Legacy of '86: Expo helped shape our little coastal town into a global city, but at what expense?

Vancouver welcomed the world in 1986. And the world showed up. Those who were there weigh in on its impact.

Crowds at Expo 86, with the new Skytrain in the foreground and the geodisc dome that would become the home of Science World in the background. Photo by Courtesy of B.C. Transit

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An electric train car whizzing by overhead, the glowing lights of the downtown stadium and nearby geodesic dome, the white sails of the harbourside convention centre, the waterfront skyscrapers that gave Vancouver its “city of glass” moniker.

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So many of the most “recognizably Vancouver” features of the city in 2026 can be linked back to Expo 86, the world’s fair that opened on May 2, 1986.

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Expo ran for five months, welcomed 22 million visitors to Vancouver, and had a major impact on the city — although looking back now, 40 years later, there is some disagreement among those who were there at the time  over just what the fair’s legacy represents.

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Passengers ride across the water toward the Expo 86 fairgrounds in Vancouver, BC. Photo by Mark van Manen /VANCOUVER SUN

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The influx of people and money boosted B.C.’s economy and transformed a relatively small coastal city into a metropolis with a global profile. But debate persists about whether that rising tide lifted all boats, or if it contributed to the inequality and affordability challenges confronting Vancouver now.

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Crowds at Expo 86, with the new Skytrain in the foreground and the geodesic dome that would become the home of Science World in the background.

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From skeptic to booster

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In 1980, when Vancouver city councillor Mike Harcourt decided to make his first run for mayor, he was a strident critic of the B.C. government’s plans for a 1986 fair to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Vancouver’s incorporation. Harcourt even wrote a letter to the Bureau of International Expositions in Paris, in 1980, asking the governing body to reject the B.C. government’s application.

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Harcourt was criticized by many, including then mayor Jack Volrich and provincial government leaders, for attempting to sabotage a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Vancouver and B.C. But, he says, he could not support a splashy international event that could leave the city in debt without a real plan for a major transit project to benefit the region and permanent housing on the False Creek North property after the fair ended.

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“Housing, transit, and livability are priorities which leave no room for multi-million-dollar birthday bashes,” Harcourt was quoted saying in The Province in October 1980, just weeks before the election in which he upset Volrich.

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Harcourt went on to become an enthusiastic booster of Expo.

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He served as mayor for the six years leading up to Expo, and said he visited the fair 80 times with his wife and young son. Looking back now, Harcourt says he was happy with the legacy projects Expo brought to the region — without saddling the city with massive debt, he emphasized — including the convention centre, B.C. Place stadium, SkyTrain, Science World, and the neighbourhood developed on the Expo lands on False Creek’s northern foreshore.

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Harcourt says he regrets that hundreds of poor tenants were displaced from their homes in downtown low-rent hotels and boarding houses in the lead-up to Expo, despite his attempts to stop the evictions.

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But, he says, “All in all, I think Expo was 90 per cent-plus good.”

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Vancouver went from being the “last stop” on the CP rail line to being the “front door of Canada to the Asian Pacific,” Harcourt said.

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“It got the attention of major investors from around the world, and some people think that’s bad and some people think that’s good,” he said. “But it put Vancouver on the map.”

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Expo Ernie leads a parade held at Expo 86’s closing ceremonies in October 1986. Photo by Peter Battistoni /PNG

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Waterfront reclaimed

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After the fair, the B.C. government sold the 82 hectare Expo lands in a single-package deal to an investor group from Hong Kong led by billionaire Li Ka-shing.

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Li’s company, Concord Pacific, then set to work on what was described as the largest residential-commercial development project in North America.

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Terry Hui has run Concord since taking over as a 29-year-old CEO in 1992. In a a recent interview on the former Expo lands — a neighbourhood he has long called home — Hui reflected on how Vancouver has changed since he first arrived shortly before Expo, fresh from university in California.

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“Expo allowed all this to happen,” Hui says as he gestures towards the Yaletown marina and a sun-drenched seawall populated by joggers, cyclists, baby strollers, and coffee-sippers on benches enjoying the view.

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Expo “allowed the city to reclaim the waterfront,” which was until then, like many North American port cities, dominated by industrial facilities, warehouses and railyards, Hui said.

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“Now it becomes a big amenity for everyone. … The seawall is a defining experience of Vancouver.”

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Concord has built more than 10,000 homes on the former Expo lands in a series of tall, slender towers mixed with parks, three kilometres of seawall, retail and commercial space, day-care centres, a community centre and elementary school. The neighbourhood has demonstrated how downtown urban living can be both high-density and highly livable, helping establish the new style of urban design that became known around the world as Vancouverism.

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But Concord’s work on the Expo lands is not finished. It still has one parcel of land in northeast False Creek that remains undeveloped, and Concord has drawn criticism — including last year from then Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon — for that delay.

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Hui said Concord is “pushing very hard” to move that development forward, but it’s complicated by several factors, including the uncertain future of the vehicle viaducts beside the site. The former Plaza of Nations site, immediately beside Concord’s final undeveloped parcel, has different owners with their own plans.

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Concord’s empty lot is “still serving a purpose to the city,” Hui said, hosting events such as Cirque du Soleil and operations for this summer’s World Cup. But, he added, “We can’t keep the site as event space forever. … I want to build it.”

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The public spaces in Concord’s False Creek North development are a key reason it’s become such a livable, popular community, said landscape architect Margot Long.

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Landscape architect Margot Long at George Wainborn Park in Vancouver. Long worked on designing the park, at the foot of Richards Street, following Expo 86. Photo by Jason Payne /PNG

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In the years leading up to Expo, Long was part of a team, led by Don Vaughan, who worked on the design of the public spaces in between the pavilions. After the fair ended and Concord began developing the land, Long and her firm, PWL Partnership, worked on the series of public parks along False Creek’s northern foreshore, including Coopers Park, George Wainborn Park, the second phase of David Lam Park, and the “pop-up park” that now stands in northeast False Creek. Although the latter is only a temporary park while the land awaits Concord’s development, it’s Long’s favourite.

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More than half of the former Expo lands developed so far are now public realm, including plazas, pathways, roads, and 15 hectares of public parks.

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Long said that in some other major developments, developers might focus on the design of the buildings first, and the public spaces are an after-thought.

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“But that was not the case here,” she said, as the public realm was a central piece of the plan from the beginning — with prime waterfront real estate set aside for public use.

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Developers and city planners have come from around the world to Vancouver to see Concord’s waterfront development, and have tried, with varying degrees of success, to emulate it in other cities, Long said.

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‘Incredible legacy’

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On May 2, 1985, exactly one year before the fair started welcoming guests, the Expo preview centre opened inside a 17-storey geodesic dome on the east end of False Creek.

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After the fair, the distinctive, golfball-shaped building became the home of Science World, and is now one of the defining features of Vancouver’s skyline. In 2023, an analysis of metadata on more than 10 million photos on Flickr found that Science World was the second most popular building in North America for nighttime photography, after only the Empire State Building in New York.

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Fireworks over False Creek at Expo 86 on October 6, 1986. Photo by Ian Lindsay /Vancouver Sun

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But it’s more than a landmark, says Science World CEO Tracy Redies. The educational non-profit has welcomed more than 23 million visitors, and works with B.C.’s K-12 school system teaching students and teachers about the so-called STEAM subjects: science, technology, engineering, art and math.

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“It’s formed a really important ecosystem to deliver STEAM talent to British Columbia organizations and companies, and that’s really important in this day and age when we want to be economically and socially independent and prosperous,” Redies said. “Having that continuous pipeline of STEAM talent is going to be really important to solve the issues facing the 20th century.”

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Business magnate Jimmy Pattison chaired the Expo board starting in 1981, and in 1985 was appointed to take over as CEO and lead the team into the final stretch, famously taking the job for a salary of $1 a year. Pattison became so closely associated with the fair — and is now credited with so much of its success — that he became known as “Mr. Expo.”

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In an emailed statement this week, Pattison said, “Expo 86 left an incredible legacy both on Vancouver and the whole province of B.C.

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“It brought people together in a common pursuit and was very positive in all ways.”

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Jimmy Pattison in May 1986 with Transformer Star Scream at Expo 86. PROVINCE

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Not all Vancouverites view Expo’s legacy as entirely positive.

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“To look at the legacies of Expo 86, we shouldn’t view it with just rose-coloured glasses, but also through a microscope and an X-ray of its intentions, successes, and shortcomings,” said Andy Yan, an associate professor of urban studies at Simon Fraser University, who has recently been researching Expo and the fair’s influence on the region’s development and housing market.

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“The event was a marker on Vancouver’s journey from a struggling resource-dependent city to a global metropolis. Examining the 40 years of policy, data, and history since the event, you get to see who got ahead, who got left behind, and what should not be forgotten,” Yan said.

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“What worked? And what didn’t work? And what should we do now?”

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Between 1986 and 2025, the city of Vancouver’s population grew by about 72 per cent, from 431,000 to 740,454. That seems like a big increase until you compare it to the growth in the rest of Metro Vancouver, which had a 181 per cent population boom during that same period.

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“Expo wasn’t just about Vancouver — it shaped regional population growth,” Yan said.

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A key piece of facilitating that suburban growth was SkyTrain, the world’s first fully automated driverless rapid transit system and the centrepiece of the transportation-themed Expo. The original SkyTrain line connected Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster, and further stations and lines were built over the following years to connect other municipalities.

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“No pun intended, but Expo 86 literally laid out the track for the development of these regional city centres,” Yan said. It didn’t happen overnight, he said, but Metro Vancouver developed “a network of communities” where people can live, work and play, instead of a sprawling network of highways where “everybody just has to go in and out of downtown Vancouver.”

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Expo was seen as a calculated gamble to kickstart the struggling economies of Vancouver and B.C. By many measures, it was a success, kicking off a protracted building boom and helping modernize and diversify the province’s economy, developing sectors beyond those focused on the extraction of natural resources.

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In 1986, the Vancouver region had an 11 per cent unemployment rate, nearly double the six per cent of today.

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While the unemployment picture today is better, Yan said, it’s worth considering the housing situation of society’s most vulnerable. In 1986, Vancouver conducted what may have been its first attempt to count its homeless population, which was estimated at between 59 and 76 people. The city’s most recent tally is at least 10 times that number, with 763 “unsheltered” homeless people sleeping outdoors (as well as another 1,952 “sheltered” homeless people).

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Andy Yan, an associate professor of urban studies at Simon Fraser University, has been researching Expo and the fair’s influence on the region’s development and housing market. Photo by NICK PROCAYLO /PNG

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Several factors contribute to homelessness, but a major cause is the cost of housing. In 1986, the average cost of a Metro Vancouver home was around four times the median annual household income, Yan’s analysis shows. By 2021, that ratio had more than tripled to 14-to-one.

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“It’s the cost of becoming this global metropolis. You see how real estate just soars, while income does not necessarily follow,” Yan said.

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“It was a catalyst of the city we have today, in all its strengths, but also all its struggles.”

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During research for his book, Yan obtained a copy of the Vancouver planning department’s original official development plan for False Creek North, from 1989. The plan envisioned building 7,650 homes, with 20 per cent reserved for “core-needy households.”

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Today, False Creek North is widely viewed as a vibrant community, but it never came close to providing that amount of affordable housing. After a series of amendments to the local development plan, there are now more than 10,000 homes in False Creek North, but only about 470 are non-market units (another 670 social housing units are under construction).

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Another Expo?

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Many local anti-poverty activists opposed Expo from the beginning, seeing it as a waste of public funds that would be better spent on the needy. One of them, Jean Swanson, remembers picketing outside the Patricia Hotel on East Hastings after several low-income tenants were evicted to make way for tourists who could pay higher rates for the rooms.

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One of the early evictees was 88-year-old retired logger Olaf Solheim, who had lived at the Patricia for six decades before being kicked out in March 1986. After Solheim died a few weeks later, Vancouver’s chief medical health officer, John Blatherwick said his death was directly attributable to the forced relocation disrupting his way of life.

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Solheim and the other low-income SRO tenants displaced for Expo — estimates pegged their numbers between 500 and 1,000 — are an important part of the fair’s legacy, Swanson said.

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Olaf Solheim in his room in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside on March 26, 1986. The 88-year-old former logger died six weeks after being evicted from his SRO room at the Patricia Hotel so that it could be rented out for tourists during Expo 86. This photo was taken in the Powell Centre social housing project, where he had moved. Photo by Bill Keay /Vancouver Sun

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Reflecting on the past 40 years, Swanson says there is a clear connection between the rising cost of housing and the increase in homelessness. There were poor people in Vancouver in the 1970s and ’80s, but there was not a population of thousands of homeless people with nowhere to go, Swanson said. “You had to go looking for homeless people.”

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“That isn’t all caused by Expo. A lot of it is caused by the feds ending their support for social housing in the early ’90s,” Swanson said. “But I think that Expo contributed to the commodification of housing, and the fact that rents as a percentage of incomes have risen so fast.”

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When Miro Cernetig moved from Toronto to Vancouver in 1986, taking a job at the Vancouver Sun specifically to report on Expo, the city “felt like a village,” he said.

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The fair “really was a pivotal point. … It made Vancouver a global city.”

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Cernetig’s career later took him around the world as a foreign correspondent for The Globe and Mail and more recently as CEO of CityAge, a company that creates events and campaigns in several cities. Expo did a lot to boost awareness of Vancouver, and the city’s international reputation, he said, and set the stage for the 2010 Olympics, which further increased the city’s profile.

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The influx of global capital and attention contributed, in some ways, to Vancouver’s affordability challenges over the last four decades, Cernetig said.

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“But I think you can’t grow as a city without human and financial capital. You just stagnate without it. So you have to be open to that, but you have to have good leadership to manage it.”

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Cernetig thinks, on balance, Expo was worthwhile, and the region would benefit from galvanizing behind another global event.

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“I think we need another Expo,” he said. “The world would come knocking at our door again.”

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