Is it time for New Westminster and Vancouver to amalgamate as "one great metropolis" and take in the lesser municipalities of the region?
That was the question being mused upon in the March 30, 1914 edition of the New Westminster News, 109 years ago this week.
The newspaper was reporting on the thoughts of former Reeve J.W. Weart of Burnaby, who spoke to a gathering of businessmen aboard the steamer Paystreak while on an inspection trip of the new Fraser River channel. Weart predicted that the lower mainland of British Columbia was on the verge of a new era of co-operative development.
"As yet there has been no outward sign of the movement outlined by Mr. Weart as inevitable, tending to bring within the corporate limits of one great metropolis the present cities of Vancouver and New Westminster and the municipalities of Point Grey, South Vancouver and Burnaby, but that a man of such recognized business ability could make such a statement to such a gathering of business men as sat in the cabin of the Paystreak Friday afternoon last and be applauded for so doing is an immensely significant fact," the News reported.
Weart said amalgamating the five different sets of "municipal machinery" would create enormous saving in time, money and energy.
"The idea is a big one and, like all big ideas, will take much time to work out," the News wrote, "but so surely as this peninsula continues the development of which its past performances have given promise, so surely will this big idea become an actual fact."
As for New Westminster in this scenario? The News proclaimed that New Westminster would have "nothing to fear."
"Her safeguard and guarantee of full recognition and consideration lies in the Fraser river which flows past her doors with its miles of industrial and dock sites," it wrote, noting that "business of a magnitude at which we can only now guess" would come to use those sites in future.
The New Westminster News advised it would be wise to move forward with a "pull together" spirit.
"By so doing we will reduce the size of the obstacles in the path leading to that inevitable union, that consolidation of purposes which is bound to work out to the advantage of all the interests within the five municipalities concerned," it concluded.
Would that erstwhile editor be pleased or disappointed to know that the City of New Westminster remains alive and well more than a century later? And what would his opinions be on the government that is Metro Vancouver?
Such questions will never be answered.
New Westminster is a city full of history — and that history includes a variety of community newspapers over its many decades.
In this new weekly series, we're taking a look back at the headlines from some of those newspapers, shining a spotlight each week on a notable news story, person or moment from this week in New West history.
Watch for it online every Thursday.
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Follow Julie MacLellan on Twitter @juliemaclellan.
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