Home Province of British Columbia

This opened up the North Coast and Bulkley Valley region BC Game to new economic opportunities. About 55,570 of the province’s 400,000 residents, the highest per-capita rate in Canada, responded to the military’s need. In World War I, the province responded strongly to the call to assist the British Empire against its German foes in French and Belgian battlefields. Establishing a labour force to develop the province was problematic, and British Columbia was a destination of immigration from Europe, China, Japan and India. This included expropriation from First Nations people of their land, control over its resources, as well as the ability to trade in some resources, such as fishing.

The Franco-Columbian community is an officially recognized linguistic minority, and around one percent of British Columbians claim French as their mother tongue. English is the common language of the province, although Punjabi, Mandarin Chinese, and Cantonese also have a large presence in the Metro Vancouver region. Christianity is the largest religion in the region, though the majority of the population is non-religious. British Columbia is Canada’s third-largest province in terms of total area, after Quebec and Ontario.

Employment, business and economic development

While the coast of British Columbia and some valleys in the south-central part of the province have mild weather, the majority of its land mass experiences a cold-winter-temperate climate similar to the rest of Canada. The five largest pan-ethnic groups in the province are Europeans (60 percent), East Asians (14 percent), South Asians (10 percent), Indigenous (6 percent) and Southeast Asians (5 percent). The interior south of the Thompson River watershed and north of the Columbia was organized into the Columbia District, administered from Fort Vancouver on the lower Columbia River. The bulk of the central and northern interior was organized into the New Caledonia district, administered from Fort St. James.

To the northwest of the province are the peoples of the Na-Dene languages, which include the Athapaskan-speaking peoples and the Tlingit, who live on the islands of southern Alaska and northern British Columbia. Atlin in the province’s far northwest, along with the adjoining Southern Lakes region of Yukon, get midwinter thaws caused by the Chinook effect, which is also common (and much warmer) in more southerly parts of the Interior. Most of the region is classified as oceanic, though pockets of warm-summer Mediterranean climate also exist in the far-southern parts of the coast. High mountain regions both north and south have subalpine flora and subalpine climate. The northern, mostly mountainous, two-thirds of the province is largely unpopulated and undeveloped, except for the area east of the Rockies, where the Peace River Country contains BC’s portion of the Canadian Prairies, centred at the city of Dawson Creek.

Building B.C.’s economy stronger

Nearly all travel and freight to and from the region occurred via the Pacific Ocean, primarily through the ports of Victoria and New Westminster. Campbell eventually resigned in late 2010 due to opposition to his government’s plan to introduce a Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) and was replaced by Christy Clark as premier in the 2011 BC Liberal leadership election. Prior to the rise of the Liberal Party, British Columbia’s main political party was the BC Social Credit Party, which governed the province for 20 years. In 2022, Kevin Falcon was elected leader of the BC Liberals, promising to rename the party in an effort to distance themselves from their federal counterparts. 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. The NDP and its predecessor the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) have been the main opposition force to right-wing parties since the 1930s and have governed with majority governments in 1972–1975, 1991–2001 and since 2020 (with a minority government from 2017 to 2020).

• Preparedness guides and community resources are available to help you prepare for potential emergencies.
• The two major ranges are the Coast Mountains, which lie in the western part of the province, and the Canadian portion of the Rocky Mountains in the eastern part.
• Coastal southern British Columbia has a mild and rainy climate influenced by the North Pacific Current.
• The above outline map represents the Province of British Columbia, located in the extreme southwestern part of Canada.

While sharing some ideology with the subsequent Liberal government, they were more right-wing, although they undertook nationalization of various important monopolies, notably BC Hydro and BC Ferries. Historically, there have commonly been third parties present in the legislature (including the Liberals themselves from 1952 to 1975); the BC Green Party is the current third party in British Columbia, with three seats in the legislature. Following the election, the Greens entered into negotiations with both the Liberals and NDP, eventually announcing they would support an NDP minority government. The province is currently governed by the British Columbia New Democratic Party (BC NDP) under Premier David Eby. British Columbia is divided into regional districts as a means to better enable municipalities and rural areas to work together at a regional level.

British Columbia is a diverse and cosmopolitan province, drawing on a plethora of cultural influences from its diasporas of British, European, and Asian Canadians, as well as the Indigenous population. In 1871, British Columbia entered Confederation as the sixth province of Canada, in enactment of the British Columbia Terms of Union. One of the earliest British settlements in the area was Fort Victoria, established in 1843, which gave rise to the city of Victoria, the capital of the Colony of Vancouver Island. With an estimated population of 5.68 million as of 2025, it is Canada’s third-most populous province.

Previously, the right-of-centre British Columbia Liberal Party governed the province for 16 years between 2001 and 2017, and won the largest landslide election in British Columbia history in 2001, with 77 of 79 seats. The government of the day appoints ministers for various portfolios, what are officially part of the Executive Council, of whom the province’s premier is chair. British Columbia’s debt-to-GDP ratio is edging up to 15.0 percent in fiscal year 2019–20, and it is expected to reach 16.1 percent by 2021–22. With its film industry known as Hollywood North, the Vancouver region is the third-largest feature film production location in North America, after Los Angeles and New York City. The largest section of this employment is in finance, insurance, real estate and corporate management; however, many areas outside of metropolitan areas are still heavily reliant on resource extraction.