Michael E. Vance, "'Mon – he's a gran' fish': Scots in British Columbia's Interwar Fishing Industry," BC Studies 158 (2008)

Read 10 Oct 2026. On the Scots in BC’s salmon fishery between the wars, and the fishery’s politics. In 1922 the federal fisheries commission chaired by William Duff MP (no relation to Duff Pattullo) “recommended that fishing licences issued to those ‘other than white, British subjects and Indians’ be cut immediately by 40 percent and then by another 15 percent in 1925.” A scheme to settle Scottish crofters in the industry “was proposed in 1924 by Duff Puttallo [Pattullo], then British Columbia…” (he was then Minister of Lands), and Vance notes that “Patullo’s 1925 plan to assist Scottish crofters to enter the industry was, in part, intended to replace those forced out of the fishery,” the Japanese Canadian fishermen. Both remarks are in footnotes (nn. 21 and 27), and the “in part” is Vance’s reading, citing Roy, Adachi and his own note of 1993; of this and the crofter scheme of 1888-93 he says, “Both were abandoned when they failed to obtain support from either Ottawa or London.” The scheme’s course is in newspaper-prince-rupert-daily-news-1924-hebridean-settlers. See pattullo-bloody-sunday.