Although photography has existed since the early 1800s, motion pictures are a relatively recent invention. The first movie was an 11-frame clip of a running horse shot in June 1878 to settle the age-old question, “When a horse gallops, are all four feet ever off the ground?”
 
Horse in Motion settled the “four-legs-in-the-air” argument (the answer is “Yes”) and spawned a new industry dedicated to entertaining audiences with moving pictures.
 
Despite growing public interest in the new technology, North America didn’t get its first stand-alone movie theatre for another twenty-seven years. In 1905, Pittsburg entrepreneurs John P. Harris and Harry Davis converted their Smithfield Street store into a 96-seat theatre dedicated to showing motion pictures. Needing a name for their new business, they combined the Greek word for theatre (“oideion”) with the name of a five-cent coin. Harris and Davis sold 450 five-cent tickets to the Nickelodeon’s first 15-minute showing. The following day, they sold more than 1,500.
 
The Nickelodeon was a smashing success and spawned copycats across North America. Canada got its first purpose-built cinema – the 1200-seat Ouimetoscope at the corner of Sainte-Catherine and Montcalm streets in Montreal – in January 1906. Residents of the Lakes District had to wait a lot longer.
 
The Reo Theatre Circuit, a sprawling entertainment empire that included movie theatres in Vanderhoof and Smithers, was the first cinema company to operate in the Lakes District. Owned by Robert Cecil Steele, the Vanderhoof businessman who later served as this area’s Member of the Legislative Assembly, the Reo Theatre Circuit included a mobile operation that traveled to smaller communities in the Central Interior. Cecil and his portable projector were regulars at the Burns Lake, Decker Lake, and Francois Lake community halls for more than a decade.
 
On June 30, 1938, Cecil was playing to a packed house in the Burns Lake Community Hall when the film he was showing snapped and burst into flames. He calmly removed the top spool of film and covered it with sand, then evacuated the building with help from Mrs. H. D. McNeill and Jack Brown Sr.
 
Safely outside, the visiting projectionist and his patrons watched the hall burn to the ground.
 
Residents rebuilt the hall the following year and continued to use it as a makeshift theatre. In May 1946, a handful of citizens decided to enter the movie business. Dubbed the “Burns Lake Welfare Committee,” they purchased a 16mm projector and began showing films in town.
 
Former resident Laurence A. “Larry” Taylor remembered those days well.
 
”In the 1940s, there was not yet a theatre in Burns Lake, so once a week, (I) would become the projectionist at the town hall,” he recalled many years later. “The big movie reels were shipped in from Vancouver, and you could not count on the correct film always arriving. The first few films that came to town were 16mm hand crank. During the film, music would be played on a record, but it was difficult to operate both machines at once. Usually, the film rolls had to be changed about three times each viewing. Once in a while, a film was also shown at the Francois Lake Hall.”

The Burns Lake Welfare Committee’s efforts, while well-intentioned, left something to be desired. Because the group lacked a 35mm projector (the format in which most new releases were shot), it could only show old movies. The films that came to town between 1946 and 1950 were already well past their “best before” dates. Scattergood Rides High, a comedy released by RKO Pictures in May 1942, didn’t play at the Burns Lake Community Hall until Saturday, Sept 14, 1946.
 
Four years is a long time in the movie business – a fact that wasn’t lost on theatre-goers who moved to Burns Lake from larger centres.
 
“As a newcomer to Burns Lake, I must voice a compliant [sic] heard here very often: that is, the lack of entertainment,” a newcomer stated in a letter to The Review newspaper in September 1948. “Burns Lake is a nice part of the country, and we would like to settle here, but who wants to live in a town where there is nothing do to? … This twice-a-week show in the community hall is a laugh! Poor sound, ancient pictures, hard seats, small-time equipment, unlicensed operators, and such a tiny screen!”
 
Ouch.
 
The Review was one of the biggest advocates for construction of a permanent theatre. In June 1949, the paper ran an article headed “Suggested Type of Theatre for the Average Small Town,” which recommended building cinemas out of pre-fabricated Quonset huts. The following month, not long after the Tweedsmuir Hotel opened, the paper took a definitive stand on the theatre issue.
 
“A maxim that holds true today as it did 20 years ago, reads something like this: ‘It takes a hotel, bank, newspaper, and a theatre to make a town,” wrote a member of The Review’s staff in a column entitled The Odd Spot. “Now that Burns Lake has the new Tweedsmuir Hotel, all we need to make a town is the theatre. Let’s hope it won’t be long.”
 
It wasn’t. In July 1949, a local entrepreneur decided there might be money in motion pictures. Verne Taylor, manager of the Co-operative food store and father of Larry the Part-Time Projectionist, expressed an interest in building a cinema.

Verne applied to the Village of Burns Lake for permission to build a theatre with “at least 300 seats” on property along Francois Lake Drive next to the Royal Canadian Legion hall. It sparked a minor controversy in town, in part because Verne was chairman of the village commission at the time. (The equivalent of the mayor.) While some residents expressed concern over a perceived conflict of interest, most just wanted action. As one of The Review’s readers noted, “Most of us don’t give a d**n who builds the theatre as long as it’s built, but fast.”
 
Verne’s building permit application was approved, but he never followed through with it. The job of building a permanent theatre defaulted to an out-of-towner with more experience.
 
Cecil Steele stopped showing films in Burns Lake when the welfare committee arrived on the scene. He continued serving Decker Lake and Francois Lake, though, as well as several other small communities in the region.
 
In October 1949, Steele hired Ted Lovas of Decker Lake to build a 37’x90’ theatre at the corner of Alaska Way Drive (Highway 16) and Third Avenue. The Review noted that according to Cecil’s building permit application, the $21,000 cinema would be of “fireproof type, in accordance with the Fire Marshall’s regulations,” and equipped with a 35mm projector.
 
“Plans show the main entrance fronting Alaska Way at 3rd Avenue,” continued The Review. “A basement will contain furnace room and fuel storage. Main floor will contain lobby, office, and rest rooms. Auditorium will be divided by two aisles separating three rows of seats. A ‘crying room’ is to be provided for mothers with youngsters.”
 
Work on the theatre dragged more than a year. The facility was scheduled to open by Labour Day, but the September long weekend came and went. So did October. Finally, in November, Steele decided to open his new 304-seat cinema (named, like its sisters in Vanderhoof and Smithers, the “Reo”) even though it still lacked its trademark stucco siding.
 
The event made news across the region. “In opening the theatre, Mr. Steele spoke briefly to the people each night, thanking them for the support they had given him for many years throughout the district, and assured them it was much appreciated and that every effort would be put forth to run a theatre that would be a credit to the town and district,” reported the Smithers Interior News.
 
Cecil kept his word. Initially, the theatre only played movies three nights a week, but they were new or at least relatively recent releases. And when it wasn’t screening the latest flicks, the theatre opened for community events.
 
In August 1952, members of the Associated Boards of Trade of Central BC conducted business at the Burns Lake Reo. A few months later, the Reo hosted an evening of boxing. There were five fights on the Nov. 10 card, including a heavyweight tilt between Burns Lake residents Dale “Red” Dundas and Terry Lougheed. Dick Schritt and promoter Alf Bye served as referees while judges Henry Schritt and Bruce Thompson kept score.  Admission was $2 for adults and $1 for children. The fisticuffs were followed by a dance at the community hall.
 
Cecil sold the Smithers theatre in 1952 but kept his holdings in Burns Lake and Vanderhoof. His son Doug operated the Burns Lake Reo until dying suddenly at home in April 1967.
 
For a while, the local cinema’s future seemed uncertain. Then two Burns Lake residents, John Baker and Tom Forsyth, stepped up to the plate.
 
Baker and Forsyth took over as the Reo’s new owners in July 1968. One of the first things they did was change the theatre’s name to the “Beacon.” Then they went to work on the schedule.
 
The Reo was closed on Wednesdays and Sundays when Doug Steele was at the helm. The new owners thought the business would be more profitable if it operated six days a week, and took the bold step of opening on Sundays.
 
“We decided to runs shows on Sundays,” Lee Baker, John’s wife, recalled later in life. “We asked for public opinion, and someone said, “Why not? I would sooner see my daughter at the show instead of in the back seat of a car.’”
 
The name and schedule weren’t the only things new. The programming also changed, though some would argue not for the better. The Beacon under Baker and Forsyth screened two different films in a week, but few were new releases. The schedule for the week of July 18-22, 1968, featured “Ernest Hemminway’s [sic] The Killers – Fast cars and fast men, on and off the deadly racing tracks (featuring) Lee Marvin, Angie Dickson [sic], and Ronald Reagan,” followed by Robert Redford and Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park. Hemingway’s The Killers had been released four years earlier, and the Barefoot in the Park was more than a year old.
 
Lyle Graham, now president of the Lakes District Museum Society, worked part-time at the theatre during the Baker/Forsyth era. He split the projectionist duties with resident Dan Rosler each week while the owners’ wives sold tickets downstairs.
 
“It (the Beacon) only showed old movies then,” Graham recalled recently. “Once in a while, there would be a half decent show.”
 
The theatre’s projection equipment was older than the films it showed. Judging from Graham’s description of his duties, the Beacon’s projector likely contained a carbon arc lamp that consisted of two long, thin carbon electrodes mounted in the open air opposite each other behind the projector lens. These electrodes were allowed to touch each other during the ignition phase, then slowly drawn apart to force the electricity to arc between them.
 
The arcing process created light bright enough to project film but also slowly burned away the carbon rods, meaning that they had to be regularly repositioned to keep the light consistent. The distance between the electrodes had to be adjusted by hand in early carbon arc systems, but Graham says the projector he used at the Beacon in the late 1960s did it automatically – most of the time.
 
Sometimes, Graham says, the projector’s mechanism wouldn’t feed the electrodes fast enough, and the projector’s rudimentary lamp would go out, shrouding the theatre in darkness. “When that happened,” he says, “you’d have to bang the rods together to get them to work again.”
 
Most theatres replaced their carbon arc lamp systems with enclosed Zenon arc lamps in the 1950s and ‘60s, but the Beacon didn’t keep pace with technological innovation. That didn’t stop people from coming to the theatre, though. It was the community’s cultural hub in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.
 
Graham remembers the night his daughter Amber went to work with him. Shortly before the show started, a gruff, mountain of a man and his wife commandeered the adjacent ‘crying room.’ The couple settled in to watch the show, and Amber joined them.
 
The movie playing that night, according to Graham, was the story of a family dog or other pet. (It may have been Old Yeller, a 1957 flick that played in this area in the late 1960s.) The film’s climax was a tragic scene in which the pet died. Shortly after, Graham’s daughter re-entered the projection room with some news.
 
“You know, Dad,” Amber said, pointing toward the couple in the private viewing area, “they’re both crying in there.”
 
Baker and Forsyth sold the Beacon Theatre sometime in the 1970s. Arnold Faber owned it for many years, then sold it in the 1980s. Tom Finch and his family ran the Beacon after that, and even brought in live acts like The Mercy Brothers.
 
But the community was changing, and the Beacon was no longer the only ‘show’ in town. Television became residents’ go-to source of entertainment. Then, development of the Video Cassette Recorder (and, later, the Digital Video Disc) enabled people to view recent releases without leaving the comfort of home.
 
Attendance dwindled. The theatre closed for the first time in the early 2000s. It sat empty until purchased by Jim Liddle and Rosann Blackburn in December 2005.
 
Liddle and Blackburn changed the theatre’s name to the “Lone Wolf.” They hoped to turn it into a multipurpose event centre and spent months refurbishing it.
 
“We’ve worked four months at 10 hours a day, with four days off in between,” Liddle said when the theatre finally reopened in April 2006. “I spent three days just scraping gum off the bottom of the seats. Put it in the paper that the Lone Wolf won’t be selling gum.”
 
Their big plans never panned out. After enjoying a brief resurgence, the theatre closed again.
 
The building sat empty for almost four years. Then, in April 2010, local film buffs formed the Lakes District Film Appreciation Society and set their sights on Burns Lake’s sixty-year-old cinema.
 
None of the film society’s directors knew how to run a theatre, so they made a road trip to Salmon Arm, where the Salmar Community Association had been operating Canada’s only community-owned theatres since the 1940s.
 
The SCA gave the Burns Lake contingent a crash course in theatre management. “The most important messages [we] brought back from Salmon Arm were, don’t skimp on equipment – buy the best to ensure that audiences are treated to the best possible theatre experience, make sure your concession is clean and your staff friendly, reinvest in your facilities and equipment first then donating to the community, and – first and foremost – make the transition to digital projection as soon as possible,” a member of Lakes District Film Appreciation Society told the Lakes District News.
 
The Burns Lake group was long on enthusiasm and short on cash. The community – waxing nostalgic for the theatre – came to the rescue in a big way. By August 2009, the film society had raised enough money to make an offer on the theatre; a month later, they purchased it with help from the Bulkley Valley Credit Union.
 
“A definite memory I will never forget is sitting in the lawyer’s office with [film society director] John Illes, signing papers,” one of the society’s directors said last week. “As he [the lawyer] asked questions that I had no idea about, the enormity of what we were taking on weighed very heavy on our shoulders, and it was a scary situation to sign our lives away on those papers!”
 
Renamed the “Reo Beacon” in homage to its illustrious past, the theatre became Canada’s second community-owned cinema. The film society was slated to show its first movie on Nov. 26, 2010, but the Beacon’s antiquated 35mm platter-feed projection equipment broke down at the last minute.
 
Finding parts for the old analogue technology proved problematic. For a while, it looked as though the Beacon would never reopen. Then the film society made a bold decision.
 
Digital projection was still relatively new in 2010. While most large theatre chains had swapped their old film projectors for computerized units, few small theatres could afford to make the technological jump. Digital projectors and the high-powered computers needed to run them cost $70,000 to $80,000.
 
Faced with an uncertain future, the Lakes District Film Appreciation Society decided to “go big or go home.” It committed to purchasing a digital projector, then set about raising the money to pay for it.
 
“At the time, there was a long wait list for digital projectors,” former film society president Michael Riis-Christianson recalled last week. “Then someone in Canada canceled their order, and a unit became available. We didn’t have the money to pay for it – we only had a few thousand dollars in the bank at the time – but we knew if we didn’t commit to buying it, we might not get another chance for six months or a year. It was a case of ‘now or never.’ Community expectations were so high. We didn’t want to lose momentum, so we committed to going digital and then started fundraising like crazy.”
 
The community came through once again. A number of local organizations donated to the cause, and more than 150 people gave the theatre society $100 each as part of the “Adopt-A-Seat” campaign. The final piece of the funding puzzle was a $30,000 grant from the Northern Development Initiative Trust.
 
Work proceeded at a frantic pace. The ProjecTech Group of Calgary installed the new digital equipment while theatre society members spent hours getting the building ready.
 
“What do I remember best about that time? It was the work bee,” says Sandra Macievich, one of the society’s directors in 2010. “So many people making it all happen. We painted floors and cleaned out all the concession area.”
 
The Beacon Theatre opened to great fanfare in December 2010. The first movie to play in the refurbished building was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It sold out.
 
It was followed soon after by Yogi Bear. The children’s movie was so popular here that people had to be turned away at the door. “We had to tell a long line-up of parents and their children that we had no seats left,” says a film society member. “We had crying kids outside. It was so hard to take that we added another showing.”
 
While a few people were “left out in the cold” that day, most went home happy. And at the Beacon, that’s been the rule rather than the exception in the past 64 years. Residents have fond memories of the place.
 
“When I was young, the admission was 25 cents, popcorn was 10 cents, and also a pop was 10 cents,” George Carlson noted on social media a few years ago. “It was our main entertainment, and they had Christmas parties with cartoons, Santa, and candy – all free.”
 
Sharon Sandercott Armistead has her own theatre story. “We lived behind Three Gables [Store] and walked to Decker Lake to collect bottles and get money to go see a movie,” she says. “I remember they had talent shows on stage, and I entered and spun my hula hoops and won.”
 
“One of my favourite memories is driving in from across the lake to go to movies with my family when I was growing up there,” says former Southsider Marci Hill Dell.
 
More than a few people had their first date at the Beacon. “I remember taking a girl to see Grease More at the Beacon,” said another local man. “I fell in love that night – with Olivia Newton-John!”
 
The Lakes District Film Appreciation Society still operates the Beacon. The iconic building remains one of Canada’s only community-owned theatres and a fixture on Burns Lake’s crooked Main Street. These days, though, it seldom sells out.
 
Running a movie theatre is more challenging than it was fourteen years ago. Studio consolidation has made it difficult for independent cinemas to obtain first-run movies, and yesterday’s blockbusters are only a click away on the Internet. Some shows never even make it to the Big Screen, bypassing theatres and going straight to streaming services like Netflix.
 
In March of this year, a study released by the Network of Independent Canadian Exhibitors revealed an industry in crisis. More than 60 percent of Canada’s independent theatres lost money in their most recent fiscal period. Most said they would need at least $50,000 in public funding to remain operational.
 
The majority of people living in Burns Lake today can’t remember a time when the town didn’t have a theatre. Perhaps that’s part of the problem. Too few residents recall life before the Beacon, when the only movies available in town were 16mm reruns at the old community hall.
 
That’s why it’s important to share memories of the place – and appreciate the unique community asset we have at 441 Highway 16 West. After all, as The Review newspaper noted almost eighty years ago, “It takes a hotel, bank, newspaper, and theatre to make a town.” We’d be poorer if we lost any of them.
 
***
Do you have a theatre story? Share it in the comments section below, or email it to us at [email protected].
 © 2024 Lakes District Museum Society

​​The Lakes District is saying goodbye to an old friend this month.
 
Crews began dismantling the MV Omineca Princess this week. Destruction of the grand old girl nearly a half-century after her launch marks the end of an era in the Lakes District.
 
The Omineca Princess was the third steel-hulled ferry to ply the waters of Francois Lake and the last operated here by the provincial government. Constructed by Allied Shipbuilders Ltd. of Vancouver for $2.698 million, the 765-tonne vessel was shipped north in segments and assembled at Nicholson Bay. (The cartage company had to make 22 trips.) Heavy rain and record water levels delayed the vessel’s launch, but the 192-foot-long steel hull got its first taste of Francois Lake on June 9, 1976.
 
A large crowd gathered at Northbank four days later to celebrate the vessel’s completion. Shirley Kempf, wife of Omineca MLA Jack Kempf, cut a ribbon on the boarding ramp with help from 92-year-old pioneer John Keefe. Then more than 200 people boarded the Omineca Princess for a short tour of Francois Lake and the inaugural run to Southbank.
 
No infrastructure project would be complete without speeches from politicians. Provincial Highways Minister Alex Fraser said the vessel would change the economic face of the “south country” by permitting heavy logging equipment and cattle liners to cross the lake.
 
Social Credit MLA Kempf, who’d been in office less than seven months, was more conservative with his predictions. “None of us have any idea what an impact this new vessel will make on the south country,” he said. “Some will be for the better, some for the worse.”
 
Despite his guarded comments, Kempf – like most people on the ferry that day – must have been in a good mood. The bombastic MLA, who later in his political career earned the nickname “Wolfman Jack” for his vociferous support of predator control in Northern BC, shared credit with the man who had previously represented the constituency.
 
“I have to compliment the vision of my predecessor [New Democrat Doug Kelly] as MLA, who saw the need for this ferry,” Kempf said. “I must give that kind of tribute. It doesn’t matter what flag we fly as long as we give the service to the area.”
 
The comment drew a round of applause, as did Fraser’s promise that his government would not charge people for riding the ferry.
 
 “There are no ferry fares here,” the highways minister said. “There never were, and there never will be, as far as I am concerned.”
 
The comment came back to haunt the provincial government decades later.
 
The Omineca Princess was very different from its predecessor, the MV Jacob Henkel. The Henkel, named after one of the first Euro-Canadians to homestead in the Lakes District, was constructed in an era when shipping firms spent lavishly on passenger vessels. The Henkel’s wheelhouse and waiting room high above its narrow car deck were tiny by 1976 standards but featured teak handrails, gleaming brass work, wooden benches, and a massive ship’s wheel that looked like it had been lifted from a nineteenth-century schooner. The Omineca Princess was far more utilitarian; synthetic materials were used instead of exotic woods, brass accents were few, and its ship’s wheel was not much larger than an automobile’s.
 
Southside residents may have missed the Jacob Henkel’s stylish design, but they appreciated the new ferry’s capacity. The Jacob Henkel could comfortably accommodate 16 automobiles and wasn’t designed to carry logging trucks (though it occasionally did). It served the area adequately in the 1950s and early ‘60s when few people lived on the Southside and most of the area’s timber was processed locally by small portable mills. By the 1970s, though, it couldn’t handle the traffic volume – as evidenced by the long line-ups at both ferry terminals. The queue of cars and trucks waiting to board the Henkel on Saturday mornings often stretched along Uncha Lake Road and partway up Southbank Hill.
 
Delays were minimal after Omineca Princess was launched – at least during its first decade of service. One hundred and ninety-two feet long, capable of carrying 34 vehicles and 200 passengers, the Princess had more than double the capacity of the old ferry. Perhaps more importantly, it could transport commercial vehicles because the passenger lounge, bridge, and wheelhouse were on one side of the car deck.
 
These attributes made the Princess a hit with Southsiders, most of whom depended on the ferry to reach Francois Lake’s north side. Tatalrose resident Fred Paulig communicated the prevailing sentiment in a thoughtful commentary written a few months after the new vessel’s launch.
 
“It’s an inspiring sight to see our Princess sliding into her berth smoothly, guided by expert hands,” Paulig stated in a letter to the Lakes District News on September 22, 1976. “There is none of that frantic shuffle loading and unloading that we had on the ‘Old Jacob.’ … I’ve sized up the Princess and I think she’s worth all the dough they sunk into her. Even if this were not so, us country hicks got a slice of the Victoria pie at last.
 
“Our Princess makes a turn at Southbank landing getting out, and she trembles as her engines go from reverse to forward. Then she turns her stern on the ‘Ole Jacob’ and glides away majestically, full speed ahead. She trembles a little, just a wee bit, mind you. Is it the trembling of a blooded horse, anxious to be off, or is it one of anticipation? Anxiety perhaps; “Ole Jacob” is still there. He will be waiting to jump into the breach and fill the gap. Gals are fickle, you know.”
 
It wasn’t just the vessel that changed in 1976. Captain Ed Ashe and Engineer William Corner were the only two Princess crew members who had served on all three steel-hulled ferries.
 
The change in personnel didn’t affect service. The newcomers approached their tasks with equal dedication. Although one government review identified several mechanical and procedural deficiencies on board the Princess, it found little fault with the employees. According to the Lakes District News, the crew’s enthusiasm resulted in “well-though-out safety equipment and [an] impressive standard of maintenance/housekeeping.”
 
Yet the Omineca Princess did more than transport vehicles on Francois Lake. It also played a key role in telecommunications.
 
In November 1978, the Omineca Princess worked with BC Tel employees and Shields Navigation to lay a new telephone line across Francois Lake. The 10,000-foot continuous strand of armoured submarine cable, housed on a spool measuring 9.5 feet by 15 feet and weighing more than 40 tonnes, arrived in Burns Lake by rail. It was then transported south to Francois Lake on a low bed trailer and loaded into a specially fabricated cradle on board Princess.
 
Crews worked throughout the night in bone-chilling cold, gusting winds, and blowing snow to ready the Princess. When dawn arrived, Captain Ashe weighed anchor and the vessel started across Francois Lake at a steady 1.5 knots (slower than a walking speed), the submarine cable trailing behind like a glistening black snake.
 
Despite the challenges, the job was completed by 4 p.m. More than 100 inflated inner tubes were used to keep excess cable afloat while tradesmen finished their work.
 
Although the Omineca Princess was occasionally sidelined for refits – and experienced a few mechanical problems – it provided almost uninterrupted service for nearly 30 years. Its time on Francois Lake wasn’t without controversy, though.
 
For nearly two decades, the vessel’s wastewater was pumped into a septic field for treatment. Around 1995, though, the Princess was fitted with an onboard marine sanitation system and began releasing treated sewage into the lake.
 
Francois Lake residents were incensed. Ministry of Transportation and Highways officials tried to allay concerns at a public meeting, noting that the amount of effluent released daily totaled about five litres, but the 130 people in attendance were not mollified.
 
One speaker summed up the prevailing opinion: “[Maybe it is] five litres a day, but for me, a pint a day is not acceptable.”
 
By the end of August 1995, the ferry was no longer discharging waste water into Francois Lake.
 
It wasn’t the only time public opinion influenced government policy. On at least three other occasions, determined resistance by residents forced the province to rethink its plans for the Francois Lake ferry.
 
Government ferry service on Francois Lake has always been free. Despite Highways Minister Fraser’s assurances in 1976 that no one would be charged for riding the Omineca Princess, the government tried three times to implement tolls.
 
The first instance – or the threat of it – occurred only a year after the Princess’s launch. In August 1977, word spread through the community that the provincial government planned to implement tolls on the ferry. It may have only been a rumour, but it was enough to spark outrage. (As a long-time resident noted recently, “mentioning the possibility of putting tolls on the Francois Lake ferry is like kicking a beehive on the Southside.”)
 
Residents mobilized for a fight. They had a powerful ally in MLA Kempf, who said fares would be implemented “over my dead body.” He then went to the highways minister and received assurances that the Francois Lake ferry service would remain free.
 
According to an old saying, “If, at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again,” and that’s what the provincial government did. The Social Credit administration considered implementing tolls in 1986, but backtracked in the face of public opposition.
 
Sixteen years later, perhaps thinking “three’s the charm,” the province made another attempt to collect money from passengers. In February 2002, Premier Gordon Campbell introduced legislation that would make customers pay to ride BC’s inland ferries. At about the same time, the Ministry of Transportation announced that it planned to reduce the Princess’s daily hours of service.
 
The surprise move sparked an immediate response. Residents formed the Francois Lake Ferry Committee to fight the changes and began gathering information on the ship’s social and economic importance to the region. The result was a document entitled “Two Worlds Separated by Two Miles,” which made a compelling case against the government’s proposals.
 
Although the government claimed cutting the Omineca Princess’s hours of operation would save taxpayers $365,000 annually, ferry committee members suggested the move would cost the province millions in lost revenue. One committee member said last week that information revealed that the Omineca Princess was costing the government about $250 per hour but generated three times that amount in provincial revenue.
 
“The Liberal government’s plan to reduce the hours of service on the Francois Lake ferry will result in millions of dollars of lost stumpage revenue,” stated the document’s authors. “…this action will greatly impair the ability to move timber to mills north of Francois Lake … If three ferry sailings are slashed, Victoria loses over $10,000 per day, $50,000 per week, or $200,000 per month, or over $2 million over the course of a ten-month logging season.
 
“Both of these measures [tolls and reduced hours of operation] will have immediate and far-reaching impacts on residents, workers, and companies that operate on the Southside. Burns Lake and area will also be severely impacted … [We] believe that reduced hours of operation and imposition of tolls will result in a net loss of revenue to the Crown.”
 
The Francois Lake Ferry Committee argued that the province needed to improve ferry service here, not reduce it and impose tolls. They noted that the Omineca Princess transported 4,037 loaded logging trucks and 3,317 recreation vehicles across Francois Lake in 1998. The timber carried by the logging trucks was likely worth $6.459 million to the province, they said, and the fuel tax generated by all those gas-guzzling RVs had to be significant.
 
Although the ferry committee preferred to work with officials rather than against them, it wasn’t averse to using civil disobedience to make its point. When Liberal MLA Dennis Mackay tried to board the Princess at Southbank after a meeting on the Southside, residents blockaded the ferry terminal. Mackay had no option but to drive around the head of Francois Lake – a distance of more than 130 km. It gave him a new appreciation for the Omineca Princess.
 
On another occasion, irate residents stopped traffic on Highway 16 in Burns Lake for fifteen or twenty minutes, then walked downtown. “I’ll never forget the parade of loaded logging trucks honking their horns,” recalls one man who participated in the rally.
 
Faced with overwhelming opposition across the province, the Campbell government finally scrapped its plan to implement tolls – much to the relief of Southside residents.
 
“This is a victory to all the citizens and groups that fought very hard to keep tolls off our local highway system,” Southside resident Mike Robertson reportedly said to the Lakes District News. “It is a testament to the grit and spirit of the residents whose livelihoods were challenged by an uninformed government.”
 
While the decision not to implement tolls was welcomed here, the community still faced uncertainty. The Liberals were committed to privatizing BC’s inland ferries, and no one knew how it would affect service on Francois Lake.
 
One thing was obvious, however: Francois Lake needed a new ferry.
 
By the turn of the millennium, Southside residents were again waiting for their ship to come in. Line-ups at the landings were the rule, not the exception. In February 2002, one logging truck driver said he had to wait five hours to board the ferry at Southbank. Delays of three hours were common.
 
The problem wasn’t mechanical. The Omineca Princess, despite being almost 30 years old, wasn’t any slower. It still traveled across the lake at a speed of about 10 knots (about 18 kilometres per hour), and its diesel engines remained strong. The wait times were caused by traffic volume.
 
There were too many vehicles and not enough deck space.
 
Southsiders had been pleading for a larger ferry for some time, but it sometimes seemed no one was listening. Then they got help from an unexpected source.
 
Today, the idea that an insect less than a centimeter long could decide the fate of a 765-tonne passenger vessel might seem ludicrous. Yet as one Southsider points out, the Omineca Princess might have remained in service far longer if not for the mountain pine beetle.
 
In the 1990s, a succession of warm winters and decades of wildfire suppression resulted in a pine beetle infestation of epic proportions. The insects spread quickly across the landscape, leaving a sea of dying pine trees in their wake. Almost overnight, forests that had once been green were red and dead.
 
Efforts were made to stop the devastation, but it was too late. By 2004, the bugs were killing more than 100 million cubic metres of mature pine a year in BC.
 
The Lakes District, a region dominated by pine forests, was one of the areas hardest hit. As the losses mounted, the province shifted into salvage mode. The district’s Allowable Annual Cut, which had traditionally been around 1.5 million cubic metres, was increased to 3.2 million. Companies tried frantically to harvest the dead timber before time and weather destroyed its economic value.
 
All this industrial activity placed increased pressure on the highway system. Dozens of logging trucks and other commercial vehicles needed to get across Francois Lake each day, and time was of the essence. The Omineca Princess became a transportation bottleneck that impeded the flow of logs to sawmills along Highway 16.
 
The province solved the problem by getting a bigger bottle.
 
In 2003, the province chose Waterbridge Equipment Inc. as the new ferry service provider on Francois Lake. The company, which has a long history of designing, building, and operating passenger vessels on BC’s inland lakes, brought a new, larger ferry to Francois Lake.
 
Two hundred twenty feet long and capable of carrying 52 vehicles – and, more importantly, eight loaded logging trucks – the MV Francois Forester entered service in November 2004. The Omineca Princess was demoted to reserve status and berthed at Northbank.
 
The Princess’s retirement was supposed to be temporary. Government officials thought the vessel would be laid up for eight years, after which traffic volumes on the Francois Lake run would return to pre-beetle levels that the Princess could handle. It didn’t happen. The years went by, and with a few exceptions, the Princess remained idle.
 
In 2008, a report found traces of asbestos in the “hard face spray coating” that sealed the insulation below the Princess’s car deck. The material was later removed, but the vessel’s days were numbered.
 
There was talk of making the Omineca Princess a tourist attraction when it became obvious she would never resume her old duties. Some folks suggested converting it to a museum ship or a tour vessel capable of taking visitors on sightseeing trips along Francois Lake. Others thought the Princess would make a great floating casino.
 
All bets were off. Nothing came of these ideas, perhaps because the financial cost of maintaining the vessel’s certification is so high. It wasn’t even worth taking the Princess apart and shipping it to another inland lake.
 
Today, the vessel that served this community almost continuously for nearly three decades is valued solely for its scrap value.
 
When the Omineca Princess disappears beneath the wreckers’ shears, she will leave behind memories and a legacy of service. According to one source, she traveled at least a million miles during her 48 years on Francois Lake – a distance equal to more than 40 circumnavigations of the globe. She probably carried at least ten times that many passengers and vehicles. For some people, riding the Princess was their first trip; for others, it was their last.
 
Goodbye, old girl. You may be gone, but aren’t forgotten.
 
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Do you have a story about the Omineca Princess? Share it in the comments section below or email it to [email protected].
 
© 2024 Michael Riis-Christianson and the Lakes District Museum Society