British Columbia History, Facts, Map, & Flag

Its climate encourages outdoor recreation and tourism, though its economic mainstay has long been resource extraction, principally logging, farming, and mining. While these languages all reflect the last centuries of colonialism and recent immigration, British Columbia is home to 34 Indigenous languages. Of the 4,648,055 population counted by the 2016 census, 4,598,415 people completed the section about language.

The exception to British Columbia’s wet and cloudy winters is during the El Niño phase. Many areas of the province are often covered by a blanket of heavy cloud and low fog during the winter months, in contrast to abundant summer sunshine. Temperatures often exceed 40 °C (104 °F) in the lower elevations of valleys in the Interior during mid-summer, with the record high of 49.6 °C (121.3 °F) being held in Lytton on June 29, 2021, during a record-breaking heat wave that year. During winter on the coast, rainfall, sometimes relentless heavy rain, dominates because of consistent barrages of cyclonic low-pressure systems from the North Pacific.

• 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.
• This opened the way for formal claims and colonization by other powers, including Britain, but because of the Napoleonic Wars, there was little British action on its claims in the region until later.
• Major ports are at Vancouver, Roberts Bank (near Tsawwassen), Prince Rupert, and Victoria.
• Ferry service to Washington is offered by the Washington State Ferries (between Sidney and Anacortes) and Black Ball Transport (between Victoria and Port Angeles, Washington).

The high price of residential real estate has led to the implementation of an empty homes tax, a housing speculation and vacancy tax, and a foreign buyers’ tax on housing. Many experts point to evidence of money-laundering from China as a contributing factor. In the 2020 British Columbia general election, the NDP won 57 seats and formed a majority government. In the lead-up to the 2013 election, the Liberals lagged behind the NDP by a double-digit gap in the polls but were able to achieve a surprise victory, winning a majority and making Clark the first woman to lead a party to victory in BC.

Lesser rivers, such as the Skeena, Nass, Iskut, and Stikine, drain the northwestern region into the Pacific, while the Liard system drains the northeastern section into the Arctic Ocean. The vast territory of British Columbia lies almost entirely within the great mountain system, or cordillera, that stretches along the western edge of the Americas from north of the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn, at the southernmost extremity of South America. Vancouver, the province’s largest city, serves as the headquarters of many western-based natural resource companies. Though less than 5 percent of its vast 944,735 square kilometres (364,764 sq mi) land is arable, the province is agriculturally rich (particularly in the Fraser and Okanagan valleys), because of milder weather near the coast and in certain sheltered southern valleys.

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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.

Visible minorities and Indigenous peoples

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.

Ferry service over inland lakes and rivers is provided by the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure. Ferry service to Washington is offered by the Washington State Ferries (between Sidney and Anacortes) and Black Ball Transport (between Victoria and Port Angeles, Washington). It now operates 25 routes among the islands of British Columbia, as well as between the islands and the mainland.

In 1846, the Oregon Treaty divided the territory along the 49th parallel to the Strait of Georgia, with the area south of this boundary (excluding Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands) transferred to sole American sovereignty. 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 (within present day Washington and Oregon). Among the places in British Columbia that began as fur trading posts are Fort St. John (established 1794); Hudson’s Hope (1805); Fort Nelson (1805); Fort St. James (1806); Prince George (1807); Kamloops (1812); Fort Langley (1827); Fort Victoria (1843); Yale (1848); and Nanaimo (1853). This opened the way for formal claims and colonization by other powers, including Britain, but because of the Napoleonic Wars, there was little British action on its claims in the region until later. In 1793, 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 Dean Channel near Bella Coola. In doing so, Pérez and Quadra reasserted the Spanish claim for the Pacific coast, first made by Vasco Núñez de Balboa in 1513.

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