The Kamloops Canneries: The Rise and Fall of a Local Industry, 1913-1990

Abstract

This paper is a study of the tomato canning industry in Kamloops. It asks how the success and failure of canneries at Kamloops were influenced by geography, markets, labour supply, competition, and concentration of capi­ tal. Such a study of the life and death of these canneries can illuminate our understanding of the province's fruit and vegetable canning industry as a whole and raises, at least by implication, certain questions about industrialization in British Columbia. It also underlines once again our awareness of how much the nature of economic activity in British Columbia has been shaped by its geography, by the productivity of its resource indus­ tries, and by national and continental economic realities. In particular, the paper argues that tomato and vegetable canneries in Kamloops survived as long as they could compete with producers in the western United States through the use of cheap labour and a protected home market. By the 1950s a shortage of cheap labour, increased compe­ tition from the United States, and consolidation of plants throughout Canada and the United States forced those in Kamloops to close. The result for the city was the loss of an important agricultural and manu­ facturing industry, a lessening of local control, and a narrowing of the economy. Events in Kamloops thus contributed to the decline of the tomato canning industry in the province as a whole—where fifteen plants had operated in 1953/ only one still functioned in the 1980s2 — and to the diminishing importance of the food processing industry generally. Where, indeed, it had at one time been the number three industry in the province,3 it has, thanks to just the sort of developments that took place in Kamloops, fallen in recent years to the status of a struggling and vulnerable one.