Vancouver Saved by Hippies in 1967

I was too young to remem­ber it, but in the fall of 1967, the char­ac­ter of my adopted home under­went a sig­nif­i­cant change. At the time, I was actu­ally vis­it­ing Canada for the first time with my par­ents, attend­ing Expo ’67 in Mon­treal. Mean­while, back here in Van­cou­ver, a large pop­u­la­tion of hip­pies (or at least, that’s what they were called back then) descended on the town, much to the dis­may of the mayor, Thomas J. Camp­bell. An ‘Evening Mag­a­zine’ clip has recently sur­faced on YouTube, and I’ve included it below.

The best part of it for me is Campbell’s fear and hys­te­ria regard­ing the hip­pies. Camp­bell hates them pas­sion­ately, almost like a char­ac­ter in National Lampoon’s Ani­mal House: “If these young peo­ple get their way, they will destroy Canada. From what I hear across the world, they will destroy the world!”

Camp­bell was a big pro­po­nent of tear­ing down older build­ings to make room for rede­vel­op­ment (he’s shown pos­ing glee­fully atop a wreck­ing ball) and spear­headed the move to bring an express­way into the city. He had those hip­pies he hated so much arrested for loitering.

For­tu­nately for us (or unfor­tu­nately, if you like free­ways), the hip­pies, by ally­ing them­selves with the more straight-laced peo­ple who wanted to pre­serve their neigh­bor­hoods won in the end. No super­high­way was built through Van­cou­ver. One his­to­rian in the piece says that this was the time when Van­cou­ver ‘found its voice’, and hence owes a lot to the spirit of that era. Like Haight-Ashbury in San Fran­cisco, I see echoes of that era in Kit­si­lano, which was appar­ently Hip­pie Cen­tral in ’67. Both the Haight and Kits are now largely yup­pi­fied, but still retain some of that charm. We cer­tainly saw some of it in the farmer’s mar­ket we went to a cou­ple of weeks ago. I even got some gra­nola from the Gra­nola King.

Now, with free­ways all over North Amer­ica clogged with com­muters flee­ing cities at 5PM and head­ing for sub­urbs, burn­ing $4 a gal­lon gas and burn­ing hydro­car­bons (while Van­cou­ver con­tem­plates fur­ther eco­den­sity as a way of deal­ing with the Cli­mate Cri­sis and Peak Oil), Campbell’s vision seems all the more wrong-headed. Maybe (per­haps through dumb luck) the hip­pies had it right all along. On the other hand, they were right about Viet­nam, too…and Iraq. OK, maybe it wasn’t dumb luck.