The History of the Blair Rifle Range
This 640-acre area was a military training ground, then a Great Depression relief camp, later Vancouver’s main training facility during World War II. The Blair Rifle Range is now an unsafe urban wasteland.
This booklet traces the contentious history of this North Vancouver site. During the Great Depression, the Blair Rifle Range housed over 100 unemployed men in a National Defence Relief Camp. The men who passed through the Camp to wait out the Depression performed hard manual labour for little compensation. Many participated in the relief camp strike of 1935 and joined the On-To-Ottawa Trek. They were an important, but often unrecognized, part of Canada’s social and labour history.
Digging deep into archival sources, this well-researched booklet shares a previously unknown history. It gives names to the faceless unemployed men who were forced to work there, and documents their role in the relief camp strikes of 1935 which ultimately brought down the Conservative Party government of R.B. Bennett. The experiences of the Great Depression helped fuel postwar union organizing drives in BC.
This resource traces the persistent legacy of the property’s heavy military use, beginning in 1927, including the unexploded ordnance and soil contamination which persist to the present time. The booklet reveals state efforts to exclude Indigenous ownership, failed development proposals, willful neglect of the environmental legacy of military use and the property’s unrecognized place in Canada’s social history. The author received a District of North Vancouver Heritage Award for this research in 2015.