The Most Valuable Land in Canada

Will an idyllic island just off Vancouver’s Stanley Park be opened up for all or kept under lock and key?

Story by Daniel Wood

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This is the strange story of Canada’s other disputed island. Not Hans Island, that hunk of rock off Greenland that Denmark also claims, but long-contested Deadman’s Island, which lies like a hairball – 100 metres or so off the Stanley Park seawall – in the throat of Vancouver’s booming Coal Harbour.

The feds own it. They legally extracted it from adjacent Stanley Park for military purposes in 1942 and renamed it HMCS Discovery. It’s a ship in name, and a landlocked “stone frigate” in naval jargon, but the fact is, the island’s current military usefulness is zero. (The huge cottonwood-shaded outdoor barbecue left there by Arnold Schwarzenegger after filming the 2000 blockbuster The 6th Day does provide naval personnel with, it must be admitted, the most scenic picnic grounds in British Columbia.) Just 12 staff, most employed in cadet and naval reservists’ training, utilize the 9.4-acre off-limits site. But Vancouver, after 64 years of petitioning, wants the island back. Civic officials have proposed renaming it the Isle of Dreams.

If location, location, location really does count, then Deadman’s Island is, quite likely, the most valuable piece of real estate in Canada. High-rise developers regularly approach the base’s commanding officer with fat financial inducements for his contingent to leave. Meanwhile, the city waits. Recalcitrant Ottawa defence authorities would like nothing more than to let sleeping sea dogs lie.

But historical factors conspire to raise the issue. The 99-year one-dollar-a-year federal lease that Vancouver has on Stanley Park expires in 2007. As well, the Vancouver/Whistler Olympics take place in 2010. Could it be time to dust the old legal parchment off and give the island back? Could the island be Ottawa’s little emerald Olympic bling to Lotus Landers?

On my way to see Lieutenant-Commander King Wan, the captain of this grounded “ship,” I circumnavigate its seldom-viewed 1.5-kilometre shoreline. There’s a nice sandy beach and large dock and a bluff so close to Vancouver’s newest downtown towers that I can see movements in the windows across Coal Harbour. There are a couple of hectares of tree-shaded grass and gardens, the Schwarzenegger barbecue and a bunch of deserted picnic tables. Further on, a cannon points east. It fires blanks, appropriately, on those rare occasions when dignitaries arrive in nearby Burrard Inlet by ship. Just across the water are the Stanley Park totem poles, the single most photographed tourist attraction in British Columbia. So close, so far away.

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