Building a refinery in Vancouver, a city newly constructed on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, Rogers created a western Canadian sugar empire — one that sourced raw sugar cane through the Pacific, refined it in British Columbia and sold it throughout the Canadian West.
To make the refined sugar that is so familiar to Canadians today, B.C. Sugar — the name of the company that owned Rogers Sugar — sourced both beet and cane sugars. Canadian beet sugar has its own atrocious labour history, as University of Saskatchewan professor Ron Laliberte, York University professor Mona Oikawa and other experts have demonstrated.
In both cases, workers reported horrendous conditions. The pay was so low and the work was so menial in the Dominican Republic that, as historian Catherine C. Legrand points out, workers left the plantation whenever they could. Conditions were so dire that some workers tragically perished in B.C. Sugar’s cane fields. When Fiji decriminalized the desertion of indenture contracts in 1916, it is little wonder that hundreds of workers left the colony’s sugar plantations. These included plantations operated by B.C. Sugar.
Oh no.