The Harbour Publishing Company began as the "Raincoast Chronicles", a periodical which started in 1972 under the direction of Howard White and the Raincoast Historical Society. "Raincoast Chronicles” featured works by and about the people of the Pacific Northwest and focused on the culture and industries, particularly fishing and logging, which shaped their identity. This influence continued when Howard White incorporated Harbour Publishing in 1984. Over the years, Harbour developed relationships with others in the publishing industry, including Nightwood Editions and Caitlin Press. Not only do they publish works under their own banner and for these additional companies, they also assist with select self-publishing endeavours.

Born in Florida, Stephen Lunsford emigrated to British Columbia in 1977, after attending graduate school at Ohio State University. He taught both at University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University for a few years, before becoming a full time rare book and manuscript dealer, and an appraiser of the same. He has issued catalogues offering a wide variety of original manuscripts, photographs, printed items, and artwork. He specialized in unearthing hitherto unknown early works printed in Western Canada, especially indigenous language materials. For many years, he worked to discover and describe the earliest items printed in British Columbia, as well as the other western Provinces, Yukon, and Alaska. He amassed, in large part, the ground-breaking collection of BC Colonial imprints of John Keenlyside, as well as his own smaller collection of variants not found in the Keenlyside collection. Results of two of his bibliographical researches can be found in Amphora, the journal of the Alcuin Society: “Robert Mathison Jr’s Tasty Printing,” an account of Vancouver’s first job printer, in Special Issue of Amphora No. 150, November 2008, and “Pressing the Word into the Wilderness,” an overview of mission printing on the Northwest Coast. Amphora No. 154, Vancouver, 2010.

Ian McDonald was born in North Vancouver, British Columbia to parents Monique and Les McDonald. Inspired by the labour activism of his father, he dedicated his graduate studies to the plight of electrical workers involved in International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 213 and received a Master of Arts in History from Simon Fraser University in 1986. Ian McDonald’s father, Les McDonald, was a trade union activist with the IBEW Local 213 and past-president of the International Triathlon Union.

Joan Parolin (née Gillis) was born Winnifred Joan Gillis on January 16th, 1928. She was born in Sproat Lake, near Port Alberni, on Vancouver Island where she spent the first ten years of her life, with her mother Margaret Forster, her father William Gillis, her younger sister Donalda Gillis, and her uncle Jim Gillis. Here her father and Uncle worked as contract loggers, until her Uncle was killed in a logging accident in the summer of 1937. Following this, her family moved to a one-acre property and house on Scott Hill in Surrey. This home was roughly a mile from the Patullo Bridge in an agricultural area, then known as South Westminster. The family kept chickens, and a cherry orchard, and the father sold eggs at work, while the children sold cherries at a roadside stand during the summer. At the age of 10, Joan began attending South Westminster Elementary school on 104th avenue. Here she met her friend Sumi Mototsune whose father owned a small boat-building yard on the Fraser River, near the Patullo Bridge. She attended South Westminster Elementary until Grade 7 and then Sir Richard McBride School in New Westminster. She began Grade 7 on September 3rd 1939; the same day that Britain and France declared war on Germany.
At this time, the Queen Elizabeth Secondary School was being constructed, and from September to November Gillis and her classmates attended Newton Elementary School until the building was complete. Beginning in November of 1940 Gillis attended Queen Elizabeth (Q.E.) Secondary School on King George Highway, now King George Boulevard in Surrey. Gillis became involved in the school newspaper, ‘The Q.E. Vue’ and met several students from higher grades working on it, including Setsuko Fujii, Yoshi Okamura, and Yosh Nakamura.
In the wake of World War II and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Gillis watched as her friends of Japanese Canadian descent were ordered, along with their families, to be interned away from the ‘security zone’ of within a 100 mile radius of the coastline.

Gillis and many of her classmates felt that this was unjust, and in 1942 she began regular correspondence with several of her Japanese Canadian friends and acquaintances. On V.E. day in May of 1945 Gillis celebrated with many of her female friends by wearing slacks to school; an offense for which they were suspended for the day.
Gillis continued at Queen Elizabeth until her graduation in June of 1945. The previous autumn her parents had a third child, Kenny Gillis, born in November of 1944.
Due to the lack of teachers following the war, the province waived the requirement for students to complete Senior Matriculation (Grade 13), and so Gillis went straight to the Provincial Normal School to train to become a teacher. This school was located at the Northwest corner of 12th avenue and Cambie Street in Vancouver, and she commuted there from her home in Surrey from September 1945 to June 1946.

Upon graduation she applied to teach in several school districts and was accepted by 3, including the Vancouver School District. She refused to work at Vancouver School District because they paid female teachers less than male, and instead accepted a position teaching Grade 2 in Parksville on Vancouver Island. Aged 18, Gillis taught here for one year, and then moved to the Maple Ridge District where she taught from 1947 to 1955. From 1950 to 1951 Gillis took a year off from teaching to obtain her Bachelor of Arts from University of British Columbia, which was required for her to teach high school. She also attended U.B.C. later in her career, completing a Masters of Education.
From 1955 to 1959 Gillis taught in Hope School District. Here she met her husband Joe Parolin, who had signed up for a French class Gillis was teaching. Gillis and Parolin married in 1963 and had two children, Peter, born in 1967, and Margaret, born in 1968. Gillis had moved to Surrey School District in 1959 and she taught there until her retirement in December 1984.

Gillis passed on March 10, 2019.

Lilian Bland is widely recognized as the first woman to design, construct, and fly her own aircraft. She was also an avid photographer, journalist, marks-woman, equestrian, motorist, and an early settler of Northern Vancouver Island.

Lilian Emily Bland was born September 27th 1878 in Kent, England. Her mother was Emily Charlotte Madden, born January 16th, 1847. Her father, John Humphrey Bland, was an artist, born in 1828. Lilian was the youngest of three children, and had an elder sister named Eva Charlotte Bland and a brother, Robert Wyndham Humphrey Bland.
During the first ten years of her life, Lilian traveled to Switzerland, Italy, and France —primarily with her father. From 1890 to 1891 she attended school at Westgate in Kent. As a young adult Lilian journeyed around the continent, occasionally moving back to Ireland to live with her father. She studied musical and visual arts and also enjoyed fishing, hunting, photography, horse-back riding, and reading. From 1903 to 1908 Lilian published several articles in various sport and lifestyle magazines. These articles were accompanied by her own photographs of horse-back riding, travel, and automobile racing. In September 1909, in Ireland, Lilian began modeling an idea for a plane, and in November she began building the biplane, called the Mayfly. The plane flew successfully for approximately 10 metres and she became the first woman to design and fly her own aircraft.

On October 3rd 1911, Lilian married her fathers’ brothers’ son, Charles Loftus Bland. Charles had recently purchased land in Quatsino, on the Northern part of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. He moved ahead of her to build a home for the two of them, and she travelled to Canada in April of 1912. In April of 1913 Lilian gave birth to her daughter, Patrick Lilian Bland.

Lilian spent the next several years making a life for her daughter and husband in Quatsino; raising livestock, farming, making wine, and selling goods. In 1917 Mary Madden, Lilian's cousin on her mothers' side, joined Charles and Lilian to work on the homestead in exchange for pay. In 1921 Lilian, Charles, and Mary all moved to California, where they purchased a farm and lived for 3 years in the small town of Calistoga in Napa County. They returned to Quatsino sound in 1925 via automobile with Mary’s son Jack Bland. In 1929 Lilian’s daughter Pat passed away from a Tetanus infection.

In 1932 Lilian and Charles separated and Lilian stayed on the homestead until 1934. After this, Lilian returned to England where she worked as a gardener, investing her savings in the stock market. In February of 1955 Lilian retired and moved to Land’s End in Cornwall. She lived there until the time of her death on May 11th 1971, at the age of 92.

The Regional District Review Committee of the Legislature was initiated on September 8, 1977, to review the regional district concept as it was being implemented in British Columbia. It was the first comprehensive review of regional districts since their inception. The committee members – Phillip Farmer, Rendina Hamilton of Penticton, Alfred O. Hood of Victoria, Daphne Phillips of Dawson Creek, and Ronald Thompson of Galiano – all had experience in local government in British Columbia. Farmer was named chair by agreement of the committee, and Brigadier-General E.D. Danby served as the committee’s executive secretary. Because of his leadership role, the Regional District Review Committee was also known as “The Farmer Committee.”

Appointed by Hugh Curtis, Minister of Municipal Affairs, pursuant to order-in-council Number 2888, the committee was authorized to examine:

1) the jurisdictional role of regional districts, including an examination of present and future functions and responsibilities;

2) the structural and administrative organization of regional districts including internal and external boundaries; the relationships between regional districts and Provincial, municipal and the citizens; and Provincial financial support policy for the regional districts; and

3) such other issues germane to the review of the regional district concept as may be appropriate.

To these ends, the committee was empowered to seek briefs from interested parties and hold public hearings at various locations throughout the province.

The Review Committee held 41 public hearings at which it received 366 written and verbal submissions and an additional 150 pieces of correspondence, including one from the Greater Vancouver Regional District. The responses revealed a diversity of issues, making the differences amongst the 29 regional districts quite evident.

After becoming ill in June 1978 following the conclusion of the committee’s public hearings, Farmer resigned the position of committee chair in September 1978, at which time Rendina Hamilton was appointed acting chair and later chair of the committee. The Committee's final report, released on October 31, 1978, recommended the regional district governance model be retained, and made a total of 52 suggestions for changes. After submission of the report to the Minister of Municipal Affairs, Hugh Curtis, the committee was dissolved.