The referendum that created the Fraser Valley's first college

PHOTO: Students take notes during a class at Fraser Valley College in its early years 📷 University of the Fraser Valley/Flickr

The year is 1973 and it has been more than a decade since Fraser Valley residents were told they deserved a college to call their own.

A suggested 1971 opening date two years earlier has come and gone—as has the government that initiated the overhaul of BC’s entire post-secondary system. Just last year, a plan for a vocational college in Chilliwack was sent to the trash bin by the province’s new education minister. Locals are unhappy and uncertain.

They not only still don’t have a college, they don’t even have an agreed-upon plan for a college. They don’t know if they have funding for a college.

What they do have, it turns out, is a collection of men and women who—once finally given the green light—will be able to create a college from scratch with a speed that seems impossible 50 years later.

Let the race begin.

The first part of this story told how, in the space of a couple years, the idea of regional colleges went from being considered a “silly idea” to one demanding the utmost urgency. You can find it here. That story largely relied upon contemporary newspaper accounts. The information in this story largely comes from a 26-page insider’s history of the founding of UFV written in the 1980s by Dr. Eric Woodroof, considered the college’s “founding father.” You can find the document here. Photos are courtesy of the University of the Fraser Valley.

The blind find a vision

In 1960, the University of British Columbia’s leadership was still begging the province for more money and discouraging calls to build colleges across the sprawling province. But UBC’s alumni, at least those who came from or moved to the Fraser Valley, were of a different mind.

That year, they organized a conference to consider whether a college in the Abbotsford/Chilliwack area would work and, if so, what it would look like. Locals had talked about a college for years, but the conference set the stage for more than talk: it created a formal group, led by Chilliwack school trustee Fred Leary, that would look to put specifics on what had, until then, mostly been a general, hazy idea.

But that group had to start from scratch, because they quickly realized they didn’t really know much about the thing they wanted.

“It really was a case of the ‘blind leading the blind,” David Greenwood, one of the members of Leary’s group, told Eric Woodroff in the 1980s.

British Columbia had universities and it had high schools. There were vocational courses and night schools that were thought of as catering to hobbyists. And there were Grade 13 courses offered in high schools for students looking to get a head-start on university without enrolling yet. But when it came to actual, formal colleges, the template that BC residents were basing their hopes on—the burgeoning junior college system in the United States—was both literally and metaphorically foreign to most.

Leary’s group of junior-college advocates knew why they wanted—and deserved—a local college. They knew there was substantial demand for local, post-secondary education, and that providing it could help keep costs low for learners, and encourage more people to pursue a college certificate, diploma, or degree.

But they would have to put actual numbers to those feelings. And they would have to wrestle with the practicalities of where such a college would be located, what programs it would offer, who would do the teaching, and who would pay for the whole thing.

The arrival of UBC president John B. Macdonald and his reversal of long-standing post-secondary policies (as recounted in the first part of this story), supercharged the activities of college advocates around the province, including the group that had gathered in the Fraser Valley.

As Macdonald toured the province to figure out where new colleges could be established and in what form, he met for hours with groups in Abbotsford and Chilliwack. In those meetings, the research that had been initiated by Leary’s committee would come in handy.

But the meetings also revealed some key obstacles: figuring out just who would drive the local-college bus, who would fund it, and where a campus would be located.

Rivalries emerge

The Macdonald report would set a roadmap for regional colleges in the province—and it would do so on an incredibly ambitious timeline. A first phase would see a four-year college created to serve students in Burnaby, Surrey and Langley, plus two-year institutions in the Kootenays and Okanagan. The second phase would see the expansion of those institutions. And finally, around 1971, Macdonald foresaw the arrival of a third phase that would harken the arrival of a new college in Abbotsford or Chilliwack.

In the Fraser Valley, locals and advocates greeted the Macdonald report and his policy of decentralized education with enthusiasm. But it also spawned new conflicts.

The new colleges wouldn’t instantly come with big, fancy campuses, and operating costs would be relatively low. But they would still cost millions, and at the outset, the province told communities that they would have to step up to the plate and help finance and run them.

Locals—usually school districts or groups affiliated with school districts—would also be tasked with doing all the necessary planning work, including sketching out programs and courses and finding locations for classes, student facilities, and administrative offices.

But those responsibilities and prospective costs didn’t deter fierce competition between communities who wanted a local college. In places like the Okanagan and Fraser valleys with multiple cities, school districts, and advocacy groups, not everyone was on the same page. In the Okanagan, Vernon, Penticton, and Kelowna all sought to be the host site for their local college. And in the Fraser Valley, school districts in both Abbotsford and Chilliwack submitted competing proposals for how they would administer a new college.

Although Woodroff described the situation in the Fraser Valley as a “friendly rivalry,” earlier accounts hinted that intra-regional battles across BC were slowing the formation of colleges.

In 1967, the Vancouver Sun asked “Whatever Happened to Junior Colleges?”

“In the various regions of B.C., where inter-community rivalry has become a way of life, competing communities have found in the regional college movement yet another issue over which to quarrel with each other,” a long article in the Vancouver Sun reported in 1967, by which time just one of 10 suggested colleges had opened.

That article wasn’t just speculation. It was written by Dr. Lorne Downey, the chairman of UBC’s centre for the study of administration in education, an advisor for a planned college in Prince George, and a previous consultant to Selkirk College in Castlegar—the one college that had managed to open.

Writing five years after the Macdonald report was handed in, Downey warned the push for colleges was getting bogged down by “petty politics.”

By the time Downey was writing, the efforts to immediately create a college in the Fraser Valley had stalled, with one proposal rejected by the province in 1966.

Then, almost on cue, things started to happen.

Start your engines

Creating a brand new college system from scratch takes time.

But creating a single college, surprisingly, does not.

As the 1970s dawned, a consensus of sorts began to form that the Fraser Valley should host a vocational school—a post-secondary institution focused on the trades. The province already had 10 such schools, but none between Burnaby and Kamloops.

But there was the question of where in the valley, exactly, such a school should go.

Concerns about quarreling neighbouring cities receded as details were hammered out and schools started to spring up all around BC. And the province clearly wasn’t worried about avoiding such disputes: when the Fraser Valley’s advocates suggested they jointly work together on a plan, Victoria itself asked for two different submissions—one from Abbotsford, and another from Chilliwack.

Abbotsford picked three potential locations. Chilliwack identified six, and eventually, the government gave the thumbs up for a school to be built near the intersection of Highway 1 and Lickman Road. (That site was identified after Chilliwack’s delegation found/declared the geographic centre of the region to be at the top of Chilliwack Mountain. Since the top of a steep mountain wasn’t ideal for a college, the spot at the base of it was seen as a better alternative.)

The school would have a large classroom block and an extensive library, with the idea that the trade school would eventually evolve into a full-blown college. By November of 1971, the Chilliwack Progress reported that plans for courses and programs were being drawn up and architects were sketching out buildings.

The drawings, it was hoped, would be completed the following year, with a potential opening date of 1973.

“The community at large thought, ‘At last we have a post-secondary institution, not exactly what we wanted or expected, but nevertheless a step in the right direction,’” then-Abbotsford school district superintendent W.J. Mouat later told Woodroff.

But everything was about to change.

The first vote

In August of 1972, BC’s voters ousted the Social Credit government and its Premier, W.A.C. Bennett, who had led the province for 20 years.

“The socialist hordes are at the gates of British Columbia,” Bennett had “thundered” (according to the New York Times) before the election. Then BC’s voters opened the gates.

The new NDP government did not suddenly nationalize BC’s means of production, but it did slam the brakes on its predecessor’s plans—including the vocational school for the Fraser Valley.

The province’s new education minister scrapped the Lickman Road school plan, citing its location on the Sumas Prairie flood plain and lack of water and sewer connections. But bitter locals pointed out that excuse flew in the face of other decisions by the new government. Whatever the reason, another college dream had been put to pasture—but it didn’t stay out there for long.

Darkness, before dawn

For the last 15 years, the process of building a regional college in the Fraser Valley had been a series of steps backwards and forwards, with a lot of words but little actual progress. A college was first ridiculed and dismissed, then promised and planned. But nothing real had actually happened.

And then, very quickly, a decade-long two-step turned into a full-blown sprint. Although locals feared BC’s new government would overturn the province’s still-fresh regional college plans, the new NDP government continued with their predecessor’s post-secondary decentralization push.

In April of 1973, the government decided that, the Lickman Road location notwithstanding, the Fraser Valley should get a college and assigned three men to come up with a plan within two months. They included a dean from Douglas College, a vice-principal from BCIT, and Woodroff, then the supervisor of adult education in the Chilliwack school district. That group then appointed its own steering committee, which would help lay the groundwork for a college.

As Woodroff later wrote, the group went back to the start and looked at all the ideas that had thus far been suggested and had floundered. They quickly decided to exclude Langley and Maple Ridge from their planning, then opened the process up to feedback from the public. They also confirmed that a full-blown college—not just a vocational school—could work in the Fraser Valley, then started sketching out what it would look like.

Notably, they also decided that, maybe, they could start a college without actually building a college.

That key decision had allowed other BC colleges to quickly get up and running in recent years. The idea was to sketch out a curriculum and program plan, then find existing classrooms and office space that could be used in the region. They hoped to install makeshift, temporary structures at sites in Chilliwack and Abbotsford, while leasing space around the valley—potentially from school districts.

There was just one big hurdle. Locals—both through tuition fees and property taxes—were expected to pay for about 40% of a college’s operating costs. The task force estimated the project would cost local taxpayers about $1.5 million. And getting authorization to spend that money would require a plebiscite—a referendum of residents to gauge whether they really supported spending that much money on post-secondary education.

After 15 years of plans, posturing, procrastinating and preemptions, the decision to start a college would come down to voters.

And if they said yes, voters were told that a college would arrive not in a matter of years, but in just a couple months.

The second vote

The task force sent along its report, and the province agreed, finally, to hold its referendum and gauge the public’s interest.

A referendum on a thing like a college seems strange in 2024, but such votes were more common five decades ago. (Two weeks before the college vote, Chilliwack’s councils set the stage for a separate referendum later the same year on whether the municipalities should build a swimming pool and ice rink. But referendums didn’t require months of planning to happen.)

On Jan. 22 1974, locals received word that they could hold a vote. It only took a week for a referendum day to be set. And that date—March 2—would arrive in barely a month.

February saw a concentrated race to spread the news of the vote—and what it was all about in the first place. Community groups organized meetings across the region. Woodroff describes good attendance in Mission, Hope, and Agassiz, but a “most disappointing turn-out” in Abbotsford. And that brought new worries.

Woodroff wrote:

“The minister was being informed of the public reaction at these meetings and word came via unnamed channels that if the Chilliwack meeting was not well attended, the dream of the college, instead of becoming a reality, would be yet another defeat…”

The goal of the plebiscite was to gain official authorization to spend money on a college. But it also had the less formal function of gauging the public appetite that would determine whether there were enough students to make the new institution work. The Chilliwack meeting—which would be held just four days before the plebiscite—was seen as crucial to rallying that support.

Organizers hoped to draw an overflow crowd to Chilliwack’s junior high auditorium. Woodroff wrote that there was first anxiety, then excitement, about the pending meeting. And even nine years after the meeting, his words ring with the pride that came from seeing a packed hall of people endorse an idea that had been in the works for a decade.

“Not only did the auditorium fill with a capacity crowd, but an overflow audience was accommodated in the lower gym.”

Endorsement

Four days later, the votes were tallied.

The plebiscite passed with nearly 90% of the ballots cast in favour of a new college.

“How could we help but be pleased,” Douglas Hamilton, the chair of the college steering committee, told The Progress.

Turnout wasn’t great—just 9% in Mission, 13% in Abbotsford and 21% in Chilliwack. But in total, nearly 6,000 people voted for a college and just 700 voted against.

The people had spoken. And quickly, so too did the province. A month after the plebiscite, the province’s Minister of Education swept into an Abbotsford school district board room and formally proclaimed the creation of the new institution.

Then, suddenly, the locals had to actually build a college.

Getting it done

The organizing group had pitched the idea of creating an “instant college” that would open in 1974. And after the vote they decided to follow through on that timeline, even though it gave them just six months to get everything sorted. Woodroff later wrote that the decision to open that fall might not have been made if those involved had understood the scale of the job ahead.

But they pulled it off.

The core group of organizers, many who had been advocating for a university for more than a decade, started putting all their ideas and plans and contacts into action.

And as they hired and recruited new staff and administrators and faculty, each of those new hires embarked on their own race to get things sorted for September.

Administration offices were set up in the basement of the Abbotsford school district’s offices, faculty was hired, brochures and calendars were created, students were recruited, and policies were set up to develop transfer protocols.

Each brand new program created dozens of additional knock-on jobs that had to be tackled.

Take the typewriters. The university had created a “secretarial” program that focused on typewriting. But the course didn’t just need an instructor and classroom. It also needed typewriters: dozens of them. They were ordered from IBM, which promised to ship them immediately.

But as the new college prepared to open, the typewriters were nowhere to be seen.

Frank Dolman, the man in charge of the vocational and career program, told Woodroff what happened next.

“On a Friday morning, with the class due to start on Monday, I went to [bursar] Bob Dyck… and told him we had no typewriters and we couldn’t start the class without them,” Dolman said. “Bob said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get typewriters.’ So he jumped into his station wagon and drove off to Vancouver. Within a couple of hours he arrived back loaded with 30 typewriters.”

Dolman didn’t know quite where the typewriters came from, but seemingly wasn’t about to start asking questions.

Only on Monday, the first day of the new college’s existence, did the typewriters’ source—a repair shop—become clear as many of the new machines failed to work properly. Still, Dolman later told Woodroff, they were good enough until the new machines arrived from IBM.

Pride

After years of waiting and months of scrambling, the college did open that Monday in September. Reflecting on that moment in 1984, Woodroff wrote: “I am filled with a deep pride for what was achieved by a few people.”

He was writing in 1983, as Fraser Valley College—long scattered across the region in make-shift buildings—moved to one of its first permanent homes.

Today, Fraser Valley College is the University of the Fraser Valley. It’s a modern institution with modern processes and modern problems and modern achievements. The typewriters are long gone, as are almost all of the college’s founders.

But nearly three-quarters of all Canadians have a post-secondary education of one sort or another and each year thousands graduate from a college located in their own backyard. Nobody calls it a silly idea.