The Gulf of Georgia Cannery was built in 1894 at Steveston, near the mouth of the Fraser River, during a rapid expansion of British Columbia's salmon-canning industry. Investors placed the long wooden structure on pilings so fish could move directly from boats to processing lines. It quickly became one of the coast's largest canneries. The plant belonged to a network that turned seasonal salmon runs into an export commodity shipped across Canada, Britain, and other markets.

Industrial production depended on a diverse and unequal workforce. First Nations fishermen brought generations of knowledge to commercial fishing while confronting restrictions on their fisheries. Japanese Canadian, Chinese, European, and Indigenous workers caught, cleaned, packed, cooked, and labeled salmon. Jobs were often segregated by race and gender, wages differed, and companies controlled seasonal housing. Chinese crews performed much of the dangerous butchering and canning work until mechanization altered the line. Women filled cans and processed fish, while Japanese Canadian fishermen became essential to the fleet despite discriminatory licensing and politics.

The cannery expanded its lines and accommodation during the 1890s, then changed as catches fluctuated, regulations tightened, companies consolidated, and machinery increased output. In 1906 a mechanical butchering machine reduced some skilled hand labor. During the First World War, canned salmon supported military supply as well as civilian markets. The broader Steveston industry was marked by strikes, racial conflict, dangerous river conditions, and recurring efforts by workers and fishermen to secure better prices and treatment.

The forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War ruptured the community and fishing fleet. Their boats were seized and sold, and many families were not permitted to return to the coast for years. The Gulf of Georgia plant had already shifted away from salmon canning; during the 1940s it became a major herring-reduction operation, producing oil and meal. New dryers, tanks, boilers, and industrial spaces changed the building. Reduction continued until 1979, after which portions served as net loft and storage.

Community advocates campaigned to save the aging complex as waterfront industry disappeared. The federal government acquired it in 1979, transferred it to Parks Canada in 1984, and worked with the Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society, formed in 1986. Restoration led to public opening in 1994, the building's centennial year. The national historic site now interprets technology, labor, environment, immigration, Indigenous fisheries, and discrimination alongside commercial success. Its machinery and pilings preserve a rare industrial workplace where global markets met the Fraser salmon runs and where workers from many communities made coastal British Columbia's fishing economy possible. Preserved equipment makes technological change legible at full scale: visitors can follow fish from dock to canning line and later through machinery that rendered herring into oil and meal. Yet interpretation also asks who controlled the resource and who bore industrial risk. Declining fish stocks, government regulation, corporate consolidation, and worker displacement connect the cannery's internal machinery to environmental and political decisions made throughout the coast. The surviving workplace consequently carries histories of both abundance and depletion, opportunity and exclusion, technological progress and human cost.