Victoria — Old Town, Chinatown & Inner Harbour
Helmcken House
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Transcript
Helmcken House is associated with physician and politician John Sebastian Helmcken, one of the delegates who negotiated British Columbia's entry into Confederation.
He was initially skeptical about joining Canada, partly because Ottawa was thousands of kilometres away and Victoria's commercial ties ran strongly south to the United States.
The promise of a transcontinental railway helped change the political calculation.
The house also reminds us that nineteenth-century politics was conducted through small personal networks. Doctors, merchants, colonial officials and legislators often knew one another socially as well as politically.
Confederation can look inevitable in retrospect. From Victoria in 1870 it did not.
British Columbia could imagine several futures: continued colonial status, closer American economic ties or union with Canada.
The house belongs to the moment when Canada had to persuade the Pacific coast that a continental country was practical.