Warning: this blog post contains images of violence.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the 1993 presidential summit between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin at UBC. However, that wasn’t the only time President Clinton visited the campus, as he would return four years later to meet with seventeen other nations leaders in the 1997 APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation) Leaders Economic Meeting. Though this time around, the high profile event was met with much resistance and student activism against the world leaders campus visit.

This blog post is exceptionally long and will be split into two parts. I have attempted to compile a timeline of the 1997 APEC event in Vancouver and the legacy it left on UBC, Vancouver, and Canada as a whole through the lens of the content available on Open Collections. Much of the content in this blogpost comes from articles published in the UBC student newspaper The Ubyssey which has many of its issues preserved in The Ubyssey collection. The photographs of the protest itself can be found at the UBC Archives collection. Materials from Kinesis: News about women that is not in the dailies collection are included to document that there was already an anti-APEC movement and the parallel “NO! to APEC” group demonstrations in the Vancouver area prior to 1997. Some images have been digitally altered from their original publishing to improve the readability of the content and all images link to the open collections record to be viewed as the original item.