Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Marking its 75th birthday in 2013, the Lions Gate Bridge was officially opened, a year
after its 1938 completion, by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, who were on a
cross-Canada tour.
Expo-Sing the City
By the start of the 1950s, Vancouver's population was 345,000 and the area was thriv-
ing. The high-rise craze hit in the middle of the decade, mostly in the West End. During
the next 13 years, 220 apartment buildings went up - and up - in this area alone.
In the 1960s and '70s, Vancouver was known for its counterculture community,
centered on Kitsilano. Canada's gay-rights movement began here in 1964 when a group
of feminists and academics started the Association for Social Knowledge, the country's
first gay and lesbian discussion group. In 1969 the Don't Make a Wave Committee
formed to stop US nuclear testing in Alaska, sending a protest vessel to the region in
1971. A few years later, the group morphed into the environmental organization Green-
peace.
As the years passed, the city's revolutionary fervor dissipated and economic develop-
ment became the region's main pastime. Nothing was more important to Vancouver in
the 1980s than Expo '86, the world fair that many regard as the city's coming of age.
The six-month event, coinciding with Vancouver's 100th birthday, brought millions of
visitors to the city and kick-started a rash of regeneration in several tired neighbor-
hoods. New facilities built for Expo included the 60,000-seat BC Place Stadium, which
has since played a starring role in the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2010
Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.
Multicultural Milestones
The brewing issue of First Nations land rights spilled over in the late 1980s, with a
growing number of rallies, road blockades and court actions in the region. Aside from a
few treaties covering a tiny portion of the province, land-claim agreements had not
been signed and no clear definition of the scope and nature of First Nations rights exis-
ted. Until 1990 the provincial government refused to participate in treaty negotiations.
That changed in December of that year when the BC Claims Task Force was formed
among the Canadian and BC governments and the First Nations Summit with a mission
to figure out how the three parties could solve land-rights matters. It has been a slow-
moving, ongoing process that in Vancouver's case involves the Tsawwassen, Tsleil--
Waututh, Katzie, Squamish and Musqueam nations.
