Siwash Rock in Vancouver’s Stanley Park
Canada is the world’s second largest country, covering an immense area of 3,855,230 square miles (nearly 10 million square kilometers). Canadian land stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic, and shares its long southern boundary, along the 49th parallel, with the United States.
Bordering the Pacific Ocean, British Columbia is the country’s westernmost province and its third largest geographically, after Ontario and Quebec; it’s about the size of Germany, France, and the Netherlands combined. To the south are the U.S. states of Washington, Idaho, and Montana; to the north are the Yukon and Alaska. More than 60 percent of B.C.’s population is clustered in the province’s southwest corner, in and around the city of Vancouver, in the region known as the Lower Mainland.
Siwash Rock in Vancouver’s Stanley Park
Vancouver is known for its dramatic natural setting, perched between the mountains and the sea. Water surrounds the downtown peninsula, where three bridges cross False Creek, connecting the city center to the rest of the metropolitan area. Two more bridges take you over the Burrard Inlet to the city’s North Shore, where several mountains dominate the landscape, with three local ski areas and numerous parks. Continuing north, along the strikingly beautiful Sea-to-Sky Highway, you’ll reach Whistler, North America’s largest winter resort and a year-round outdoor playground; it’s a two-hour drive from downtown Vancouver.
Vancouver is a particularly green city, not only for its environmental policies, but also for its rainforest setting, with tall trees dominating the region. Douglas fir, western cedar, Sitka spruce, and hemlock all grow in B.C.’s coastal regions, and many of these giants are the tallest in Canada. Even within the city of Vancouver, you can wander through the forests in Stanley Park, on the end of the downtown peninsula, and in Pacific Spirit Regional Park, near the University of British Columbia campus.
If you travel inland from Vancouver, into the province’s vast interior, you’ll cross several mountain ranges. The Coast Mountains, which extend from Washington State to the Yukon, rise to more than 9,800 feet (3,000 meters) in their southern sections. Driving over these mountains, you leave behind the coastal rainforests and descend into a sunnier, drier region known as the Okanagan. Located along a string of scenic lakes, this agricultural valley has become B.C.’s major wine-producing area and a popular holiday destination. It’s also home to Canada’s only desert.
Continuing east through southern British Columbia, you’ll cross the Columbia Mountains in B.C.’s Kootenay region, and then nearing the provincial border with Alberta, you’ll reach the Canadian Rockies. British Columbia has four beautiful national parks—Mount Revelstoke, Glacier, Kootenay, and Yoho—in this mountain region.
Vancouver Island is west of the city of Vancouver, across the Strait of Georgia. It’s a big island, measuring 285 miles (460 kilometers) from north to south; from east to west, it’s between 30 and 75 miles (50 to 120 kilometers) across. British Columbia’s capital city of Victoria is located on the southeast tip of Vancouver Island, a 90-minute ferry ride or 35-minute flight from mainland British Columbia.
A spine of mountains, including several approaching 7,000 feet (2,100 meters), runs along the center of Vancouver Island. Winding your way between these peaks will take you to the island’s western shore, with lovely sandy beaches in the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve and in the nearby communities of Tofino and Ucluelet.
Because coastal British Columbia sits near the edge of two tectonic plates, the large North American plate and the smaller Juan de Fuca plate, it’s located in an earthquake zone. Small earthquakes do occur with some regularity across the region, although few have been felt in the metropolitan areas; the last major earthquake shook the area back in 1700. However, researchers say that there’s a 25 percent chance of another significant quake occurring in the next 50 years.
Unlike the rest of Canada, coastal British Columbia has a temperate climate. In fact, Victoria has the mildest climate of any Canadian city. The weather in Vancouver and Victoria is similar, although Victoria is normally a degree or two warmer and slightly drier.
In both Vancouver and Victoria, summers are sunny and mild, with daytime temperatures in July and August averaging 68-75°F (20-25°C). In January, the coldest month, expect average temperatures during the day of 41-43°F (5-6°C), dipping close to the freezing level at night. From November through March, it’s not terribly cold, but it is rainy, frequently cloudy, and gray. While it can snow in the cities, it’s relatively rare, and snow doesn’t typically stick around for more than a couple of days. When it’s raining in Vancouver, it’s often snowing in the North Shore mountains and in Whistler.
Spring comes early to coastal B.C., with flowers beginning to bloom in late February or early March. By April, Vancouver’s cherry trees blanket the city streets with their pink blossoms. It can still rain in the spring, but showers are shorter and temperatures milder than during the winter months. Early autumn (September and October) is another moderate season with comfortable temperatures and less frequent rain.
The region’s numerous microclimates can cause surprising variations in weather, even across short distances. The North Shore, where it snows regularly at higher elevations, receives far more rain than downtown Vancouver. In contrast, it rains noticeably less in the suburb of Richmond, where Vancouver International Airport is located, than on the downtown peninsula. Within the city itself, there are variations, too. It can be snowing in Vancouver’s Point Grey neighborhood or near Queen Elizabeth Park, when at lower elevations just down the hill, in Kitsilano, along False Creek, or downtown, it’s raining.
Vancouver is a green city, with parks throughout the metropolitan region, citywide recycling initiatives, and programs to encourage everything from environmentally friendly construction to car sharing. Farmers markets are helping to provide better access to locally grown food, though most operate only from May through October. The city is in the midst of a major initiative to make Vancouver even more bicycle-friendly; a bike-sharing program launched in the downtown core in 2016, and the city continues to build bike lanes on many urban streets.
As residential and commercial towers sprout up throughout metropolitan Vancouver, development has become a major issue. Recent city governments have worked to increase urban density—building up, rather than out—to try to reduce the environmental impact of commuting from the suburbs and, at least in theory, enable more people to live in the central city. In many districts, historic homes and other structures are being razed to make room for more expensive towers, and neighborhoods are changing in character as they become more densely populated.
Aboriginal people have lived in western Canada for more than 10,000 years. The southwestern corner of British Columbia, where Vancouver is located, is the traditional territory of several aboriginal groups, collectively known as the Coast Salish. Coast Salish territory extends across the Strait of Georgia to Vancouver Island, which is also home to the Nuu-chah-nulth and the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples.
The west coast’s natural resources defined the early life of Canada’s coastal people. Much of their food came from the sea, where salmon, crab, and other species were abundant. They used the region’s large trees, particularly the western red cedar, to construct their homes and longhouses, to carve oceangoing dugout canoes, and to craft massive totem poles, which commemorated the events, histories, and people of these native communities. Although totems have come to be a symbol of many aboriginal peoples, only six west coast First Nations originally carved the poles.
The earliest European explorers to reach North America’s west coast were the Spanish, who traveled north from Mexico as early as the 1540s. However, it wasn’t until the 1700s that extensive exploration of the region got underway, when Spanish, Russian, French, and British ships all traveled along the coast of what is now British Columbia.
The British left the most lasting legacies, beginning with an expedition in the 1770s that British explorer James Cook captained. Cook became the first non-aboriginal person to set foot in what is now British Columbia, when he landed on Vancouver Island’s west coast in 1778. Cook’s crew included a young sailor named George Vancouver, who had joined the Royal Navy in 1772 when he was just 13 years old.
In 1792, George Vancouver returned to the region as captain of another Pacific Northwest expedition, charged with mapping the coastal areas and negotiating with the Spanish. The mainland beach where Captain Vancouver met with two Spanish captains is known today as Spanish Banks.
In the early 1800s, explorers and fur traders traveled westward across North America. Explorer Simon Fraser, who came from eastern Canada, reached the Pacific after following the river that today bears his name. The Hudson’s Bay Company established the first permanent European settlement in the Lower Mainland in 1827 at Fort Langley, east of present-day Vancouver. In 1843, the company set up a trading post on Vancouver Island, naming it Fort Victoria. That post, on the island’s southeastern point, would become the city of Victoria.
In 1858, nine years after the start of the California gold rush in the United States, miners found gold along British Columbia’s Fraser River. Thousands of miners traveled from eastern Canada and from the United States to seek their fortunes. Many Chinese, too, joined the search for gold, coming either from California or directly from China, triggering a major wave of immigration.
Although the gold rush didn’t last long, many of these settlers remained in B.C. and found work in the emerging fishing and lumber industries, businesses that would remain the backbone of the province’s economy for years to come.
After two small sawmills began operation in the 1860s along the Burrard Inlet, the entrepreneurial Captain John Deighton opened a nearby saloon to quench the millworkers’ thirst. Although the district where the saloon was located had officially been named “Granville,” Deighton’s nickname, “Gassy Jack”—for his habit of telling tall tales—gave the area its more enduring name: Gastown.
A milestone year in Canadian history is 1867, when the British Parliament passed the British North America Act, creating the Dominion of Canada as a stand-alone nation, independent of Great Britain. Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick became the country’s first four provinces, joining together at Confederation on July 1, 1867. Canadians celebrate Confederation annually on July 1, now the Canada Day holiday.
British Columbia joined the Canadian Confederation in 1871 (following Manitoba and the Northwest Territories, which came on board in 1870). B.C.’s government signed up with the expectation that the cross-country railroad, under construction to link the east and west, would be completed. It took nearly 15 more years, including a major influx of workers from China, but the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) officially finished the 3,100-mile (5,000-kilometer) transcontinental railroad in 1885, when workers drove in the last spike at Craigellachie, B.C., in the mountains west of the town of Revelstoke.
The railway opened up the west to rapid settlement and drew large numbers of migrants from eastern Canada, the United States, and Europe, especially from Italy, the Ukraine, Poland, Germany, and Hungary. Chinese immigration continued, and small numbers of Japanese began arriving in British Columbia around the same time, many of whom found work along the coast in the fishing industry on boats or in canneries.
At that point, the western terminus of the rail line reached only as far as Port Moody, on the Burrard Inlet 12 miles (20 kilometers) east of Vancouver. The CPR’s decision to extend the railroad to the fledging settlement then known as Granville fueled Vancouver’s development. Named for the British explorer, the city of Vancouver was officially incorporated in 1886, and the first transcontinental passenger train rolled into town in 1887.
Migrants continued settling in B.C. throughout the early 1900s. The University of British Columbia was established in 1908 and by the 1920s, Vancouver had become the third largest city in Canada, a position it retains today.
Canada didn’t always welcome these immigrants, however. Despite the Chinese role in constructing the railroads, the federal government attempted to restrict further immigration from China. They imposed a “head tax” on every Chinese newcomer. In 1885, the tax was $50; by 1903, it had been raised to $500. In 1923, the Canadian Parliament passed the Chinese Immigration Act, an exclusionary measure that effectively prevented Chinese immigrants from entering Canada. The act was finally repealed in 1947 after World War II.
During the Second World War, more than a million Canadians fought for the Allies, joining the United States, Britain, France, and Australia among the nations who battled the Axis coalition of Germany, Italy, and Japan.
At home, anti-Asian sentiment began to rise after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, particularly in British Columbia, which by this time had a well-established Japanese Canadian population, most of whom lived in and around Vancouver. In January 1942, the B.C. government established a 100-mile (160-kilometer) “security zone” between the Pacific Ocean and the Coast Mountains, extending south to the U.S. border and north to the Yukon. They decreed that all male Japanese Canadians between the ages of 18 and 45 were prohibited from living in the area; they were separated from their families and sent to relocation camps in B.C.’s remote interior regions.
Less than two months later, the government extended the prohibition to all people of Japanese origin and began relocating women, children, and seniors. Overall, more than 22,000 people of Japanese heritage, three-quarters of whom were Canadian citizens, were forcibly relocated, and their land and other property were confiscated. Many spent the war years in these rustic internment camps in British Columbia’s Kootenay and eastern mountain regions.
After the war, most of the interned Japanese Canadians were given the choice of moving east of the Rockies or returning to Japan. The majority opted to relocate again, settling in the prairies or farther east in Ontario, although several thousand were sent to Japan. The Japanese were forbidden to return to the B.C. coast until 1949.
Another dark period in Canada’s history began in the 1880s, when the Canadian government began establishing residential schools for aboriginal children. Native students were required to attend these church-run boarding schools, where children were removed from their families. The schools’ objective was to assimilate aboriginal youth into mainstream Canadian culture. In 1920, Parliament passed the Indian Act, which made it illegal for native children to attend any educational institution other than a residential school.
While some students’ experiences at the schools were positive, the vast majority suffered through poor education, inadequate food, isolation from their families and culture, and in some cases, physical or sexual abuse. The last residential schools closed, or were turned over to aboriginal communities to operate, in the 1980s. However, the schools’ negative legacy continues to affect many aboriginal people today, with high rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence, and suicide plaguing many communities.
Canada’s Assembly of First Nations filed a class action lawsuit against the Canadian government in 2005 for the ongoing trauma that the residential school system had caused. When the suit was settled, and both the federal government and the churches agreed to pay compensation to survivors of the schools, the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement became the largest class action settlement in Canadian history. In 2008, Canada’s House of Commons publicly apologized for the government’s role in creating and maintaining the residential school system.
In recent years, several events triggered significant changes in and around Vancouver.
In 1986, Vancouver marked its centennial, hosting Expo ’86, a World’s Fair that focused on developments in transportation and communications. This international exposition took place on a formerly derelict site along False Creek that had been redeveloped to house more than 50 pavilions. Britain’s Prince Charles and Princess Diana were among the first visitors, and more than 22 million people visited Expo ’86 during its six-month run, with tourists continuing to arrive long after the event officially closed. Vancouver built the city’s first SkyTrain line in anticipation of the Expo, and many other city landmarks, including Canada Place, Science World, B.C. Place, and the Cambie Bridge, were constructed during this era.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, thousands of Hong Kong residents immigrated to Canada, and a large percentage settled in British Columbia. Many were afraid of how their country might change when the United Kingdom handed over Hong Kong to the Chinese government in 1997. This wave of immigration was the first of several that significantly increased Vancouver’s Asian population; many more immigrants arrived from Taiwan and mainland China, beginning in the 1990s and continuing through the present day.
In 2010, Vancouver hosted the Olympic Winter Games, which again turned the world’s attention to the region. The Olympics’ legacy included a new subway line connecting the airport and downtown, as well as the candelabra-like Olympic Cauldron, which has become a waterfront landmark. The residential buildings along False Creek where athletes lived during the Games formed the basis for a new neighborhood, known as the Olympic Village.
Canada is divided into 10 provinces and three territories. The country has a three-tiered governmental structure, with federal, provincial (or territorial), and municipal governments.
Headquartered in Ottawa, the nation’s capital, the federal government is responsible for foreign policy, defense, immigration, and other national issues. Since the country is a constitutional monarchy with roots in the British Commonwealth, Canada’s official head of state is the monarch of the United Kingdom. However, the king or queen’s role in Canada is largely symbolic; the prime minister is the country’s chief executive.
Parliament, the national legislature, has two bodies: the elected 338-member House of Commons and the appointed 105-member Senate. The major political parties, to which the House of Commons members belong, include the Liberal Party, Conservative Party, New Democratic Party (NDP), Bloc Québécois, and Green Party. Justin Trudeau, who was elected prime minister in 2015, is the leader of the Liberal Party.
By law, federal elections must now be held at least every four years. In practice, the ruling government has the power to call an election at any time. In addition, if the current government loses a confidence vote in the House of Commons, that vote brings down the government and triggers a new election. Canada’s shortest Parliament session lasted just 66 days (in 1979) before the government was brought down. The longest-serving government, from 1911 through 1917, held power for 2,152 days.
The provincial governments handle health care, education, policing, and highways, among other things. The governmental structure at the provincial level parallels that of the federal government. The head of each provincial government is the premier, a position analogous to a U.S. state governor. Each province and territory has its own legislature.
Although Vancouver is British Columbia’s largest city, Victoria is the provincial capital. B.C.’s Legislative Assembly meets in the 1897 provincial Parliament Building, overlooking Victoria’s Inner Harbour. The 85 provincial representatives are known as MLAs, members of the legislative assembly. In recent years, two parties have dominated provincial politics in B.C.: the Liberals and the NDP.
Local issues, such as zoning, city police and firefighting, snow removal, garbage, and recycling, are the municipal governments’ purview. The local governments in Vancouver, Victoria, and other B.C. cities are each led by a mayor, who works with the local city council to determine local policy and regulations.
Service industries dominate the economies of Vancouver and Victoria. Tourism, including hotels, restaurants, and all sorts of recreation-focused businesses, is a significant pillar of the economy, as are health care, education, financial services, trade (particularly with Pacific Rim countries), and, increasingly, technology. Due to recent changes in liquor laws, numerous craft breweries have opened in both cities.
A construction boom in both Vancouver and Victoria has kept job growth high in this industry. Outside the urban areas, other industries that contribute significantly to B.C.’s economy include agriculture, forestry (about 60 percent of the province’s land is forested), mining, oil and gas extraction, and fishing.
Poverty, drug use, and homelessness are very visible issues on the streets of Vancouver (and to a lesser extent, in Victoria). It’s common to see people sleeping in parks, hanging out on the sidewalks, or pushing their possessions in a shopping cart across Vancouver, especially in Gastown, Chinatown, and the east side of downtown. The extent of the problem can surprise visitors, particularly because you’ll see people living on the streets, even when those streets are lined with cool restaurants and stylish shops.
While the Vancouver city government has been working on programs to reduce homelessness and increase the availability of affordable housing, those programs have not yet been particularly successful, in part because Vancouver continues to be Canada’s most expensive housing market. In early 2017, the average purchase price of a single-family detached home was over a million dollars, and buying even a one-bedroom condo would set you back over $500,000.
Rental prices have been rising steadily, too. In 2016, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reported that the average monthly rent in the city of Vancouver was $1,268 for a one-bedroom apartment and $1,757 for a two-bedroom unit. If you want to live downtown, you’d pay an average of $1,425 for a one-bedroom and $2,167 for a two-bedroom place.
Stretching over a vast landmass, Canada has a population of 36 million (as of 2016). By contrast, the United States, its geographically smaller neighbor to the south, is almost 10 times larger in population, with more than 320 million inhabitants. Nearly three-quarters of all Canadians live within 100 miles (160 kilometers) of the U.S. border.
With 4.7 million residents, British Columbia is Canada’s third most populous province, after Ontario (nearly 14 million) and Quebec (8.3 million).
Vancouver is Canada’s third largest city, after Toronto and Montreal, and has approximately 2.5 million residents in the metropolitan region. Victoria is the second largest city in B.C., but with 365,000 people, it’s significantly smaller than metro Vancouver.
Canada’s major cities, including Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, are among the most multicultural on the planet. Nationwide, more than 20 percent of Canada’s population was born outside of the country, but that figure is much higher in urban areas; in Vancouver, 40 percent of residents were born outside Canada. Though the majority of Canadians have their origins in Europe, more than half of the country’s recent immigrants have come from Asia, with significant numbers arriving from the Philippines, China, and India. Other major immigrant populations include those coming from the United States, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Iran, South Korea, Colombia, and Mexico.
In Vancouver, 70 percent of the region’s recent immigrants have arrived from Asia, and overall, more than 40 percent of the population is of Asian descent, including a mix of people born in Canada and those born abroad. It’s often called the most Asian major city outside of Asia, and you’ll find Asian influences in everything from art and fashion to urban design and food.
While Victoria is becoming increasingly diverse, it’s still a far more homogenous community than Vancouver. The majority of the city’s citizens trace their roots to the United Kingdom and western Europe; 11 percent of Victoria’s population is Asian.
Canada has three officially recognized aboriginal groups: the First Nations, the Inuit, and the Métis. The Inuit people live primarily in Canada’s far north, while the Métis—descendants of French settlers and their First Nations spouses—have historically settled in the prairies and the west. First Nations, the largest indigenous group, is the term for aboriginal people who are neither Inuit nor Métis.
In British Columbia today, approximately 5 percent of the population is of aboriginal heritage. Two-thirds are First Nations, representing 200 different communities; most of the rest are Métis.
Of these indigenous people, one in four lives in the Lower Mainland in and around Vancouver, where the largest of the 11 First Nations are the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh. Many public events in Vancouver now begin with a statement acknowledging that they’re taking place on the traditional territory of these native communities.
Across the Strait of Georgia, Vancouver Island is home to 53 different First Nations, including the Esquimalt and Songhees near Victoria, the Saanich First Nations on the peninsula of the same name north of Victoria, and B.C.’s largest First Nation, the Cowichan, whose territory includes the present-day Cowichan Valley outside of Victoria.
Ever since European explorers first landed on Canada’s shores, both English- and French-speaking colonists settled the country. As a result, Canada has two official languages: English and French. That means that any official federal government communications, from tax forms to airport signs to national park brochures, must be produced in both English and French, and products sold in Canada must contain information on their packaging in both languages.
The province of Quebec is Canada’s major francophone region, and there are numerous French-speaking communities in other parts of the country. In British Columbia, although many people can speak some French and kids study the language in school, only about 70,000 people, or 1.5 percent of the population, have French as their mother tongue. In fact, you’re more likely to hear Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, or Punjabi on the streets of Vancouver than you are to hear people speaking French.
Christianity is the major religion in Canada. Nearly 40 percent of Canadians are Catholic, and about a quarter are Protestant. Conversely, recent census figures indicate that nearly 25 percent of Canadians claim no religious affiliation at all.
Canada’s largest non-Christian religious group is Muslim, representing about 3 percent of the population nationwide. Other major religious groups in Canada include Hindus (1.5 percent of the population), Sikhs (1.4 percent), Buddhists (1.1 percent), and Jews (1 percent).
In British Columbia, these numbers differ somewhat from the nation’s population overall. About 45 percent of B.C.’s residents are Christians, and more than 40 percent say that they have no religious affiliation. Five percent are Sikhs, 2 percent Buddhists, just under 2 percent Muslims, 1 percent Hindus, and less than 1 percent Jews.
Though she’s more often associated with Ontario, where she was born (in 1931) and has lived much of her life, Canadian short-story writer and novelist Alice Munro spent the 1950s and ’60s in Vancouver and Victoria. She and her then-husband Jim opened Munro’s Books in Victoria in 1963, a classic bookstore that’s still operating today. Her many books include The Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), The View From Castle Rock (2006), and Dear Life (2012). Munro became the first Canadian woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, when she received the award in 2013.
Many British Columbia authors have written about the region’s Asian communities in both fiction and memoir. In his novel, The Jade Peony (1995), Wayson Choy, who was born in Vancouver in 1939, paints a portrait of life in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the first half of the 20th century. He continued to explore similar themes in a follow-up work of fiction, All That Matters, and in his memoir, Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood.
In her novel, Obasan, Vancouver-born Joy Kogawa writes about the forced relocation and internment of Japanese Canadians in western Canada during World War II, depicted through the eyes of a young Vancouver girl. It’s based on her own experiences; Kogawa and her family were required to leave Vancouver and sent to Slocan, B.C., during the war.
Other contemporary B.C. writers include novelist and artist Douglas Coupland, who popularized the term for an entire generation with his 1991 novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture; fiction writer Caroline Adderson, who has set several of her novels, including The Sky Is Falling (2010), in and around Vancouver; and CBC radio and podcast host Grant Lawrence, who published the humorous B.C.-based Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound in 2010.
The visual artist whose work is perhaps most closely associated with British Columbia is the Victoria-born painter Emily Carr (1871-1945), known for her paintings of B.C.’s landscape and its indigenous people. Unusually for a woman of her time, Carr traveled—on her own—to Haida Gwaii and other remote northern communities, where she painted scenes of First Nations’ life. You can see Carr’s work at the Vancouver Art Gallery (www.vanartgallery.bc.ca) and at Whistler’s Audain Art Museum (www.audainartmuseum.com).
While Carr had no aboriginal heritage herself, another well-known B.C. artist came from mixed European and First Nations ancestry. Bill Reid (1920-1998) created more than 1,500 sculptures, carvings, and other works, most of which explore the traditions of the Haida First Nation, to which his mother belonged. Vancouver’s Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art (www.billreidgallery.ca) is dedicated to Reid’s work; you can also see his massive sculptures in the Vancouver International Airport and at the Museum of Anthropology (http://moa.ubc.ca) on the University of British Columbia campus.
Painter and naturalist Robert Bateman captured scenes of B.C.’s landscapes and wildlife, which you can view at the Robert Bateman Centre (http://batemancentre.org) in Victoria. In the 1950s and ’60s, photographer Fred Herzog focused his lens on wildlife of a different sort, taking photos of Vancouver’s downtown streets.
The city of Vancouver has a significant public art program that places art around the city. Look for works like A-maze-ing Laughter, opposite English Bay in the West End, by Beijing-based contemporary artist Yue Minjun, and The Birds, two 18-foot-tall (5.5-meter) sculptures in the Olympic Village, by Vancouver’s Myfanwy MacLeod. Find a directory of local public art on the City of Vancouver’s website (http://vancouver.ca).
Many musicians and performers with British Columbia connections have gone on to wider acclaim.
Though born in Ontario, rock singer-songwriter Bryan Adams launched his early career in Vancouver. Canadian crooner Michael Bublé was born and raised in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby and still maintains homes in the area. Tegan and Sara, the powerhouse musical duo (and identical twins), reside at least part time in Vancouver.
Singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan, who founded the Lilith Fair tours highlighting women musicians, established the Sarah McLachlan School of Music in Vancouver, which provides free music instruction to local at-risk youth.
Singer Nelly Furtado was born in Victoria, and jazz artist Diana Krall, who’s married to fellow musician Elvis Costello, also has island roots; she hails from the city of Nanaimo.
Vancouver and Toronto vie for the title of Hollywood North, since both cities are popular filming locations for movies and TV series.
Recent movies shot in or around Vancouver include Deadpool (2015), starring Vancouver native Ryan Reynolds; Tomorrowland (2015), with George Clooney; 50 Shades of Grey (2014), based on the popular book of the same name; and Big Eyes (2014), directed by Tim Burton and starring Amy Adams.
Although the number of movies being made in Canada rises and falls with the relative strength of the U.S. and Canadian dollars (when the Canadian dollar is weaker compared to the U.S. currency, it’s cheaper to make films north of the border), it’s not unusual to stumble upon a film set as you wander around Vancouver. To increase your chances of spotting a celebrity when you’re in town, check the Creative BC website (www.creativebc.com), which lists movies and TV shows currently filming in British Columbia.
What should you eat in Vancouver? As in any major North American city, Vancouver restaurants span the globe, serving meals that take cues from Italy, France, Spain, China, Japan, and more.
Vancouver is known for seafood, particularly salmon, halibut, oysters, and spot prawns, caught in regional waters. The city’s restaurants have embraced the eat local movement, so look for seasonal produce and locally raised meats. With a large Asian population, Vancouver has some of the best Chinese food in North America, as well as good Japanese and Korean fare, and many non-Asian restaurants incorporate Pacific Rim influences in their dishes.
British Columbia wines, from the Okanagan Valley or Vancouver Island, are good accompaniments to most Vancouver meals, as are regionally brewed craft beers. Plenty of bartenders have adopted a “drink local” philosophy, too, incorporating locally grown herbs, house-made bitters, and other fresh ingredients into creative cocktails and alcohol-free drinks.