Strategic Victoria

It may seem that Victoria will always be a little out of the way place where history or great events pass us by. Wars, revolutions, all those sorts of things happen in other places, not here. It wasn't always that way. The British who established a port here set up naval batteries in 1878 to prepare for a possible war with Russia and if it hadn't been for the Royal Navy Victoria would probably be an American city.
Vancouver and Seattle are the metropolises of our area where rail and road connect the North American heartland with the Pacific sealanes. Seattle is home to two large corporations, Microsoft and Starbucks as well as a large part of Boeing's operations. North of Seattle, in Everett, the US Navy keeps its Pacific Carrier fleet. Vancouver has the best harbour north of San Francisco...or I should say harbours in the plural. There are docks in Vancouver proper, on the North shore, in Burnaby, Port Moody, on the Fraser River, and there is the huge Roberts Bank port where trains continuously supply the steel miills of Japan from BC's coal fields.
Again, it wasn't always so. Before the railways arrived Victoria had a larger population than Seattle- in 1880 almost 6000 compared to less than four thousand. In the days of steam ships Vancouver Island was an important source of coal to keep the boilers going. Sailing ships, which persisted into the 20 C did not need coal but by unloading their cargoes in Victoria avoided the tricky waters and finicky winds of Puget Sound. Victoria was an important supply center for the Yukon Gold Rush and was just as wild as San Francisco, opium smoking Chinatown and all. Looking at Victoria's surviving buildings from the 1800's it's easy to see that the city had ambitions in those days.
But now Victoria is a quiet government town with very little international trade prowess. It would be senseless for shipping companies to unload their goods here only to have to load them up again for major population centers on the mainland or overseas. We don't do much manufacturing here and we don't have much in the way of natural resources. Besides, Victorians tend to think small. Ambitious people with big ideas tend to leave. And so the bombings and so on that we read about seem unreal and unconnected to us. It makes it easy for us to pontificate and tut tut about how it could never happen here, it's all the fault of George Bush who is responsible for all the trouble in the world, blah blah. A lot of Victorians think that way. Our self image of a slumbering backwater makes it easy to either ignore history or to fantasize about it. It doesn't matter what we think, it is assumed. But this is a very naive attitude.
Victoria, while it shows no sign of ever becoming a financial or industrial powerhouse, occupies a very strategic geographical position. There is the long corridor of Juan de fuca Strait that terminates at Victoria where the waters open out to Puget Sound and Georgia Strait. Anybody who controls Victoria could potentially control the whole works. Plug it up and you could cripple the world's largest economy. If you want to get in or out you have to go by Victoria. We are sitting on a powder keg. I don't think many Victorians understand this, and I doubt if anybody in Ottawa has given it the slightest thought. It may not happen in my lifetime but wars will be fought over this beautiful place. Undoubtedly people hostile to our way of life are perfectly capable of looking at maps and figuring things out so history could happen to us any time. They may already have plans in the works which we probably wouldn't like. Most people, rather than face this possibility prefer to hide their heads in the sand. This will make it all the easier for bad things to happen.
So I'll try to forget about history when I go out for my walks or bike rides around this beautiful part of the world and try to enjoy this transient sense of peace and security.