Encyclopedia
British Columbia, often referred to as
B.C. or
BC , is the westernmost of
Canada's provinces and is famed for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto,
Splendor sine occasu . It was the sixth province to join Confederation. Residents are referred to as
British Columbians or
BCers.
Geography
British Columbia is bordered by the
Pacific Ocean on its west, by the American state of
Alaska on its Northwest, and to the north by the
Yukon Territory and the
Northwest Territories, on the east by the province of
Alberta, and on the south by the states of
Washington,
Idaho, and
Montana. The current southern border of British Columbia was established by the 1846
Oregon Treaty, although its history is tied up with lands as far south as the
Columbia River.
British Columbia's land area is 944,735 square kilometers which is about the size of France, Germany and the Netherlands combined. It is larger than the total area of Washington, Oregon and California. British Columbia's rugged coastline stretches for more than 27,000 kilometers , including deep, mountainous fjords and about 6,000 islands, most of which are uninhabited.
British Columbia's capital is
Victoria, located at the southeastern tip of
Vancouver Island. BC's most populous city is
Vancouver, located in southwest corner of the BC mainland called the Lower Mainland. Other major cities include
Surrey,
Burnaby,
Coquitlam,
Richmond, Delta, and
New Westminster in the Lower Mainland; Abbotsford and Langley in the
Fraser Valley;
Nanaimo on
Vancouver Island; and
Kelowna and
Kamloops in the
Interior.
Prince George is the major city nearest the centre of the province; however, a small town called Vanderhoof, 100 km to the west, is much nearer to the geographic centre.
The Coast Mountains,
Canadian Rockies and the
Inside Passage's many
inlets provide some of British Columbia's renowned and spectacular scenery, which forms the backdrop and context for a growing outdoor adventure and ecotourism industry. 75% of the province is mountainous , 60% is forested, and only about 5% is arable. The
Okanagan area is one of only three wine-growing regions in Canada and also produces excellent
ciders, but exports little of either beverage. The small rural towns of
Penticton, Oliver, and Osoyoos have some of the warmest and longest summer climates in Canada, although their temperature ranges are exceeded by the even-warmer Fraser Canyon towns further to the north such as Lillooet and Lytton where temperatures on summer afternoons sometimes surpass 40°C .
Much of the western part of
Vancouver Island is covered by
temperate rain forest, one of a mere handful of such ecosystems in the world . The province's mainland away from coastal regions, moderated by the
Pacific Ocean and a few southern interior valleys features snowy, cold winters, especially in the north.
Ten Largest Metropolitan Areas in BC by Population | Community | 2001 | 1996 |
| Vancouver | 1,986,965 | 1,831,665 |
| Victoria | 311,902 | 304,287 |
| Kelowna | 147,739 | 136,541 |
| Abbotsford | 147,370 | 136,480 |
| Kamloops | 86,491 | 85,407 |
| Nanaimo | 85,664 | 82,691 |
| Prince George | 85,035 | 87,731 |
| Chilliwack | 69,776 | 66,254 |
| Vernon | 51,530 | 49,701 |
| Courtenay | 47,051 | 46,297 |
Ten Largest Municipalities in BC by Population| Municipality | 2001 | 1996 |
| Vancouver | 545,671 | 514,008 |
| Surrey | 347,825 | 304,477 |
| Burnaby | 193,954 | 179,209 |
| Richmond | 164,345 | 148,867 |
| Abbotsford | 115,463 | 104,403 |
| Coquitlam | 112,890 | 101,820 |
| Saanich | 103,654 | 101,388 |
| Delta | 96,950 | 95,411 |
| Kelowna | 96,288 | 89,422 |
| Langley Township | 86,896 | 80,179 |
History
Pre-Confederation
The discovery of stone tools on the Beatton River near Fort St. John date human habitation in British Columbia to at least 11,500 years ago. The
First Nations population spread throughout the region, mostly on the coast, where aboriginals achieved the highest density of any place in Canada. At the time of European contact, nearly half the aboriginal people in present-day Canada lived in BC.
The explorations of
James Cook in the 1770s and
George Vancouver in the 1790s, and the concessions of
Spain in the 1790s established British jurisdiction over the coastal area north and west of the
Columbia River. In 1793,
Sir Alexander Mackenzie was the first European to journey across North America overland to the
Pacific Ocean, inscribing a stone marking his accomplishment on the shoreline of South Bentinck Arm near
Bella Coola. His expedition theoretically established British sovereignty inland, and a succession of other fur company explorers charted the maze of rivers and mountain ranges between the Prairies and the Pacific. Mackenzie and these other explorers — notably John Finlay, Simon Fraser, Samuel Black, and David Thompson — were primarily concerned with extending the
fur trade, rather than political considerations.
Their establishment of trading posts under the auspices of the
North West Company and the
Hudson's Bay Company , however, effectively established a permanent British presence in the region, which was, as of the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, under the "joint occupancy and use" of citizens of the United States and subjects of Britain . This co-occupancy was ended with the
Oregon Treaty of 1846.
Some of these early posts would grow into settlements, communities, and cities. Among the places in British Columbia that began as fur trading posts are Fort St. John ;
Hudson's Hope ; Fort Nelson ; Fort St. James ;
Prince George ;
Kamloops ;
Fort Langley ;
Victoria ;
Yale ; and
Nanaimo . Fur company posts that became cities in what is now the United States include
Vancouver, Washington , formerly the "capital" of Hudson's Bay operations in the Columbia District .
With the amalgamation of the two fur trading companies in 1821, the region now comprising British Columbia existed in three fur trading departments. The bulk of the Central and Northern Interior was organised into the
New Caledonia district, administered from Fort St. James. The Interior south of the
Thompson River watershed and north of the Columbia was organised into the Columbia District, administered from
Fort Vancouver . The northeast corner of the province east of the
Rockies, known as the Peace River Block, was attached to the much larger Athabasca District, headquartered in
Fort Chipewyan .
Until 1849, these districts were a wholly unorganised area of British North America under the defacto jurisdiction of HBC administrators. Unlike
Rupert's Land to the north and east, however, the territory was not a concession to the Company. Rather, it was simply granted a monopoly to trade with the First Nations inhabitants. All that was changed with the westward extension of
American exploration, and the concomitant overlapping claims of territorial sovereignty, especially in the southern Columbia basin . In 1846, the
Oregon Treaty divided the territory along the
49th parallel to
Georgia Strait, with the area south of this boundary, excluding Vancouver Island and the
Gulf Islands) transferred to sole American sovereignty. The
Colony of Vancouver Island was created in 1849, with
Victoria designated as the capital. New Caledonia continued to be an unorganized territory of British North America, "administered" by individual HBC
trading post managers.
With the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush in 1858, an influx of Americans into New Caledonia prompted the colonial office to formally designate the mainland as the
Colony of British Columbia, with
New Westminster as its capital. A second gold rush — the Cariboo Gold Rush — followed in 1862, forcing the colonial administration into deeper debt as it struggled to meet the extensive infrastructure needs of far-flung boom communities like
Barkerville and Lillooet, which literally sprang up overnight. The Vancouver Island colony was facing financial crises of its own, and pressure to merge the two eventually succeeded in 1866, with the name
British Columbia being applied to the newly united colony.
Rapid growth and development
The Confederation League led by such figures as
Amor De Cosmos,
John Robson, and Robert Beaven had long led the chorus pressing for the colony to join Canada, which had been created out of four British colonies in 1867. Several factors motivated this agitation, including the fear of annexation to the
United States, the overwhelming debt created by rapid population growth, the need for government-funded services to support this population, and the economic depression caused by the end of the gold rush. With the agreement by the Canadian government to extend the
Canadian Pacific Railway to British Columbia and to assume the colony's debt, BC became the sixth province to join
Confederation on July 20, 1871. The borders of the province were not completely settled until 1903, however, when the province's territory shrank somewhat after the Alaska Boundary Dispute settled the vague boundary of the Alaska Panhandle.
Population in British Columbia continued to expand as the province's
mining,
forestry,
agriculture, and
fishing sectors were developed. Mining activity was particularly notable in the Boundary Country, in the Slocan, in the West Kootenay around
Trail, the East Kootenay , the
Fraser Canyon, the Cariboo and elsewhere. Agriculture attracted settlers to the fertile
Fraser Valley, and cattle ranchers and later fruit growers to the drier grasslands of the Thompson River area, the
Cariboo, the Chilcotin, and the
Okanagan. Forestry drew workers to the lush
temperate rain forests of the coast, which was also the locus of a growing
fishery.
The completion of the CPR in 1885-86 was a huge boost to the province's economy, facilitating the transportation of the region's considerable resources to the east. The booming logging town of Granville, near the mouth of the
Burrard Inlet was selected as the terminus of the railway, prompting the incorporation of the community as Vancouver in 1886. The completion of the
Port of Vancouver spurred rapid growth, and in less than fifty years the city would surpass
Winnipeg as the largest in western Canada.
The early decades of the province were ones in which issues of land use — specifically, its settlement and development — were paramount. This included expropriation from First Nations people of their land, control over its resources, as well as the ability to trade in some resources . Establishing a labour force to develop the province was problematic from the start, and British Columbia was the locus of immigration not only from Europe, but also from
China and
Japan. The influx of a non-caucasian population stimulated resentment from the dominant ethnic groups, resulting in agitation to restrict the ability of Asian people to immigrate to British Columbia through the imposition of a head tax. This resentment culminated in mob attacks against Chinese and Japanese immigrants in Vancouver in 1887 and 1907. By 1923, almost all Chinese immigration had been blocked except for merchants and investors .
Meanwhile, the province continued to grow. In 1914, the last spike of a second transcontinental rail line, the
Grand Trunk Pacific, linking north-central British Columbia from the
Yellowhead Pass through
Prince George to
Prince Rupert was driven at Fort Fraser. This opened up the north coast and the
Bulkley Valley region to new economic opportunities. What had previously been an almost exclusively fur trade and subsistence economy soon became a locus for forestry, farming, and mining.
The 1920s through the 1940s
When the men returned from
World War I, they discovered the recently-enfranchised women of the province had helped vote in the prohibition of liquor in an effort to end the social problems associated with the hard-core drinking that Vancouver and the rest of the province was famous for until the war. Because of pressure from veterans, prohibition was quickly relaxed so that the "soldier and the working man" could enjoy a drink, but widespread unemployment among veterans was hardened by many of the available jobs being taken by European immigrants - Italians and others - and disgruntled veterans organized a range of "soldier parties" to represent their interests, variously named Soldier-Farmer, Soldier-Labour, and Farmer-Labour Parties. These formed the basis of the fractured labour-political spectrum that would generate a host of fringe leftist and rightist parties, including those who would eventually form the
Co-operative Commonwealth and the early
Social Credit splinter groups.
The advent of prohibition in the United States created new opportunities, and many found employment or at least profit in cross-border liquor smuggling. Much of Vancouver's prosperity and opulence in the 1920s is due to this "pirate economy", although growth in forestry, fishing and mining continued. The end of US-side Prohibition, combined with the onset of the
Great Depression, plunged the province into economic destitution. Compounding the already dire local economic situation, tens of thousands of men from colder parts of Canada swarmed into Vancouver, creating huge
hobo jungles around False Creek and the Burrard Inlet railyards, including the old CPR mainline right-of-way through the heart of the city's downtown . Increasingly desperate times led to intense political organizing efforts, an occupation of the main Post Office at Granville & Hastings which was violently put down by the police, and an effective imposition of martial law on the docks for almost three years. A Vancouver contingent for the
On-to-Ottawa Trek was organized and seized a train, which was loaded with thousands of men bound for the capital but was met by a
Gatling gun straddling the tracks at Mission; the men were arrested and sent to work camps for the duration of the Depression.
There were some signs of economic life beginning to assert normalcy towards the end of the '30s, but it was the onset of World War II which transformed the national economy and ended the hard times of the Depression. Because of the war effort, women entered the workforce as never before.
BC has long taken advantage of its Pacific coast to have close relations with
East Asia. However, this has caused friction, with frequent feelings of animosity towards Asian immigrants. This was most manifest during the
Second World War when many people of
Japanese descent were relocated or interned in the Interior of the province.
A second growth spurt: The 1950s and 1960s
The post-
World War II years saw Vancouver and Victoria also become cultural centres as poets, authors, artists, musicians, as well as dancers, actors, and
haute cuisine chefs flocked to the beautiful scenery and warmer temperatures. Similarly, these cities have either attracted or given rise to their own noteworthy academics, commentators, and creative thinkers. Tourism also began to play an important role in the economy. The rise of Japan and other Pacific economies was a great boost to the BC economy.
Shifting fortunes: BC since the 1970s
Demographics
Population of British Columbia since 1851
| Year | Population | Five Year
% change | Ten Year
% change | Rank Among
Provinces |
|---|
| 1851 | 55,000 | n/a | n/a | 6 |
| 1861 | 51.524 | n/a |
6 | | 1871 | 36,247 | n/a |
7 | | 1881 | 49,459 | n/a | 36.4 | 8 |
| 1891 | 98,173 | n/a | 98.5 | 8 |
| 1901 | 178,657 | n/a | 82.0 | 6 |
| 1911 | 392,480 | n/a | 119.7 | 6 |
| 1921 | 524,582 | n/a | 33.7 | 6 |
| 1931 | 694,263 | n/a | 32.3 | 6 |
| 1941 | 817,861 | n/a | 17.8 | 6 |
| 1951 | 1,165,210 | n/a | 42.5 | 3 |
| 1956 | 1,398,464 | 20.0 | n/a | 3 |
| 1961 | 1,629,082 | 16.5 | 39.8 | 3 |
| 1966 | 1,873,674 | 15.0 | 34.0 | 3 |
| 1971 | 2,184,620 | 16.6 | 34.1 | 3 |
| 1976 | 2,466,610 | 12.9 | 31.6 | 3 |
| 1981 | 2,744,467 | 11.3 | 25.6 | 3 |
| 1986 | 2,883,370 | 5.1 | 16.9 | 3 |
| 1991 | 3,282,061 | 13.8 | 19.6 | 3 |
| 1996 | 3,724,500 | 13.5 | 29.2 | 3 |
| 2001 | 3,907,738 | 4.9 | 19.1 | 3 |
- Source: Statistics Canada
Ethnic groups
Note: The following statistics represent both single and multiple responses to the 2001 Census, and thus do not add up to 100%.>| Ethnic Origin | Population | Percent |
|---|
| English | 1,144,335 | 25.58% |
| Canadian | 939,460 | 24.28% |
| Scottish | 748,905 | 19.36% |
| Irish | 562,895 | 14.55% |
| German | 500,675 | 12.94% |
| Chinese | 373,830 | 9.66% |
| French | 331,535 | 8.57% |
| East Indian | 183,650 | 4.75% |
| Dutch | 180,635 | 4.67% |
| Ukrainian | 178,880 | 4.62% |
| North American Indian | 175,085 | 4.53% |
| Italian | 126,420 | 3.27% |
| Norwegian | 112,045 | 2.90% |
| Polish | 107,340 | 2.77% |
| Swedish | 89,630 | 2.32% |
| Welsh | 86,710 | 2.24% |
| Russian | 86,110 | 2.23% |
| Filipino | 69,345 | 1.79% |
| American | 59,075 | 1.53% |
| Danish | 49,685 | 1.28% |
| Métis | 45,455 | 1.17% |
| Hungarian | 43,515 | 1.12% |
- Source: Statistics Canada
British Columbia has a very diverse ethnic population, with a large number of immigrants having lived in the province for 30 years or less. Asians are by far the largest visible minority demographic, with many of the Lower Mainland's large cities having sizable
Chinese,
Japanese,
Filipino, and
Korean communities. The
East Indian population is also considerable, especially in
Surrey and South Vancouver.
Also present in large numbers relative to other cities in Canada , and ever since the province was first settled , are many European ethnicities of the first and second generation, notably Germans, Scandinavians, Yugoslavs and Italians; third-generation Europeans are generally of mixed lineage, and traditionally intermarried with Asian or other non-European ethnicities more than in any other Canadian province. First-generation Britons remain a strong component of local society despite limitations on immigration from Britain since the ending of special status for British subjects in the 1960s. It is the only province where "English" ethnicity gets more response than "Canadian". American ancestry is under reported, many Americans crossed into British Columbia during 19th century gold rushes and during political turmoil, such as the during the Vietnam War.
The percentages add to more than 100% because of dual responses Groups with greater than 40,000 responses are included.
- Further information: Statistics Canada. "British Columbia ethno-cultural profile"
Politics
The
Lieutenant Governor,
Iona Campagnolo, is the
Queen of Canada's representative in the Province of British Columbia. During the absence of the Lieutenant-Governor, the
federal Cabinet may appoint an Administrator to execute the duties of the office. In practice, this is usually the Chief Justice of British Columbia .
BC has a 79-member elected
Legislative Assembly, elected by the
plurality voting system, though in recent years there has been significant debate about switching to a "
mixed member" style system.
Currently, the province is governed by the
British Columbia Liberal Party under Premier
Gordon Campbell. Campbell won the largest landslide election in BC history in 2000 , but the legislature is more evenly divided between Liberals and members of the
social democratic New Democratic Party following the 2005 provincial election.
The British Columbia Liberal Party is unrelated to the federal Liberal Party and does not share its ideology. Instead, the BC Liberal party is a rather diverse coalition, made up of the remnants of the Social Credit Party, many federal Liberals, federal Conservatives, and those who would otherwise support right-of-centre or 'free enterprise' parties. Historically, there have commonly been third parties members present in the legislature, but there are presently none.
Prior to the rise of the Liberal Party, British Columbia's main right-of-centre political party was the
BC Social Credit Party which ruled BC for almost 40 continuous years.
BC is well-known for having very politically active labour
unions, who normally support the NDP.
Economy
British Columbia has a resource dominated economy. While employment in the resource sector has fallen steadily, unemployment is currently at a 30-year low of 4.5%. New jobs are mostly in the construction and retail/service sectors.
Transportation
History
Transportation played a major role in British Columbia history. The
Rocky Mountains and the ranges west of them constituted a significant obstacle to overland travel un
