Surviving as a small business can be difficult, especially in the logging industry with so many big companies fighting over timber, similar to a tiny sapling vying for sunlight in a dense forest of towering cedars. However, there have been tales of triumph by local loggers over their corporate counterparts, like one protest in 1956, detailed in Joe Garner’s Never Under the Table, by a young logger from Cowichan Lake.
Jim Gillespie was a 26-year-old market logger when he was approached by Harry Hobson, Youbou district general manager of British Columbia Forest Products Ltd (BCFP). They needed support from local loggers for their Tree Farm Licence (TFL) application. Gillespie was hesitant, but Hobson assured him he had nothing to worry about. Gillespie said that Hobson told him, “As long as we’re in business, you’re in business,” and promised him “timber forever” if he signed in their favour. After a year of logging on the north arm of Cowichan Lake, Gillespie went to see Hobson about the “promised logging area” and was told that someone else had the final say. So began Gillespie’s run-around with BCFP executives, going as far as Vancouver for meetings. When they tried to give him a flat rate for the timber, contradicting his status as an independent logger, he “told them where they could stuff their timber and contract.” Gillespie decided that drastic measures were required to keep his company in business.
So, one rainy night in June, Jim Gillespie spent most of his remaining funds to transport his sled-mounted yarder down island to Victoria. Arriving at the Legislature Building around 3 am, Gillespie called Tom Blackwood, owner of Victoria Pile Driving Company, to get the “biggest crane he had” to help move a load that had “shifted.” His misleading explanation proved useful as the crane operator, learning the truth after the yarder had been set down, left quickly once he realized he had participated in a public protest. The commissioner also unknowingly helped when Gillespie asked if he could drive a truck into the legislature’s parking lot. Unaware of the donkey engine strapped to the lowbed, they allowed him entry.
Once sat in the public parking section, right in front of the legislature building at the time, the yarder was adorned with two large banners that projected Gillespie’s plight. Civil servants, tourists staying at the Empress Hotel, and reporters with cameras gathered around him in no time. According to an article by Norman Cribbens, a Times Legislative Reporter, then Premier W.A.C. Bennet “drove by in his car and turned his head to look at the [yarder], but he hurried into his office without stopping.” Led by Chief of Police John Blackstock, fourteen officers from both the city and the Mounties arrived on the scene with orders to remove the huge piece of logging equipment. Unfortunately for the government officials who called them, the police could not push Gillespie to leave right away, nor could they arrest him, because the yarder was parked within the white lines of a public parking spot. A court order would be required to move them.
Over five hours later, after “the news media had been briefed and hundreds of pictures taken,” Gillespie decided that he had made his point. He made a deal with Evans, Coleman, Johnson Ltd to store the yarder for free if he ended the protest and, with the help of Tom Blackwood’s crane once again, loaded it back onto the lowbed. “[…] We drove slowly out of the parking lot and right through the middle of town with that overwidth load, its banners flying on both sides,” Gillespie recalled. “We didn’t damage a thing.”
As a result, a logger in Port Renfrew by the name of Stan Harrison phoned Gillespie and told him, “If it wasn’t for that protest I wouldn’t be logging. [BCFP] offered me a good contract to log for five years.” Harrison sent him a cheque for $250 as thanks, and Gillespie was given another $150 by a logger named Ralph Libel from Cowichan Lake.
After his protest, Gillespie found it difficult to get a job in the logging industry and wound up working for “a rock-drilling outfit in Victoria” where he met his future wife – the owner’s daughter! He is quoted as saying “So even if I lost my protest, I won a wife and helped some other small loggers!” Not every protest ends peacefully like this one did, but Jim Gillespie was lucky. Even the consequences held a silver lining of their own.
Works Cited
Cribbens, Norman. “Yarder Dumped, Gov’t Stumped: Woods Licence Protested by Angry V.I.
Loggers” Victoria Daily Times, 22 June 1956, p. 17. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com
/hnptimescolonist/docview/2257788520/E68EEFC83E684797PQ/1?accountid=210590&sourcetype=Newspapers
Garner, Joe. Never Under the Table. Cinnabar Press, 1991.
