CC BY-SA 3.0. Qualicum College opened in 1935 and ran on the British public-school model, transplanted whole to a stretch of Vancouver Island coastline. Boys boarded. Rugby was close to universal and taken seriously. A military cadet programme supplied war games and camping trips. Evenings mea...

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Image: JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD | CC BY-SA 3.0

Qualicum College: Overtaken

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the late 1960s the arithmetic had turned. Costs rose, enrolment fell, and the model the school was built on had begun to look less like rigour and more like inertia. Public education in British Columbia was improving fast in exactly the areas a discipline-based curriculum foun...

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Image: JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD | CC BY-SA 3.0

Qualicum College: The Inn Years

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD, CC BY-SA 3.0. For decades afterwards the old school served drinks and rented rooms. Guests slept in converted dormitories and walked corridors built for schoolboys, and the building accumulated the reputation such places always do - creaking floors, unexplained noises, ghost stories told with ...

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Image: JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD | CC BY-SA 3.0

Qualicum College: Where the School Actually Survives

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD, CC BY-SA 3.0. The building is gone. What remains is harder to bulldoze. In 2010 the Aboriginal Issues Press at the University of Manitoba published Voices from the Dorms: Qualicum Boys School, an oral history built from the recollections of the people who lived there - the dorms, the disciplin...

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Image: JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD | CC BY-SA 3.0