User:Bobanny/sandbox

By the turn of the twentieth century, many Vancouverites belonged to trade unions and industrial relations increasingly became bitter conflicts. The most pronounced of these struggles were in Vancouver's transportation sectors, notably between workers and large employers such as the Canadian Pacific Railway and shipping companies (who themselves organized after the First World War into the Shipping Federation), as well as the British Columbia Electric Railway. The first major sympathy strike in Vancouver was in 1903 when United Brotherhood of Railway Employees (UBRE) workers walked off the job. That strike was defeated and both the UBRE and the longshoremen’s union were broken. Prominent socialist organizer and longshoreman, Frank Rogers, became the first martyr of the British Columbia labour movement during this strike when CPR company police shot and killed on a picket line. Two other sympathy strikes, or general strikes, occurred in the aftermath of WWI, first in 1918 following the killing of Ginger Goodwin and again in 1919 in sympathy with the Winnipeg General Strike.

The labour movement in Vancouver consistently included an active far-left component prior to the Second World War, including the anarcho-syndicalist IWW, which successfully fought two political campaigns for free speech in 1909 and 1912 after the police and city hall attempted to prevent open air meetings and public oration by socialists. . By the 1930s the Communist Party and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation had risen to the leadership of labour and the left, and both groups had a significant impact on Vancouver's political economy. The civic political party that would dominate electoral politics into the next century, the Non-Partisan Association, was inaugurated in 1937 in response to the increasing political influence of the left.

Vancouver's development was facilitated by the manual labour of prisoners from 1887 until 1917. Every day a chain gang was paraded in leg irons through the city streets and put to work on various civic projects, such as clearing land owned by the city and building roads. Chief Constable McLennan ended the practice in 1917 because he felt it was barbaric. That same year, Chief McLennan was shot by an alleged drug user resisting eviction.

Vancouver's streetcar system began on June 28th, 1890 and ran from the (first)Granville Street Bridge to Westminster Avenue (now Main Street). Less than a year later, the Westminster and Vancouver Tramway Company began operating Canada's first interurban line between the two cities, which encouraged residential neighbourhoods outside the central core to develop. The British Columbia Electric Railway, a division of BC Electric, became the company that operated the urban and interurban rail system until 1958 when it was dismantled in favour of diesel buses.

As with other cities, Vancouver was home to numerous organizations and individuals committed to moral reform in the early decades of the twentieth century. Middle class organizations proliferated, usually led by women and churchmen, and influenced political decision-making in the city. A typical example is the Vancouver Moral Reform Association, which lobbied to have brothels on Dupont Street (now Pender) shut down in Chinatown. The sex trade was subsequently shuffled around the city, to Harris Street (now Georgia), followed by Shanghai and Canton Alleys, Shore Street, and by 1912, Alexander Street in Japantown, establishing a pattern of intermittent prostitution displacement. The current arrangement came about when a group called Concerned Residents of the West End (CROWE) successfully drove the street sex trade from Davie Street to non-residential areas, which has been cited as a cause of the increased violence against sex trade workers that culminated in the murder and disappearance of dozens of women.[Swan, Lowman). Typically, the Vancouver police have differed from many of these moral reform and neighbourhood groups in their belief that designated red light districts are necessary because "the social evil" cannot be eradicated through law enforcement.