Mr. Speaker, on February 12, 100 years ago, The Vancouver Sun wrote out its first edition. It has been delivering the news to British Columbians ever since.
Founders, “Black Jack” McConnell and Robert Ford, both Liberals, ran their paper to never “adversely criticize, condemn, or oppose in sprit” the Liberal Party and to counter The Province, a Vancouver Tory newspaper in those days.
The Vancouver Sun evolved, providing British Columbians with intelligent, informative, often controversial but never bland reporting from iconic journalists like Jack Wasserman, Al Fotheringham and Marjorie Nichols.
The Vancouver Sun was one of the first newspapers in Canada to give women hard news to cover and there are tales of female reporters packing guns in their purses as they covered organized crime and the docks in the old days. I do not think Kim Bolan, Barbara Yaffe or Daphne Brahaman do that anymore, though they still do not shy away from the tough stories.
As Stephen Hume, a The Vancouver Sun columnist, wrote:
...a newspaper is, a community having a collective public conversation with and about itself, sometimes an argument, sometimes a commiseration, but always the discourse that is community life.
I congratulate the The Vancouver Sun--