George Kuthan was born in Bohemia, Czechoslovakia in 1916. He was a medical student at the University of Prague when the Nazis closed it in 1939. It was at this time that he turned his attention to art, which he studied at Prague’s School of Decorative Arts.

In 1947 he went to Paris on a French government scholarship and attended the graphic studio at the Ecole des Beaux Arts until 1950 when he immigrated to Canada and was introduced to Robert Reid for whom he illustrated several books.

His interest in nature is one of the several aspects of his work. As a graphic artist he illustrated books, Christmas cards and other materials using printing methods such as etching, wood-engraving, and lino-cutting.

He held numerous one-man graphic shows, including at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. His engravings have appeared in many publications such as Kuthan's Menagerie of Interesting Zoo Animals (1960), Vancouver: Sights and Visions (1962), Aphrodite's Cup (1964), and Scenes from Snowbound (1970).

Occupy Vancouver was a collective of peaceful protests and demonstrations. It was part of Occupy Canada that was also part of the larger Occupy Together movement which first manifested in the financial district of New York City with Occupy Wall Street in March 2011. Occupy Wall Street had initially been organized to answer the call-to-action by the Vancouver-based, advertising-free, anti-consumerist organization Adbusters. Subsequently, the movement spread to over 900 cities around the world.

On October 15, 2011, in Vancouver, around 4000 to 5000 people participated in rallies and the local general assembly. In the days following its inception at the Vancouver Art Gallery there was the arrival of over 150 tents, food, health and safety services, operating on a volunteer basis nearly around the clock. On October 16, 2011, the activists began formalizing their work and agreeing on broad principles at large gatherings called General Assemblies. The group adopted the general format of Wall Street and they declared themselves leaderless and not hierarchical.

On November 7, 2011, city notices asking protesters to pack up their tents were immediately posted at the site. On November 15, 2011, police, firefighters and city workers moved in and started removing several tents and tarps that were described as fire hazards. The City of Vancouver applied for an injunction order to remove the entire camp, but the judge adjourned the hearing to allow protesters to prepare their legal response. On November 18, 2011, Justice Anne MacKenzie granted the city's request to order the removal of Occupy Vancouver's structures by Monday afternoon. Protesters were given until 2 p.m. on November 21, 2011, to remove their tents and other structures.

On November 21, 2011, protesters abandoned the encampment at the Art Gallery zone and relocated their tents to Robson Square, just outside provincial court facilities. Justice Anne MacKenzie granted the Attorney General of British Columbia an order to remove Occupy Vancouver's new tent city by 5 p.m. November 22, 2011. Just before 5 p.m. the tents were packed up and occupiers moved onto the SkyTrain, and over to the Commercial Drive neighborhood where they moved into Grandview Park.

As of late January 2012, Occupy Vancouver was still holding weekly meetings at the W2 media cafe.

Interview materials, both tapes and transcriptions, were compiled by poet Barry McKinnon of Prince George, B.C. for a special issue of the Toronto magazine Open Letter (Seventh series, nos. 2-3) on B.C. Poets and Print.

Bill Gaston was born in 1953 in Flin Flon, Manitoba and has lived in a number of cities across Canada, including Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, and Fredericton. He studied at the University of British Columbia, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts (1975), a Master of Arts (1978), and a Master of Fine Arts (1981). As a young man, he worked as a logger, fishing guide, and, briefly, as a professional hockey player in France. He has taught English and Creative Writing at Canadian universities including the University of British Columbia (1982-1984), Seneca College (1986-1987), Mount Saint Vincent University (1988-1990), Saint Marys University (1988-1990) and the University of New Brunswick (1991-1996), where he served as director of the creative writing program and editor of the literary journal The Fiddlehead. In 1998, he began teaching in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. Gaston is the author of several celebrated novels, including Tall Lives (1990),The Cameraman (1994; rev. ed. 2002), Bella Combe Journal (1996), The Good Body (2000), Sointula (2004), and The Order of Good Cheer (2008). His one work of non-fiction, published in 2006, is entitled Midnight Hockey: All About Beer, the Boys and the Real Canadian Game. He published his first collection of short fiction, Deep Cove Stories, in 1989, and has since written several othercollections: North of Jesus Beans (1993), Sex is Red (1998), Mount Appetite (2002), and Gargoyles (2006). A number of his stories have been read on CBC Radio and the CBC has commissioned screenplay adaptations by Gaston of two of his stories, Saving Eves Father and The New Brunswicker. Gaston has also authored the plays Yardsale, Ethnic Cleansing, and I am Danielle Steel, and a collection of poetry, Inviting Blindness (1995), which was originally his thesis for his Master of Fine Arts. In 1999, Gaston was given the Canadian Literary Award for Fiction for his short story Where it Comes From, Where it Goes. He was nominated in 2002 for both the Giller Prize and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for Mount Appetite. In 2003, he won the inaugural Timothy Findley Award, given to a male Canadian writer in mid-career. In 2004, he received a ReLit Award and a second Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize nomination for his novel Sointula. He was awarded the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize and a second ReLit Award for his collection of short stories, Gargoyles, which was also nominated for the Governor Generals Award for Fiction in 2006. Gaston lives on Vancouver Island with his wife, writer Dede Crane. Gaston and Crane have four children: Lise, Connor, Vaughn, and Lilli.

Carolyn Zonailo was born January 21, 1947, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Zonailos paternal great-grandparents were among the 7,500 Doukhobors who came to Canada from Georgia, Russia, in 1899. She is the daughter of Matt Zonailo, a builder and electrician from Castlegar, British Columbia, and Anne Gibb, who immigrated to Canada from Scotland as a young child. Zonailo attended primary and secondary school in Vancouver, B.C. She attended Scripps College in Claremont, California, as well as the University of Rochester in New York. In 1971, Zonailo received a Bachelor of Arts in literature from the University of British Columbia. From the mid 1970s, Zonailo published her poetry in literary magazines, periodicals and anthologies. In 1975, she began studies at Simon Fraser University at Burnaby, British Columbia, and completed a Master of Arts degree in 1980. Zonailo founded Caitlin Press in 1977 and published books of poetry and fiction until 1990. During this period, Caitlin Press published several other west coast poets including Elizabeth Gourlay, David West, Cathy Ford, Beth Jankola, Carole Itter, Norm Sibum, David Conn, Ajmer Rode, and Mona Fertig. In April, 1991, Caitlin Press was sold to Cynthia Wilson and Ken Carling, who relocated the press to Prince George, British Columbia, and changed its scope to fiction, non-fiction, and poetry primarily related to the interior region of British Columbia. In 1991, Zonailo began collaborating with graphic artist and poet Ed Varney to publish poetry broadsides, pamphlets, chapbooks and two anthologies under the imprint the Poem Factory/Usine de Poeme. Their collaboration continued through 1999. Zonailo has served on the board of several writers organizations including the Federation of British Columbia Writers, the League of Canadian Poets, and the Writers Union of Canada. In 1995, Zonailo married poet and teacher Stephen Morrissey and in 2000, they founded Coracle Press. Zonailos interest in mythology, archetypal studies, and Jungian psychology has been incorporated into her writing. Zonailo also writes and lectures in mythology and astrology under the name Carolyn Joyce. Carolyn Zonailo lives in Montreal, Quebec, with her husband, Stephen Morrissey.

Charles Watts (1947-1998) was a poet and literary curator. Born in San Francisco and raised in Roseville, California, he moved to British Columbia in the 1971 to attend Simon Fraser University where he studied English Literature studying under poet Robin Blaser and completed his M.A. From 1978-1997 he served as assistant curator of the SFU Librarys Special Collections (including the Contemporary Literature Collection). In 1995, he was a principal organizer of a conference honouring Blaser called The Recovery of the Public World, and later co-edited a collection of essays and conference papers under the same title (Talonbooks, 1998). He published one book of his own poetry, Bread and Wine (Tantrum, 1987), and a number of essays and papers in journals. At the time of his death he was working on a PhD thesis on Herman Melville. The library of the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver, B.C. is named in his honour.

The Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform, (CAER) membership was made of of 161 British Columbia residents, randomly chosen from the provinces 79 electoral districts. The mandate of The Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform was to examine a variety of models for the election of members of the Legislative Assembly and to propose recommendations on whether British Columbia should keep its current system for provincial elections or whether it should adopt a new model. In September 2002, Gordon Gibson was appointed by the government to advise on the mandate and make up of a citizens assembly. Gibsons, Report on the Constitution of the Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform was completed on December 23, 2002. On April 30, 2003, The Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform was created. On May 16, 2003, Jack Blaney, former president of Simon Fraser University, was appointed to the chair of the CAER by the B.C. Legislature. The Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform held fifty public hearings in May and June of 2004. In addition, over 1430 individuals made 1603 written submissions to the Assembly. The deliberation sessions were held from September to November 2004. The adoption of a new voting system, called BCSTV or single transferable vote system was recommended. On May 17, 2005 a provincial referendum was held to allow citizens to vote on whether the BC-STV system should be adopted for use in provincial elections.

Clayton Eshleman (born June 1 1935) is an American poet, translator, and editor. He is sometimes mentioned in the company of the "ethno-poeticists" associated with Jerome Rothenberg. He was a recipient of the National Book Award in 1979 for his co-translation of Csar Vallejo's Complete Posthumous Poetry. He also won the 2008 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and was shortlisted for the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Eshleman founded and edited two of the most seminal and highly-regarded literary magazines of the latter half of the twentieth century. Twenty issues of Caterpillar appeared between 1967 and 1973; and in 1981 he founded Sulfur magazine. Forty-six issues appeared between 1981 and 2000, the year its final issue went to press. Over the course of his life, his work have been published in over 500 literary magazines and newspapers, and he has given readings at more than 200 universities. As of 2009 he is Professor Emeritus at Eastern Michigan University.

Founded in Ontario in 1921, the Communist Party of Canada is one of two federally registered Communist parties in Canada, the other being the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), an anti-revisionist Maoist party. Though without elected federal or provincial representation at present, the CPC is active in trade unions, the civic reform movement, and a number of social justice, anti-war and international solidarity groups and coalitions. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the party was thrown into crisis. The CPC leadership and a segment of its general membership began to abandon Marxism-Leninism as the basis of the Party's revolutionary perspective, and ultimately moved to liquidate the Party itself, seeking to replace it with a left, social democratic entity. The protracted ideological and political crisis created much confusion and disorientation within the ranks of the Party for over two years. Ultimately, the majority in the Central Committee (CC) led by Maurice Hewison of the party voted to abandon Marxism-Leninism. An orthodox minority in the CC resisted this effort. Provincial conventions were held in 1991 in British Columbia and Ontario. At the B.C. convention, delegates threw out one of the main leaders of the Hewison group. A few months later, Ontario delegates rejected a concerted campaign by Hewison and his supporters, and overwhelmingly supporters of the Marxist-Leninist current to the Ontario Committee and Executive. The Hewison group moved on August 27, 1991 to expel eleven of the key leaders of the opposition and also dismissed the Ontario provincial committee. The expelled members threatened to take the Hewison group to court. After several months of negotiations , an out-of-court settlement resulted in the Hewison leadership agreeing to leave the CPC and relinquish any claim to the party's name, while taking most of the party's assets to the Cecil-Ross Society, a publishing and educational foundation previously associated with the party. Following their departure a convention was held in December 1992 at which delegates agreed to continue the Communist Party. The renovated party, now with fewer than 1,000 members, was smaller than before the split and had lost a number of assets. It was not in a position to run fifty (50) candidates in the 1993 federal election, the number required to maintain official party status. As a result, the CPC was deregistered by Elections Canada, and its remaining assets were seized by the government. A prolonged legal battle ensued, resulting in a Supreme Court of Canada ruling in 2003 that overturned a provision in the Elections Act requiring fifty candidates for official party status.

No biographical information available.

endnote was a literary magazine based in Calgary, Alberta and edited by Derek Beaulieu, Russ Rickey, and Tom Muir. Six issues were published between 2000 and 2003.