Gulf of Georgia Cannery

The Gulf of Georgia Cannery is a National Historic Site on the Steveston waterfront, preserving the last of what was once a coast full of salmon canneries. The buildings are original 1894 structures; inside, the canning machinery — butchering tables, soldering machines, retorts — remains in situ, giving the feel of a factory still in mid-operation rather than a sterile exhibit.

The exhibits cover the full industrial and human history: the Musqueam and other First Nations peoples who fished these waters for millennia, the Chinese and Japanese workers who provided most of the labour, the mechanisation that progressively displaced them, and the eventual collapse of the wild salmon industry. It is a thorough piece of Canadian industrial and social history. Guided tours are available; the site is managed by Parks Canada and well worth an hour or two.

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A story
At the height of the salmon canning industry, Steveston's canneries processed up to 42 million pounds of salmon in a single season. The Gulf of Georgia Cannery last operated in 1979; when Parks Canada took it over, they found the machinery still in place, as if the workers had just stepped out. The "Iron Chink" — the mechanised fish-butchering machine that replaced Chinese labour — is still here, an uncomfortable piece of history that the museum does not shy away from.