by Scott Daniel | My grandfather was a shipbuilder on the North Shore. I’m lucky to remember the christening of one of the last ships his yard built when I was 7 or 8. It’s a one-dimensional memory, mostly revolving around my fascination with swinging and smashing a bottle of booze against the bow of the ship. The North Shore’s been transitioning from working shipyards to a maritime theme park for condo dwellers for more than a decade. But the recent announcement of $8 billion worth of new shipbuilding contracts promises to tip the balance back to industry a little.

The announcement put me in a Robert-Wyatt-sings-Shipbuilding frame of mind  [The Elvis Costello lyrics steer this one home]. Vancouver won’t be building ships for the Falkland’s War, but $8 billion will pay for a lot of winter coats!

What kind of impact will this bucketload of well-paying, industrial jobs have? Some are saying it’ll keep real estate prices inflated. Maybe. But real estate prices here don’t pay much heed to rhyme or reason. With rumours of a big office building boom downtown and major industrial investment across Burrard Inlet, the critique of Vancouver as resort city starts to lose a bit of luster.

And it sounds like this contract will result in a longer term revival of BC shipbuilding since many are predicting the next batch of BC Ferries will be built here. It can’t go any worse than last time, right?

Have you ever watched this Skytrain movie? You should. It’s long, but I couldn’t turn away. Whatever happened to that band? Why did Grace McCarthy abandon her film producing career? All those hipsters burly men making union wages. Presumably the shipbuilding industry has changed over the decades, but this is what I imagine when I picture $8 billion worth of infrastructure money being spent on heavy duty industry. To use the parlance of the kings of industry, it’s a “game changer”.