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As our regular readers know, issues of BC Studies normally include several articles on a variety of topics. In a departure from this pattern this issue is devoted largely to a single article, one we believe is an unusually significant contribution to Canadian economic and social history. T h e "standard of living" debate has been a major controversy in British historiography for more, than two decades, one side led by R. M. Hartwell arguing that industrialization brought an increase in the standard of living of British workers, the other, whose most notable spokesman is E. J. Hobsbawm, contending that it did not. Only recently and in a quite different economic and social context has a similar discussion begun among Canadian historians and economists. We know a good deal about the rising fortunes of entrepreneurs and financiers such as William Mackenzie, Donald Mann, Joseph Flavelle, Edmund Walker, A. E. Ames, George A. Cox and Chester Massey during the rapid growth of the first three decades of the twentieth century, but little about the material well-being of working men and women during this period. T o what extent, if at all, did they profit from the great immigration, the railway building, and "the wheat boom" of the years before World War I, and from the industrialization begun then and accelerated by the war? Economists Gordon Bertram and Michael Percy have studied national trends in real wages, while historians Terry Copp and Michael Pi va have examined the lives of the working class in Montreal and Toronto respectively. Thus we are beginning to have some picture of the standard of living of the wage-earning sector of society during the economic expansion of the first two decades of the century and the slower development of the 1920s. Eleanor Bartlett's contribution to this discussion, published here, is based on her M.A. thesis presented in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia in 1980. I t focuses on one measure of the standard of living in one Canadian city: real-wage indexes in Vancouver in the years 1901-1929. Her innovative method and results, which challenge some of the conclusions of earlier studies of working-class incomes, should encourage other scholars to embark on comparable studies of other centres.

Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Vancouver, 1901-1929