As rural areas decline, B.C. has become the most urban province in Canada
We think of ourselves as living in a province of forests and fish, mines and ranches, with towns and cities to match.
But we’re really city and suburban people surrounded by mostly empty mountains, according to the census snapshot from Statistics Canada.
B.C., which has broken the four-million mark in population, is the most urban province in the country, according to the 2006 census statistics released Tuesday.
Only 15 per cent of its population now lives in rural areas, and residents are draining steadily away from the former thriving resource towns of the northwestern B.C. and the central coast.
The province has grown by 5.3 per cent, thanks mainly to immigrants from outside Canada, since B.C. has the lowest birthrate in the country.
However, those immigrants, along with younger people from the declining northern towns, are going almost exclusively to B.C.’s growing urban regions, with places like Kelowna and Abbotsford among the fastest-growing cities in the country.
The result is that most of the people in this huge province are increasingly shoehorned into a few valleys along major highways: The Greater Vancouver region, which has now gone over the two-million mark, the Central Okanagan, and the Vancouver Island east coast from Victoria to Nanaimo.
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