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Paul St. Pierre is a journalist and author in British Columbia, Canada. He was the Member of Parliament for the riding of Coast Chilcotin from 1968-1972. He was defeated in the 1972 election by New Democratic Party candidate Harry Olaussen in a tight three-way race. He is especially known for his popular fiction recounting adventures and quirks of life in the Chilcotin-Cariboo, and for a regular column that appeared for many years in the Vancouver Sun.
One of his novellas set in the Chilcotin, The Breaking of Smith's Quarter Horse, was adapted into a feature film starring Glenn Ford. Also starring in that film was Chief Dan George, who played the character Old Antoine in the CBC-TV adaptation of his novel Cariboo Cowboy. Saint Pierre continues to write and maintains residences in the Chilcotin, the Fraser Valley and Teacapán, Mexico.
In politics, he was a member of the Liberal Party. His riding spanned the Central Coast, then including the large pulp mill town of Ocean Falls and the western part of the Cariboo and the Squamish-Lillooet in a time when the largest town was Bralorne, and both were isolated as well as separated by each other by vast mountains. Other voters were in the Chilcotin Plateau and Cariboo, over yet another set of mountains and/or huge plateaus from the other towns on the coast and in the southern part of the riding. In those days Squamish was still only accessible by ferry from downtown Vancouver, and the rail line came no farther south. Most of the remaining major towns in the riding, Squamish, Lillooet, Powell River, Sechelt, Ocean Falls and Bella Coola, were all separated from each other and all those mentioned by either water or rail - or, in the case of Lillooet to Bella Coola, an arduously long and difficult drive via 100 Mile House and Williams Lake; the latter was among the three or four largest towns in the riding and is today central to the Cariboo riding.
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