Cancelling Powell River

Is it just me, dear reader, or is our Canada becoming an increasingly bizarre fever dream?

Our Prime Minister believes that the country he governs is not a nation at all, but rather a “post-national state with no core identity”. Land acknowledgements are solemnly proclaimed by people who, astonishingly, continue living on the very land which they just confessed to having stolen! And B.C. Ferries now hands out “eco-friendly” bamboo cutlery, which work about as well as an actual cane of bamboo!

The former mill town of Powell River (pop: 14,000 souls) is leading the way through Alice in Wonderland’s Looking Glass, into the realm of the utterly surreal, with its local government seriously entertaining a proposal to rename the town. Not a building or a street – an entire town! Is Vancouver next?

In May 2021, the Executive Council of the neighbouring Tla’amin Nation (formerly Sliammon Indian Band), requested that the town’s name be changed. Powell River established a Joint Working Group to study the issue, and last month, the town’s strategic priorities included “real steps towards a name change”.

The northern Sunshine Coast community’s namesake, B.C. politician Israel Wood Powell (1836-1915), made one fatal mistake: being a dead white male. He has been found guilty of shocking delicate 21^st century sensibilities, by holding views representative of the 19^th century in which he lived. Do the woke folk ever wonder if their views will hold up in the 23^rd century?

Powell joins the ranks of Henry Dundas and Egerton Ryerson, whose legacies have also recently been under attack. The successful campaigns to rename Dundas Square (now the passive aggressively ridiculous “Sankofa Square”) and Ryerson University (now the aggressively bland “Toronto Metropolitan University”) were as laughably historically illiterate as the campaign to rename Powell River.

Arthur Richards, a Powell River resident, has compiled the results of his extensive investigation of old B.C. government documents into a detailed treatment of the various allegations of racism that have been levied against Israel Powell. This piece has been published in the latest edition of the conservative Canadian magazine Dorchester Review, which islanders can purchase at Salt Spring Books.

Israel Powell did frown on the northwest coast indigenous potlatch, a system of feasts centred on music, storytelling, and gift-giving. Like many Anglo Canadians living in B.C. in the 1800s, Powell believed that the distribution of free goods in these ceremonies disincentivized hard work.

On the other hand, he fought for indigenous water rights, and lobbied hard for Indian reserves to be calculated at 20-acres per family instead of the 10-acre principle proposed by the provincial government of his day.

History is too complex to be reduced to the Battle of Good and Evil interpretation frequently employed today – a type of black-and-white thinking that resembles a Superman comic book. Alexander the Great showed mercy to captives, and also ordered massacres – should Egypt rename Alexandria?

As a young nation still establishing itself, we should cherish and celebrate our historical roots, not cancel them.

Editor’s note: My bi-monthly Counter Current column is originally published in Salt Spring’s Islands Marketplace paper (islandsmarketplace.com/issue.pdf). This piece was published on February 9th, 2024.