What goes into a Nanaimo bar? Answer: a Hells Angel, a bouncer, and a drug dealer. It’s an old and mostly obsolete joke but, in the way of jokes, it captures, or once captured, a truth. In the ’90s, the Hells Angels gang was highly visible in this mid-sized Vancouver Island city; when the resource economy was in decline, many loggers, fishers, shipwrights, and mill workers were idled, but the bars weren’t; in 1994, the Washington Post wrote about Nanaimo being named “Canada’s heroin capital.”
At the time, a miner’s cottage, the local term for a small home with practical aesthetics, could be had for $60,000—likely less if the roof leaked. Cedar shingles last about thirty years before they go soft. The last of the bustling coal mines closed in 1986. A lot of the roofs leaked. As many as 42.6 percent of single people lived below the poverty line in 1995.
