Selling British Columbia: Tourism and Consumer Culture, 1890-1970 (review)

Today few industries appear as naturalized or as ungrounded in history as does tourism, and within Canada this seems especially true for 'super natural' British Columbia. In Selling British Columbia, Michael Dawson takes readers on a behind-the-scenery tour of what could be called the promotional plant of BC's tourism industry, pointing out the assembly and operations of its little-known machinery of organization, advertising, and lobbying. He provides the most thorough examination yet of the shift from tourist trade to tourist industry in Canada, and raises important questions about the emergence of consumer capitalism.

Attention is tightly focused throughout on the people, practices, and thinking behind the promotion of tourism. These are studied primarily through the efforts of Vancouver and Victoria based tourist associations (and government branches) to increase their share of the market for sightseeing and recreational travel. As Dawson explains, 'It is the producers of mass culture who form the core subject of this book' (12), and here this means the small number of experts and enthusiasts who mediated between businesses, the state, and potential tourists.

After tracing the roots of tourism promotion to the intense civic boosterism of the 1890s, when literature directed towards travelling investors conflated scenery, resources, and opportunity for profit, Dawson identifies a gradual shift during the interwar period towards an 'expenditure imperative,' with tourism promoters coming to focus 'not on the tourist as a potential investor in BC production but on his or her economic impact as a consumer' (43). As leisure travel became affordable for more North Americans and expensive new techniques (billboards, radio, film) were adopted to reach them, the competitive impetus of boosterism faded, and civic tourist associations began cooperating on regional advertising campaigns. Dawson details the complex relations between BC promoters and their Pacific Northwest counterparts, and it is striking how tenuous BC's connections were with other Canadian tourist associations – most campaigns were directed along a north-south axis, with southern California the main target market.

Tourist traffic declined sharply but never disappeared during the Depression. Many promoters became increasingly strident in their belief that tourism deserved to be treated as an industry like any other, for it was one of the few that was drawing infusions of cash, through visitors' purchases of goods and services. Prominent promoters lobbied doubtful premiers, touting the economic benefits to be gained from government support for the marketing of BC as a destination. They argued that because increased advertising would stimulate consumption, it was 'the one sure thing that we can get a return on' (95). Their pitches to politicians – the selling of selling, as it were – clearly expressed the emerging logic of consumerism from the perspective of cultural producers.

For Dawson, the late 1930s and early 1940s mark the transition from tourist trade to tourist industry. This period saw civic and regional tourist associations consolidate into province-wide ones, and the provincial government begin to participate in funding and coordinating the promotion of tourism. By the end of the war, the BC Government Travel Bureau was simultaneously directing multiple advertising campaigns, and had the power to impose standards of service and appearance on the province's campsites and auto-courts. In light of this coalescence of an organized, state-supported tourist industry prior to, rather than during, the postwar years, Dawson argues that common assumptions about the 'boom' in tourism (and consumption generally) need to be rethought. Rather than a release of pent-up desires to go places (and buy things), the rapid growth in the number of visitors to BC starting in the late 1940s were at least partially the result of strategic planning by industry and the state. The closing chapters explore the expanding role of government up to the 1970s, and the influences of tourism promotion on civil society – for example, in the realm of academic research, and in campaigns that encouraged British Columbians to be on their best behaviour in front of visitors.

Dawson makes...