On Company Towns in Canada, Robert Owen, and a Clubhouse

                                                 
Ioco Townsite, British Columbia, 1940's (h/t Port Moody Station Museum) 

What do Kitimat, Powell River, Fort McMurray, Flin Flon, Ioco and New View Society (in Port Coquitlam, B.C.) have in common?  All but one are Company Towns in Canada, and all of them share an intellectual debt to Robert Owen (1771-1858).

Robert Owen was a social reformer; a Utopian Socialist, in fact.  He was a successful cotton manufacturer who took it upon himself to manufacture “men of virtue”.[1]   He began with his model cotton mills he came to own in New Lanark, Scotland, and then carried it to New Harmony, Indiana, where his plans ended in failure.  Throughout, however, he believed that the environment shaped and formed each individual’s character, which meant that education was essential to improving lives.

Following along the lines of Rousseau, Owen believed that man was naturally good.  When he took over New Lanark, conditions were poor – housing and sanitation were sorely neglected. “Within a few years, Owen had turned this dirty little village into one of the wonders of Europe, a place of pilgrimage for English earls and Russian grand dukes.  And the company paid better dividends than ever.  Owen began by sanitary reform.  He provided for the orderly disposal of waste, and forbade household refuse pits in front of the cottages.  He built new houses, and eventually gave each family several rooms.”[2]

From this, Owen developed his ideal for a model community.  “…. a new village will be built. The buildings will be constructed around a central parallelogram devoted to lawns and gardens.  They will include living-quarters with common kitchens, dining rooms, and recreation-rooms, but providing separate apartments for each family.  A school, a community hall, and other necessary public buildings will complete the parallelogram.  Barns and workshops will be built a little apart.”[3]

As I see it, Owen’s New Lanark was the model for the Ioco Townsite and many other company towns.  When the Imperial Oil Company established the beginnings of the oil refinery on the North Shore of Port Moody, B.C. in 1914, the shanty town that quickly developed needed attention.  As local historian and long-term Mayor of Belcarra, Ralph Drew put it: “The construction of the ‘Ioco Townsite’ complete with playgrounds, bowling greens, tennis courts and sports fields became a ‘jewel of Vancouver’s suburbs’  Almost every aspect of worker’s social life – dances, sports, and more casual socializing – occurred within the purview of the ‘company town.’” [4]

But Owen’s effect does not end with the company town.  His ideas in A New View of Society (1813-1816), are clearly the inspiration behind the New View Society, a mental health clubhouse in Port Coquitlam, founded in 1973  in the wake of Riverview Hospital downsizing.  Spanning the Tri-Cities, and far beyond, Robert Owen’s legacy lives on.

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[1] Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London: Ernest Benn, 1933), p. 44.

[2] Ibid., p, 52.

[3] Ibid., pp. 54,55.

[4] Ralph Drew, Townsite Tales: The History of Ioco, Anmore Valley & North Shore of Port Moody Arm (Belcarra, B.C.: Ralph Drew, 2017), p. 319.   See also: Lucie K. Morisset and Jessica Mace, Identity on the Land: Company Towns in Canada (Montreal: Patrimonium, 2019).

Has the method for killing people improved? Or, War as a catalyst for technological change

 
A Ukrainian Abrams Tank with added anti-drone metal protection.

h/t Howard Altman

The Canadian Rainbow: The case as stated in 1865

I propose the adaptation of the rainbow as our emblem.  By the endless variety of its tint the rainbow will give an excellent idea of the diversity of races, religions, sentiments and interests of the different parts of the Confederation.  By its slender and elongated form the rainbow would afford a perfect representation of the geographical configuration of the Confederation.  By its lack of consistence – an image without substance – the rainbow would represent aptly the solidity of our Confederation.  An emblem we must have, for every great empire has one; let us adopt the rainbow.

Henri Joly de Lotbinière, in the debates in the legislative assembly of Canada on the proposed scheme of a British North America, Quebec, 20 February, 1865.

Source: See the Epigraph in Frank H. Underhill, In Search of Canadian Liberalism (Toronto: Macmillan Co. of Canada, 1960)[reprinted 1975].

A Nursery Rhyme for Today

 
 Source: Edward Miller, 3 Tales Retold and Illustrated:
 The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. 
 Three Billy Goats Gruff (New York: Henry Holt & Co,
 2007).

William James and the Moral Equivalent of War, or: The Demotion of Reason

These words are of course literally true.  The immediate aim of the soldier’s life is, as Moltke said, destruction, and nothing but destruction; and whatever constructions wars result in are remote and non-military.  Consequently the soldier cannot train himself to be too feelingless to all those usual sympathies and respects, whether for persons or for things, that make for conservation.  Yet the fact remains that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and, being in the line of aboriginal instinct, is the only school that as yet is universally available.  But when we gravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more kindly of ascetic religion.  One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat.  What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.  I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of the pedantry which infested it, there might be something like that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking.  May not voluntarily accepted poverty be ‘the strenuous life,’ without the need of crushing weaker peoples?[1]

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

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[1] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Martin E. Marty (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 367.

Cash is King ...

 
     h/t David Parkins/The Globe and Mail
     Published March 31, 2026

Tehran diary: dark and bitter, the terror of life under US-Israeli bombardment

It’s 5am on Thursday 12 March. I was finally falling asleep after a day full of fear when the phone rang. Terror rushes through me. It’s not the right time for a call. Someone must need help – or maybe they are alone and frightened.

I answer the phone, exhausted. It’s my younger sister. She is crying and cannot speak. My heart breaks into a thousand pieces. I haven’t seen her for many days. When I was released from prison, she had gone to another city to take care of our mother.

She returned on her birthday. But then the war began, and we remained separated in two different homes in Tehran.

She is much younger than me, yet she took on the responsibility of protecting my son so that I could stay somewhere safe and avoid being arrested again. I remind her how grateful I am. My heart is in turmoil: I thought something terrible had happened at home and that she was unable to say it.

I tell her that right now the only thing that matters is staying alive, even if we no longer have a home.

Through her sobs she says: “Our neighbour was caught in the blast wave … and he’s gone.”

For a moment I picture our neighbour. Like me, he smoked cigarettes. He must have been on the balcony for a smoke. Or maybe, like many others, he had gone out to watch the drones and see which direction they were flying.

Maybe he had gone there to cry for a country and a people being destroyed. Maybe he was thinking about where to find gasoline so he could take his two children to a safer city.

I wish I were in a desert where I could scream. Where I could cry as loudly as I want. The last time I cried was after the massacres of protesters in January. Why is it that here, unlike everywhere else in the world, we cannot cry like ordinary people? Why have we suffered so much that even new pain no longer shakes us?

I can’t sleep any more. I go to the place where I have put a small gas burner – what I call my kitchen. I want coffee, but coffee has become very expensive and I have to save money. Cigarettes are also expensive, but I smoke anyway: one, two, five …

Ever since the fuel depots were bombed at the weekend, my chest has burned and I can barely breathe. I bought an inhaler that now hangs around my neck.

At 6.30am another loud explosion shakes the air. I look out the window. Some supporters of the government have come into the streets in their cars, chanting mourning songs and saying: “People, we are all together, compatriots.”

Compatriots? Your foolishness destroyed this homeland. We tried. We struggled so these days would never come. We were imprisoned, tortured, executed. 

I think about Donald Trump. If he had acted 50 days earlier,  35,000 people might still be alive. Now I am afraid Iran will be destroyed – and yet the Islamic republic will remain.

I am preparing to send a few packets of lentils and a small amount of money to a woman whose husband is in prison and who has a small child. It is the last banknote we have. There is no cash anywhere. I don’t know if one day we will ever have enough money to rebuild this devastation.

It is now 8am. The streets are crowded again. People are going about their business. I see several tired and hopeless men, day labourers who still come here every day. But there is no work.

Life continues in Tehran. But it is dark and bitter.

Source: Elahi (a former political prisoner writing under a pseudonym) as told to Deepa Parent, The Guardian, published online Thu 12 Mar 2026 17.19 GMT