Departures of note

Arthur Bunster, an Irish-born entrepreneur who became a British Columbia politician, is remembered for a fist-fight in the House of Commons in 1878 with Liberal MP Guillaume Cheval. The brawl, which took place during his second term as a Member of Parliament for Vancouver, was a dramatic episode in a career marked by sharp political battles over immigration and railway policy.

Bunster was born in Queen's County (now Laois), Ireland, and educated in Dublin at Trinity College. He arrived on Vancouver Island in 1856 and settled in Victoria, where he tried several ventures before purchasing the Colonial Brewery in 1859. The brewery burned down and was rebuilt in 1869, the same year he served on Victoria's town council. In 1871, he represented Nanaimo in the Legislative Council of British Columbia and was elected to the province's first Legislative Assembly as a Liberal for the Victoria District.

In the federal election of 1872, Bunster and other local candidates stepped aside so that Finance Minister Francis Hincks could win the Vancouver seat by acclamation after Hincks lost his Ontario seat. Bunster resigned his provincial seat in 1874 to contest and win the federal seat in that year's election, and he was re-elected in 1878. He lost the seat in 1882, the same year he sold the brewery back to its original owners.

Bunster was a vocal opponent of Chinese immigration to Canada. In 1871, he proposed a fifty-dollar poll tax on Chinese workers in British Columbia, but the proposal was withdrawn because it fell outside the colonial council's powers. In 1874, he lobbied for legislation to make it illegal for the Canadian Pacific Railway to hire anyone with hair longer than 5.5 inches, a measure aimed at Chinese workers. After losing his parliamentary seat, he moved to San Francisco, where he entered real estate and drowned in San Francisco Bay in 1891.