Losing Steam: The Boiler and Engine Industry as an Index of British Columbia’s Deindustrialization, 1880‑1915

Abstract

This paper examines the process whereby the resource industries on the British Columbia frontier were disconnected from the local secondary manufacturing industries and coupled to the growing manufacturing economies of southern Ontario, the United States, and Great Britain between 1860 and 1915. The resource extractive industries were closely linked, in British Columbia, to the boiler and engine-making industry and prior to 1900 both sectors grew apace. After 1900 the growing demand for boilers and engines was met by producers in Ontario, the United States, and Britain while the British Columbia industry went into decline. An examination of both the costs of production and the social determinants of those costs reveals that the main causes of this displacement were the linking of the high-wage British Columbia economy to the lower wage east by the Canadian Pacific Railway; the railway's discriminatory rate structure; and a shift towards nonlocal ownership of the main components in the economy which was accompanied by new purchasing patterns that favoured nonlocal secondary manufacturers.