BC, AD, CE, and BCE: Meanings and Differences Explained

Vancouver Island, the largest island in the province, lies off the southwest coast and is home to the vibrant city of Victoria, the provincial capital. These mountains divide the province in ranges aligned in a northwest-southeast direction, creating a series of valleys and a broad central interior plateau where human settlement has concentrated. The province’s topography features several mountain ranges, including the Canadian Rockies in the east, the Columbia Mountains in the southeast, and the Coast Mountains along the western coastline. In the interior many of the wide plateaus are cut by deep canyons and entirely surrounded by mountain ranges, including the Cassiar, Omineca, Skeena, and Hazelton mountains in the north and the Columbia Mountains in the southeast.

Several heritage railways operate within the province, including the White Pass and Yukon Route that runs between Alaska and the Yukon via British Columbia. Amtrak runs international passenger service between Vancouver, Seattle, and intermediate points. The British Columbia Electric Railway provided rail services in Victoria and Vancouver between the nineteenth century and mid twentieth century. Two major routes through the Yellowhead Pass competed with the Canadian Pacific Railway – the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, terminating at Prince Rupert, and the Canadian Northern Railway, terminating at Vancouver.

Small towns in the southern interior with high elevation such as Princeton are typically colder and snowier than cities in the valleys. Precipitation averages above 1,000 millimetres (39 in) in almost all of the coastal region, and Hucuktlis Lake on Vancouver Island receives an average of 6,903 mm (271.8 in) of rain annually. Because of the many mountain ranges and rugged coastline, British Columbia’s climate varies dramatically across the province.

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Roads and highways

• Many experts point to evidence of money-laundering from China as a contributing factor.
• In 2020, 86 percent of students in British Columbia graduated from high school within six years of entering grade 8.
• Public institutions receive approximately half of their funding from grants from the provincial government, with the remaining revenue stemming from tuition charges and philanthropic donations.
• Situated in the Pacific Northwest between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains, the province has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, forests, lakes, mountains, inland deserts, and grassy plains.

British Columbia has a history of being a resource dominated economy, centred on the forestry industry but also with fluctuating importance in mining. 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.

Visible minorities and Indigenous peoples

Employment in the resource sector has fallen steadily as a percentage of employment, and new jobs are mostly in the construction and retail/service sectors. BC’s economy is diverse, with service-producing industries accounting for the largest portion of the province’s GDP. In 2021, 34.4 percent of the population consisted of visible minorities and 5.9 percent of the population was Indigenous, mostly of First Nations and Métis descent.

In its second term especially, the NDP government faced political scandals, such as the fast ferry scandal, that ultimately contributed to its downfall. The completion of the Port of Vancouver spurred rapid growth, and in less than fifty years the city surpassed Winnipeg, Manitoba, as the largest in Western Canada. The completion of the railway in 1885 contributed to the economy, facilitating the transportation of the region’s considerable resources to the east. With the agreement by the Canadian government to extend the Canadian Pacific Railway to British Columbia and assume the colony’s debt, British Columbia became the sixth province to join Confederation on July 20, 1871. New Caledonia, as the whole of the mainland rather than just its north-central Interior came to be called, continued to be an unorganized territory of British North America, “administered” by individual HBC trading post managers. Until 1849, these districts were a wholly unorganized area of British North America under the de facto jurisdiction of HBC administrators; however, unlike Rupert’s Land to the north and east, the territory was not a concession to the company.

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.

Rail development expanded greatly in the decades after the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed, in 1885, and was the chief mode of long-distance surface transportation until the expansion and improvement of the provincial highways system began in the 1950s. A new extension to Coquitlam and Port Moody (the Evergreen Extension of the Millennium Line) was completed in December 2016. In 2009, the Canada Line SkyTrain was completed, bc game APK linking Vancouver International Airport and the city of Richmond to downtown Vancouver bringing the total to three operating metro lines.