Consumerism and the creation of the tourist industry in British Columbia, 1900--1965

During the first three decades of the twentieth century in British Columbia, tourism promoters saw tourism as a way to lure settlers and investment to the province. After 1930, however, tourism became increasingly equated with consumption and the industry's success was measured primarily in terms of tourist expenditures. Before the economic dislocation of the Great Depression tourism promotion was viewed by many people, and the provincial government in particular, as an unimportant activity. Moreover, before the government belatedly recognized tourism's possibilities in the late 1930s tourism promotion was generally pursued in an uncoordinated manner in a very limited portion of the province. The advent of state intervention was the crucial development that transformed the tourist trade into a tourist industry.During the Second World War, the provincial government's newly-created travel bureau embarked upon a campaign to coordinate the province's tourism promotion activities. It also commenced a drive to catalogue both the province's attractions and the characteristics of potential visitors to the province. Throughout the post-war era the elements of the modern tourist industry were put in place: expanded advertising campaigns, intensified consumer marketing research, and the creation of a receptive and hospitable host population. In many ways, state involvement in tourism promotion set the stage for a concerted campaign targeting civil society during the post-war era in which tourism was championed as a public good.This study examines the transformation of tourism from a utilitarian pursuit to one that is fully enmeshed within a culture of consumption. It documents the manner in which tourism promotion has become a method of making local goods and services desirable to outsiders by endowing them with an aura of unique experience. In doing so it underscores the continuities and connections between the inter-war years and the post-war era in order to chart a more thorough and balanced understanding of the roots of the fully-fledged consumer culture that emerged in Canada after the Second World War.