Creating order: The liberals, the landowners, and the draining of Sumas Lake, British Columbia

Environmental History

Volumn 13, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 92-125

  Murton, James ^a  

^a NIPISSING UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AGRARIAN CHANGE; ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY; IDEOLOGY; LANDOWNER; LANDSCAPE;

BRITISH COLUMBIA; CANADA; NORTH AMERICA;

EID: 41549097453     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/13.1.92     Document Type: Article

References (159)

1. Laura Cameron, Openings: A Meditation on History, Method, and Sumas Lake (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997), 46;
2. F. N. Sinclair, "A History of the Sumas Drainage and Dyking District," typescript, n.d., Library Collection, British Columbia Archives [hereafter BCA].
3. W. L. Blatchford, Secretary, "Minutes of the Sumas Dyking Meeting," November 24, 1919, vol. 50, file 8, GR-929 Land Settlement Board, BCA.
4. Robert A.J. McDonald, "Politics Before Parties: Modernity and Province-Building, 1871. 1903," unpublished paper presented at the Beyond Hope Conference, May 2001, Kamloops, BC.
5. Ian McKay, "The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History," Canadian Historical Review 81 (2000): 617-45;
6. Tina Loo, Making Law, Order and Authority in British Columbia, 1821-1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).
7. Barry Ferguson, Remaking Liberalism (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993);
8. James Murton, Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007).
9. On new liberalism more generally, see James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986);
10. and Peter Weiler, The New Liberalism: Liberal Social Theory in Great Britain, 1889-1914 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982).
11. In the United States new liberal ideas were part of the larger discourse of progressive reform, fuelling reformers concerned with "social consciousness," "social duty," and the "common good," having less direct influence with the better-known muckrakers, trust-busters, evangelical social reformers, prohibitionists, and promoters of technocratic government. See Kloppenberg, Uncertain, 311;
12. and Daniel T. Rodgers, "In Search of Progressivism," Reviews in American History 10 (1982): 123-26.
13. "Proceedings of the Agriculture Committee of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of British Columbia, Held at the Parliament Buildings, Dec 3rd, 1925," 9, 480(10), GR-929.
14. David Demeritt, "Visions of Agriculture in British Columbia," B.C. Studies 108 (1995-96), 40-47.
15. Cole Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 219-49;
16. Margaret Ormsby, British Columbia: A History (Macmillan of Canada, 1971), 398-99.
17. See Paul Sutter, "Reflections: What Can U.S. Environmental Historians Learn from Non-U.S. Environmental Historiography?" Environmental History 8 (2003): 5-10.
18. By the state I mean not just the government but the constellation of institutions associated with the government and involved in the administration and regulation of society. In the case of this essay that includes the linked institutions of the cabinet and legislature of British Columbia, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Lands, and various boards and quasi-state bodies. I also do not mean a state in the sense of the junior level of government in the U.S. federal system. In Canada these are, of course, called provinces. For a brief discussion ofthe difficulties inherent in defining the state, see Allan Greer and Ian Radforth, "Introduction," in Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Canada, ed. Allan Greer and Ian Radforth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 9-11.
19. Thomas Dunlap, Saving America's Wildlife: Ecology and the American Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988);
20. Thomas R. Dunlap "Ecology, Culture, and Canadian National Parks Policy: Wolves, Elk, and Bison as a Case Study," in To See Ourselves/to Save Ourselves: Ecology and Culture in Canada, ed. Rowland Lorimer et al. (Montréal: Association for Canadian Studies, 1991), 139-47;
21. Alan MacEachern, Natural Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada, 1935-1970 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001);
22. George Warecki, Protecting Ontario's Wilderness: A History of Changing Ideas and Preservation Politics, 1927-1973 (New York: Peter Lang, 2000);
23. John F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, 3rd. ed. (1975; reprint, Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2001);
24. Tina Loo, "Making a Modern Wilderness: Conserving Wildlife in Twentieth-Century Canada," Canadian Historical Review 82 (2001): 92-121;
25. Peter Gillis, Lost Initiatives: Canada's Forest Industries, Forest Policy, and Forest Conservation (Toronto: Greenwood Press, 1986);
26. Janet Foster, Working for Wildlife: The Beginning of Preservation in Canada, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998);
27. Matthew Evenden, Fish Versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
28. Michel F. Girard, L'écologisme retrouvé: Essor Et déclin de la Commission de la Conservation du Canada (Ottawa: Les Presses de L'Université d'Ottawa, 1994).
29. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 51-60, 282-84.
30. Work in the Canadian staples tradition has argued that the country's reliance on the export of lightly processed commodities such as fur and timber has encouraged the creation of an interventionist state by requiring nonmarket institutions to set the conditions for stable accumulation. For an earlier example that works particularly well as environmental history (and whose author has taken up environmental history more recently), see H.V. Nelles, The Politics of Development: Forests, Mines & Hydro-Electric Power in Ontario, 1849-1941 (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1974).
31. A more recent example is Trevor J. Barnes et al., "Stormy Weather: Cyclones, Harold Innis, and Port Alberni, BC," Environment and Planning A 33 (2001), 2127-47.
32. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 2-7, 201, 221, 304-06.
33. Nancy Langston similarly stresses the unwillingness to address complexity in explaining failures in both reclamation efforts and restoration efforts in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon: Nancy Langston, Where Land and Water Meet: Transforming a Western Landscape (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).
34. Colin Duncan has argued that environmental historians interested in ideas need to move beyond ideas specifically about nature to consider how more general logics, like liberalism, encourage a particular form of engagement with nature. See Colin A. M. Duncan, "on Identifying a Sound Environmental Ethic in History: Prolegomena to Any Future Environmental History," Environmental History Review 15 (1991): 10.
35. Richard White demonstrates how shifting ideas of technology and its relationship to society and environment influenced development in Washington state in The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), particularly 30-81.
36. For the confluence between left-wing and reforming political ideas and conservation, see Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: the Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993), particularly 15-105;
37. and Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 376-82.
38. Mark Fiege argues that irrigators aimed at an "irrigated Eden" that celebrated the combination of nature and the machine in his Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1999).
39. Cameron, Openings.
40. C. Cartwright, "Report on Sumas Reclamation Project," October 18, 1919, 48(5), GR-929.
41. On the 1948 flood, see W. R. Derrick Sewell, Water Management and Floods in the Fraser River Basin (Chicago: Department of Geography, University of Chicago, 1965), 15-16.
42. F. N. Sinclair, "A History of the Sumas Drainage and Dyking District," typescript, n.d., Library Collection, BCA. On the history of the Fraser River, North America's largest undammed stream, see Evenden, Fish Versus Power.
43. "The Sumas Reclamation Project," pamphlet, 2, Library Collection, BCA, reprinted from Agricultural Journal, November, 1922.
44. On the changeableness of nature and our tendency to nevertheless see it as timeless, see Daniel Botkin, Our Natural History: The Lessons of Lewis and Clark (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1995).
45. Cartwright, "Report," Oct 18, 1919, 48(5), GR-929.
46. Barbara Beldam, "Sumas Prairie - A Mosaic of Memories," in Millicent A. Lindo, ed., Making History: An Anthology of British Columbia (Private, 1974), 32-33;
47. Cameron, Openings, 23, 44, 50-51.
48. From Jody R. Woods, "Sumas Lake Transformations," in Keith Thor Carlson, ed., A Sto:lo Coast Salish Historical Atlas (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2001), 104.
49. Cameron, Openings, 16-40, 50-1;
50. Imbert Orchard, Floodland and Forest. Sound Heritage Series no. 37 (Victoria, BC: PABC Sound and Moving Image Division, 1983,) 59, 21,
51. quoted in Cameron, Openings, 23;
52. Brian Thom and Laura Cameron, "Changing Land Use in Soih Temexw (Our Land): Population, Transportation, Ecology, and Heritage," in Keith Thor Carlson, ed., You Are Asked to Witness: The Sto:lo in Canada's Pacific Coast History (Chilliwack, BC: Sto:lo Heritage Trust, 1997), 173.
53. McKay, "The Liberal Order Framework," 620-23.
54. An earlier, influential use of the concept is Loo, Making Law, Order.
55. Canadian liberal reformers were therefore opposed to the large grants of land given to crown and clergy in the colony of Upper Canada after 1791, and the Lower Canada rebels spoke the language of liberty and individual rights in opposing the aristocratic political order of Lower Canada in 1837. On liberal opposition to feudal rights more generally see Cheryl Greenberg, "Twentieth-Century Liberalisms: Transformations of an Ideology," in Harvard Sitkoff, ed. Perspectives on Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 56-57;
56. Stuart Hall, "Variants of Liberalism," in James Donald and Stuart Hall, eds. Politics and Ideology (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1986), 38-39;
57. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 178-81.
58. Loo, Making Law, 52-53.
59. For further discussions of liberalism, see Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (New York: Blackwell, 1984);
60. Fernande Roy, Progrès, harmonie, liberté: le libéralisme des milieux d'affaires francophonies de Montréal au tournante du siècle (Montreal: Boreal, 1988);
61. and Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (New York: Verso, 2003).
62. McKay, "Liberal," 641.
63. The concept of landscape has a long history and large literature in cultural and historical geography, but here I echo more recent works that stress the way in which power andideologyis inscribed in and reflected by particular landscapes. Classic texts include Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998);
64. and James S. Duncan, The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
65. See, also, David Ley, "Styles of the Times: Liberal and Neo-Conservative Landscapes in Inner Vancouver, 1968-1986," Journal of Historical Geography 13 (1987): 40-56.
66. For excellent introductions, see Ian D. Whyte, Landscape and History Since 1500 (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 9-25;
67. and the entry for landscape in R. J. Johnston et al., eds., The Dictionary of Human Geography, 4th ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 429-31.
68. Harris, Resettlement, 98-102; compare the maps illustrating First Nations movement across the land (p. 70) with the maps of property (pp. 87-88), noting on the later maps the small Indian Reserves.
69. Harris, in Making Native Space (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002), argues that native reserves created the "basic geography" of British Columbia in assigning small tracts of land to the original inhabitants and thus making the rest available for Euro-Canadian settlement. I must note that this is an argument about the structures and power of the state, not about what actually happened when this grid of power was applied in this place. The Sto:lo people endured as a culture and are undergoing a renaissance today (see Carlson, Sto:lo Atlas).
70. Even as the lake was being drained, the Allied Indian Tribes of British Columbia were protesting attempts by the provincial government to reduce the size of reserves-see Paul Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics: the Indian Land Question in British Columbia, 1849-1989 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1990). Still, the 1920s were a low point for native peoples in British Columbia. By the end of the decade the Allied Tribes, defeated in their efforts, had dissolved, and the Canadian government outlawed both the practice of the important potlatch ceremony and the pursuit of land claims by First Nations people.
71. Keith Thor Carlson, "Indian Reservations," in Carlson, Sto:lo Atlas, 94-95.
72. First Nations has become a standard term in Canada for what might otherwise be called Native Americans or natives. It is not without problems. It applies the word "nations" to political groupings that usually did not think of themselves this way and likely would not fit a political scientists' definition of nation. Nevertheless, it has the advantage of making clear the uniqueness of particular groups in a way that a homogenizing term like native does not, and, most important, it is the term that First Nations people themselves use.
73. "Sumas Reclamation," 2; W. S. Latta, Director, LSB, "Record of Events-Sumas," December 31, 1926, 48(3), GR-929;
74. Cameron, Openings, 53-57, quote on 57.
75. Cole Harris sees Sproat as supporting and attempting to work out an independent role for native people within colonial society, an attempt that eventually failed. See Harris, Making Native Space, 98-166.
76. "Sumas Reclamation," 2;
77. Latta, "Record of Events-Sumas."
78. See Latta, "Record ... Sumas", 4-5; "Sumas Reclamation," 2; Sinclair, "History," 4, Library Collection; "Skeleton Outline of the History of the Somas Dyking Project, with reference to the Statutes affecting the same," 2, 50(8), GR-929.
79. On B.C. Electric's attempt, see, also, Henry Ewert, The Story of the B.C. Electric Railway (North Vancouver, BC: Whitecap Books, 1986), 72, and the map inside the front cover.
80. Duff Pattullo to E. D. Barrow, August 18, 1917, volume 190, file 3, GR-441 British Columbia. Premier, BCA.
81. Jakob Zink to M. Smith, Chair, LSB, October 16, 1917, 50(1), GR-929; also Chairman, LSB to John Wilson, Sumas, October 11, 1917; and R. A. Heluk to LSB, December 10, 1917, 50(1), GR-929. Names of private individuals changed in compliance with privacy legislation.
82. "Minutes," February 4, 1918, 50(2), GR-929.
83. Cameron, Openings, 67-68.
84. Sinclair, "History," 5; LSB, Reports, 49(5), GR-929.
85. F. N. Sinclair, "Sumas Reclamation Project Final Report," July 5, 1919, 48(5), GR-929.
86. Land reclamation, as David Igler has noted, is related to but conceptually distinct from irrigation. Physically there is the distinction between taking water off the land and applying water to the land. Beyond this, reclamation, as the word suggests, carried overtones of rescue or redemption, saving the land from its current state and deliberately imposing necessary regulation and order. Though Igler notes that reclamation was responsible for the transformation of more land in the American West than any other process, it has not produced nearly the literature generated by irrigation, either promotional or academic. In David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001),
87. see the chapter "Lux v. Haggin: Reclaiming the San Joaquin from Nature," particularly 93-97.
88. Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), 374-94, notes that reclamation is motivated by the nature of our food plants, which commonly derive from semi-arid areas. As a result, the draining of wetlands (and the straightening of rivers, though Rackham gives no real explanation for this) goes back to antiquity.
89. Girard, L'écologisme;
90. Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring,
91. and Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, part 2.
92. John Oliver was minister of Agriculture when the act passed. For Oliver's statement on the priority of the Sumas project, see John Oliver to Minister of Lands, July 25, 1917, 50(1), GR-929.
93. W. E. Payne, Vancouver Board of Trade, to John Oliver, August 10, 1918, and Vancouver Board of Trade to Maxwell Smith, August 17, 1918, 50(3), GR-929.
94. "Reclamation Scheme Adds Whole County to Producing Area," Vancouver World, n.d. [clipping-between 1920 and 1923 from context], volume 7, file 3, MS-023, Jones, J. W. Papers, BCA.
95. "Dykingof Sumas Area Approved." 1919, n.s., 7(3), MS-023. In using the term "property" Oliver was likely referring to the lakelands, whose sale was intended to recoup much of the costs of the scheme. Still, it speaks to the extent to which Oliver conceived of private property as the legitimate basis of activity.
96. For landowners who worried about costs, see Jacob Zinkto Maxwell Smith, Chairman, LSB, October 16, 1917, and T. M. Hall to Maxwell Smith, October 11, 1917, 50(1), GR-929. The budget figure from "Minutes of the Meeting of the Property Owners of the Sumas Dyking District," March 27, 1920, 51(3), GR-929. Though the plan for the reclamation was approved at the initial meeting at which Oliver issued his warning, the lowest bid proved to be higherthan the engineer's estimate. This higher figure was then approved at the 1920 meeting.
97. Phillip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985).
98. Scott, Seeing.
99. Director, LSB, to Minister of Agriculture, memo, August 24, 1921, and Chief Engineer, Sumas Dyking District, "Report for the Land Settlement Board on the Sumas Dyking District...," Jun 22, 1921, 49(2), GR-929.
100. See, also, Director, LSB, "Report for the Hon, the Minister of Ag, on the Sumas Reclamation Project," n.d., 49(3), GR-929;
101. and F. N. Sinclair, Chief Engineer, Sumas to LSB, progress report, January 6, 1920, 49(2), GR-929.
102. Blatchford, Secretary Sumas Dyking Advisory Board to Davies, June 16, 1921, and Director LSB to Blatchford, July 6, 1921, 51(9), GR-929.
103. Latta, "Record... Sumas," 17;
104. and Director, LSB, "Report on Sumas Reclamation Project for Month of October, 1921," Director, LSB, "Progress Report for the Month of November," n.d.;
105. and F. N. Sinclair to LSB, "Progress Report for November," December 16, 1921, all in 49(3), GR-929.
106. Latta, "Record...Sumas," 18;
107. "Sumas Reclamation," 6;
108. "Report by Chief Engineer on Sumas Reclamation Project to May 31, 1923," 49(6), GR-929.
109. "Report on Sumas River Dam," November 26, 1923, 49(6), GR-929;
110. "Sumas Report," 1923, 49(6), GR-929;
111. G. P. Moe, Construction Engineer, "Sumas River Dam Sumas
112. "Land Settlement Board," 8(8), GR-29;
113. and "Minutes of meeting of Sumas Dyke Commission held in the office of the Land Settlement Board on May 9, 1924," 49(8), GR-929. The sturgeon and duck stories are in Cameron, Openings, 74.
114. "P.C. 1229" and "Agreement for the sale of Dominion Lands in British Columbia (Sumas Drainage Project)," August 8, 1923, vol. 3, file 2, BCA, GR-680 British Columbia. Commission on Dyking, Drainage and Irrigation, BCA.
115. C. Tice, Chief Agronomist to Col. Davies, memo, April 28, 1924, 53(1), GR-929.
116. "Minutes of meeting of Surnas Dyke Commission, January j8,1924, Chilliwack," 49(8), GR-929.
117. "Minutes of meeting of Somas Dyke Commission, July 2, 1924," 49(8), GR-929.
118. Latta, "Record... Sumas," 25.
119. See Latta, "Record...Sumas," 31.
120. LSB to T. L. Hughes, LSB Chilliwack, March 16, 1925;
121. and "Record of Proceedings of the Commissioners of the Somas Drainage, Dyking & Development District October 27, 1925," 49(9), GR-929.
122. "Lake Land Development Account," January 14, 1926, 55(6), GR-929.
123. LSB to Rowberry, Chilliwack, January 14, 1926, 55(6), GH-929.
124. "Farm Lands for Sale in the Somas Drainage & Dyking District, situated in the Lower Fraser Valley British Columbia," 1923 [date inferred from textual evidence. The finding aid notes that the pamphlets are from 1923-4148(1), GR-929.
125. "Sumas Reclaimed Lands," pamphlet, n.d. [probably 1927], Library Collection, BCA. On similar ideas in Oregon, see Fiege, Irrigated Eden.
126. See Inspector of Dykes to William Atkinson, Minister of Agriculture, December 9, 1930, vol. 6, file 4, GR-1569, British Columbia.
127. Inspector of Dykes, BCA; Somas Commissioner, "Re: Somas Lands," n.d., Sumas Commissioner to Hans Hannesen, June 13, 1927;
128. and Sumas Commissioner to R. S. Hanna, May 16, 1927, 9(1), GR-1569;
129. Commissioner Sumas to Barrow, Minister of Agriculture, October 18, 1927, 53(6), GR-929.
130. "Government to Sell 8,700 Acre Block at Sumas," clipping, n.s., n.d. and "Offer Made for Somas Acreage," clipping, n.s., n.d., 7(1), MS-023;
131. the agreement between the real estate company of Fell & Scharfe and the government, and the Order-in-Council authorizing it, are 49(10), GR-929;
132. acreages from "Amount of Land Sold in the Sumas Drainage, Dyking & Development District up to ist Nov. 1930," handwritten, and the report for December 31, 1930, 9(2), GR-1569.
133. "Sumas Drainage, Dyking and Development District, Balance Sheet and Statements as at 1928,"
134. and Sumas Drainage, Dyking and Development District, Balance Sheet and Statements as at 1929," 6(4), GR-1569.
135. "Sumas Project as at December 31, 1932" balance sheet, 29(16), GR-929.
136. R. L. Maitland to J. W. Jones, January 25, 1927, 3(1), MS-023.
137. The canal took up twenty-seven of the forty-nine acres of the Aylechoorlook reserve. The LSB argued that as the remaining twenty-two acres were now so much more valuable, nothing was owed to the band. In the end the Board agreed to purchase the land that the canal ran through for $188.72, or $7 per acre. See Cameron, Openings, 72 and n. 122.
138. "Proceedings of the Agriculture Committee, of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of British Columbia, Held at the Parliament Buildings, Dec, 3rd, 1925," 1-14, quote on 14, 48(10), GR-929.
139. "Sumas Reclaimed Lands," pamphlet, 1924, 480), GR-929.
140. "Proceedings of the Agriculture Committee ofthe Legislative Assembly of the Province of British Columbia, Held at the Parliament Buildings... -Testimony of E. D. Barrow," December 7, 1925, 108-16, 48(8), GR-929.
141. "Agriculture Committee," December 7, 1925, 75-79.
142. "Proceedings of the Agriculture Committee of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of British Columbia, Held at the Parliament Buildings..." December 8, 1925, 129, 48(9), GR-929.
143. Ibid., 170.
144. "Proceedings of the Agricultural Committee," December 7, 1925, 79-8o.
145. For other farmers assertions that dairying was more profitable, see 86 and 97.
146. Ibid. 87.
147. On the other crops, see 93, and "Proceedings of the Agricultural Committee," December 8, 1925, 124.
148. On the inability of small farmers in Washington to compete with the prairies, see Richard White, "PoorMen on Poor-Lands: The Back-to-the-Land Movement of the Early Twentieth Century," in Experiences in a Promised Land: Essays in Pacific Northwest History, G. Thomas Edwards and Carlos A. Schwantes, eds. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986), 287-303.
149. "Proceedings of the Agricultural Committee," December 7, 1925, 103.
150. "Proceedings of the Agricultural Committee," December 8, 1925, 147.
151. Ibid., 152, and December 7, 1925, 79.
152. Laura Cameron, in building an argument on the "discord" surroundingthe project, a discord she suggests may lie in a conflict between the local and provincial, misses the essential agreement between farmers and the government expressed in these hearings. She quotes opposition to the dike but not convictions as to its success. In so doing Cameron misses the ways in which environmental and racial attitudes could unite local farmers and the state. See Cameron, Openings, 26-27, and 38.
153. "Proceedings of the Agriculture Committee of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of British Columbia, Held at the Parliament Buildings," December 10, 1925, 189-201, 48(7), GR-929.
154. Inspector of Dykes to Hon E. T. Kenney, Minister of Lands, March 2, 1946, 3(2), GR-680.
155. Inspector to Kenney, March 2, 1946, 3(2), GR-680.
156. Public Inquiries Act. Inquiry before Frederick Moore Clement, Sole Commissioner, to determine how much each of the improved districts under the water act, and of the districts under the Drainage, Dyking arid Development Act., that are indebted to the province can pay annually in respect of its indebtedness, BCA, Commission on Dyking, Drainage, and Irrigation, GR-680, vol. 1 pp. 262-67, 308-35, and passim.
157. Cameron, Openings, 78-81.
158. Cameron, Openings, 82.
159. A conservative, the joke continues, will remind the drowning person that they should not have gone swimming, while a socialist will drain the entire lake.