In 1977 British Columbia gave every its new ministries a single, modern signature: the coat of arms, redrawn as a clean white badge in a rounded square, set beside the province’s name in Helvetica. Within a few years it was set aside for a flag logo, and it slipped out of the record so completely that it is hard to find at all today.
## The badge downtown
In downtown Prince George, on the government office in the building people still call the old Ramada, there is a coat of arms that does not look like the one on today’s letterhead. It is flat and white, a stag and a ram on either side of a shield, all held inside a square with softly rounded corners.
Most people walk past it. If you stop and try to look it up, you find almost nothing. Search for the British Columbia government logo and the story begins with a waving flag in 1983, then jumps to the sun over the mountains in 2005. The badge on the wall is not in it.
That gap is where this story starts. We set out to rebuild every mark the Province has used, and this one kept turning up with no name and no date.
## A modern arms for the new ministries
The badge belongs to a moment of reorganisation. In 1976 the Province’s old departments became ministries, and every lockup of this badge names a “Ministry”, which is how it was first dated. A new structure needed a common face, and in September 1977 the government issued one: the Visual Identity Program.
The program was not a logo dropped onto a page. It was a system, written down in four manuals:
– General Manual, 16 pages with colour illustrations, setting out the idea and the rules (reprinted in 1981).
– Sign Manual, for buildings and offices like the one in Prince George.
– Vehicle Manual, for the Province’s fleet.
– Reproduction Manual, a large loose-leaf binder from the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing and the Queen’s Printer, with exact specifications and reproduction sheets for official signatures, decals and stationery.
The Sign Manual says the Reproduction Manual was meant for Visual Identity Program officers and the Queen’s Printer. So the program had people inside government whose job was to keep every ministry’s signature the same.
That is what made the badge modern. The arms of 1906 were a painted heraldic picture. The 1977 version flattened them into one colour, closed them in a rounded square, and set the name beside them in Helvetica, the plain sans serif of the era’s corporate identities. Forestry, highways and health all spoke with the same voice.
## What it looked like
This is the signature as we rebuilt it from surviving artwork and photographs of signs, shown for the Ministry of Forests (1976–1986). The arms are reduced to one colour: the lion and crown on top, the Union Flag and setting sun on the shield, the stag and ram standing on either side, and the motto *Splendor Sine Occasu*, “splendour without diminishment”, on three small ribbons. The name sits to the right in two weights: the Province in bold, the ministry in regular.
Look closely and it is not quite the coat of arms you know. The differences are subtle, but they are everywhere. The stag and the ram stand stiffer and more upright, their legs and bodies bent at sharper, less natural angles than the living animals in the painted arms. The sun on the shield becomes a flat half-disc with spiky, evenly spaced rays, and the waves and flag are ruled in straight, even lines. Nothing in it is drawn the way an animal or a sunset would actually look; everything is drawn the way a sign-maker or a printer could reproduce it cleanly, in one colour, at any size.
The same parts made every version. The badge could stand above the name or beside it, and it was printed in a single ink, in the artwork we have, white on a deep forest green.
## Moved aside
The badge had about six years. In 1982 a new, much thinner document appeared: *B.C. Identity Program*, seven unnumbered leaves from a branch called Government Information Programs. The word “Visual” was gone from the name, and the program had moved away from the ministry that issued the 1977 binders.
Around 1983 the government began using a new main logo: a stylised, waving provincial flag beside the letters “BC”, later known as the “Spirit of BC” flag. It was not a change of party. Bill Bennett’s Social Credit government, premier since late 1975, had introduced the 1977 program and was re-elected in May 1983. But the flag became tied to that government’s image, and it outlived that government, lasting until about 2001.
The badge did not vanish overnight. A flag historian noted that some letterheads went on using “a silhouette of the Coat of Arms inside a square with rounded corners” after the flag arrived. Signs cost money to replace, so some stayed on buildings, which is likely why one is still on a wall in Prince George.
## Forgotten
What was set aside was then left out. The public list of B.C. government logos begins with the flag in 1983 and does not mention the 1977 badge or the Visual Identity Program at all.
There are a few reasons it fell through the cracks:
– It lived on paper, not online. Its whole life, 1977 to the mid-1980s, came before the web. Only the Sign and Vehicle manuals have been digitised; the General and Reproduction manuals sit unscanned in the Legislative Library in Victoria.
– The arms came back, but not this version. Around 2001 the government returned to the coat of arms, this time the full-colour heraldic arms over a BRITISH COLUMBIA wordmark. People remember that one, and it hides the older badge behind it.
– It had no nickname. The flag was the “Spirit of BC” and the sun came with “The Best Place on Earth”. In the 1977 manuals the badge is simply a “signature”.
So the badge survives where it was built to: on signs, stationery and the sides of buildings, doing its job without anyone remembering who made it.
## Still to find
The last pieces are on their way. The Legislative Library agreed to scan the General Manual (1977 and the 1981 reprint), the Reproduction Manual and the 1982 B.C. Identity Program, and to send the PDFs within a few weeks.
When they arrive, they should answer:
– Who designed the badge, and was it drawn in-house or by an outside studio?
– Does the Reproduction Manual’s signature grid (pages 17 to 18A) match the version we rebuilt?
– Did the 1977 badge already show the stag and ram, ten years before the 1987 grant made them official?
– Does the 1982 document introduce the flag, or still describe the badge?
