Talk:George Anthony Walkem

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[edit] Reason for deletion/excerption

To me the following phrase, taken from the article, is unnecessary:

Walkem’s government passed a racist law denying Chinese and native people the vote and also worked to curtail and reduce the size of Indian reserves leading to land claims disputes that continued for over a century.

BC legislation already blocked Chinese voters in 1871 (though some Chinese in Lillooet voted anyway); native voters maybe later but unless there's a specifically worse piece of legislation than that already in place it's not worth mentioning; the use of the cant-word "racist" all over the place is really tiresome too; either a reader knows something is racist, or they don't need to have to be beaten over the brow with it. The reduction of sizes of Indian Reserves is nothing unique to the Walkem era (Vowell Commission, wasn't it, in his day?) and it's hardly the basis of the land claims disputes, which have their bedrock foundation in the 1871-vintage claims by the BC Govt that merely joining Canada was enough to dissolve any possibility of outstanding claims; and there's the revisions under Seymour of what Douglas had put in place.Skookum1 00:33, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Details, details, details

In 1882 Walkem narrowly survived a Motion of No Confidence due to rising costs of a project to build a dock on Vancouver Island but lost the subsequent election due to hostility from Islanders who had a disproportinate number of seats in the legislature and thus were able to bring down the Walkem government.

I'll get to this later tonight, I think; I just finished reading a couple of books on the era. The "dock on Vancover Island" in question is a Royal Navy drydock at Esquimalt that was the megaproject of its day, especially as far as keeping the Island economy going since it was by this time obvious that the CPR terminus wouldn't be on the Inner Harbour, as Victorians had long assumed and/or fought for. The drydock was a payoff, and also important in local eyes in order to thwart the ongoing possibility of American adventurism (a Fenian attack, for instance, was anticipated for the opening of the CPR in 1887, hence the big warships in Vancouver harbour as can be seen in photos of that day in books and, I think, either the VPL or BC Archives online photo databases).

As for Islanders having a disproportionate number of seats in the Legislature, that's not exactly the way to put that. The Mainland had originally been given "weighted" seats, based on the assumption that with provincehood the settlement of the Mainland would proceed apace; it didn't, not until after the Railway. The Island had the bulk of the population - the voting population, since non-British subjects could not vote (this was to keep Americans from the polls unless they were naturalized, along with sundry Europeans and of course the Chinese; that backfired on them when the status of people from the then-Colony of Hong Kong were pointed out to be British subjects. Long story, you know the ending.

The electoral weight of the Mainland vs the Island didn't hold out for long as the Mainland's railway era eclipsed the Island population by leaps and bounds, although IIRC it took until 1905 for Vancouver to pass Victoria in population. Victoria had been the economic epicentre of the "British Northwest" since before the Island colony was formed in 1849, and that dominance lasted right up until the opening of the railway and the advent of steamships, which did not have to be towed from the "roads" at Victoria (where the sea-going ships moored awaiting either harbour or a pilot to the Mainland). Suddenly its former prominence as the transshipment point between the Mainland and San Francisco, Britain and the Orient vanished and other measures had to be taken - and so the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway and also the big drydock project at Esquimalt, which was seen as a protection both in terms of security but also in terms of Royal Navy spending (salaries, local base expenses etc); military spending remains a bulwark of the Esquimalt economy and so Victoria's to this day, and a more up-to-date version of the drydock project of the 1880s has just been announced (it'll be the third-largest enclosed space in North America, apparently).

Cite for all this is by Joseph Morton, In the Sea of Sterile Mountains: The Chinese in British Columbia", which despite its title is more about the careers of the politicians of the age, and an explanation of the issues of the time - to which the "Chinese question" was central (their terms were a bit nastier so I won't use them, even in quotes). The book's a bit out of date, and it makes the usual earnest politically-correct nods and snipes, but it has a lot of information and some very interesting by-the-way biographers of politicians of the time, including Walkem.

Walkem's offspring should probably get their own pages, or a listing here on their sire/grandsire's page.Skookum1 00:51, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

So anyway, there was a lot more going on than the existing text indicates, and it also says some offbase things; "disproportionate" (other than the spelling mistake) is the wrong word to use, since there was a reason for the electoral balances. And it's worth pointing out that two or three of the Island ridings were even more sparsely populated than most of the Mainland ridings. Comox had 83 votes and it was an original riding; newly-created Cassiar on the mainland had 57, most of them somewhere up in the Stikine and some on the Skeena (Prince Rupert hadn't even been thought of yet, although BCers had gotten pretty antsy when the CPR survey crews poked up through there, as Victoria would have been sold out and what became Vancouver never come to pass). Mind you Cowichan only had 143 votes vs Esquimalt 281 (2 seats) - but Nanaimo had 770 (2 seats), Victoria (2 seats) 389 and Victoria City (4 seats) 2,811. But Mainland numbers were even lower, for the districts described; and the Victoria era's eight-seat status (Esquimalt was largely part of the capital district, even then when it was a ways out in the country); guess I'll do a pie-chart or something for these election pages so the proportionates of votes/voters to seats/regions can be better shown.Skookum1 00:48, 5 January 2006 (UTC)