USED WITH PERMISSION British Columbia’s distinctive left-coast culture was a gold mine of material for satirist Allan Fotheringham. In his heyday, the columnist coined the term Lotusland to describe the navel-gazing tendencies of the province that lies beyond what he termed the Granite Curtain, i.e., the Rocky Mountains. Some cultural analysts have attributed this distinctive trait to the absence of a harsh climate, with the struggle for mere existence as experienced in the chilly parts of Canada replaced by different questions, such as: “ What will it be today, Peloton or stand-up paddleboard yoga ?” Others have looked back to the colonial era to see strong dependence on capital intensive industries like coal mining and fish canning that required large hierarchical workforces, setting up a deeper capitalist versus worker dynamic than found elsewhere in Canada, leading to the proliferation of labour unions and a bargaining-table culture. Personally...
A discussion on political, economic and social issues in British Columbia, and Canada