British Columbia
The only good thing about British Columbia is that it's right next to Alberta.
This, my friends, is God's Country. Great weather, cool people, great skiing, sushi, golf year round, BC bud (of which 40% of Canada's bud is grown) ...if you can't be happy here, you can't be happy anywhere.
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[edit] Stereotypes
B.C. natives are generally assumed to smoke a lot of marijuana, eat a lot of granola, and complain about the state of the environment. This is only true in 98% of cases. Albertans are usually the worst stereotypers of B.C. natives.
In addition to these, the stereotypical British Columbian is depicted as Asian, gay, lefty, unemployed/employed by the government (sometimes both for some reason) or a combination thereof although usually by the most ardent of rednecks. On the plus side, British Columbians are often depicted as more educated than most other provinces.
[edit] Politics
Dusting aside the stereotypes reveals something of a bizarro-world for a this province. To start, the only parties in its Legislative Assembly are the Liberals, the NDP and a Green. For a good chunk of time, the province had been run by the more left-leaning provincial NDP (who are more inline with the federal party) with... well, mixed results. They were eventually undone by continued frustration from the public in handling labour disputes (teachers, nurses, etc.), a failed attempt to modernize infrastructure between the mainland and BC's coastal islands and numerous reports of "fudge-it budgets."
Eventually, the BC Liberals were able to capitalize on these issues and tapped into a loose coalition of moderates and anyone right of the NDP, which was mostly done through appealing to centrists - and it worked! Arguably, it still works to this day. That said, the Liberals are considered fairly right-wing by many B.C. natives[1] and have distanced themselves from the federal party. Southern onlookers might find that amusing. Perhaps less so after finding out that the B.C. Liberals cut taxes, cut social spending, privatized some government-owned businesses, deregulated industry, and generally shrank the economic role of the Province substantially. In short, the B.C. Liberals are Conservatives in sheep's clothing.
In their defense, Gordon Campbell's Libs did try to implement a higher (on paper) value added tax, which would have streamlined the GST and PST into one, visible tax that was applied to the final sale price of a given purchase (instead of being applied individually to items). Economists on all sides were all for it, but the public was confused at best. This decision to implement the HST eventually cost Campbell his job as premier and triggered a referendum on the issue.[2] Long story short, the HST was defeated and Christie Clark took the office as BC's premier. Under her leadership, BC now has the highest level of income inequality in the country.[3]
[edit] Cities
[edit] Vancouver
Western Canada's most famous city, Vancouver,[4] is found in B.C.; there was an Olympics or something there, and something to do with some hockey party that got violent. Nobody really expected that, but come on... it's Canada, we take hockey seriously. If there's one thing Vancouver has in excess, it's arguably nouveau riche snobs but to be fair, Victoria has a pretty large amount of those too. Arguably the city has more on account that it is bigger in every dimension.
[edit] Victoria
Victoria is the province's capitol city and arguably the second largest city in BC, following the trend for pretty much every province's capital city. Compared to Vancouver, it has a tenth of the population and Victorians really don't care that much about hockey, actually; basketball on the other hand...[5] For the longest time, Victoria was Canada's best kept secret, but then the word got out of this city that was like Vancouver, but nowhere near as crowded - then BAM! Everyone wanted to live there and property values soared. This doesn't help the fact that Victoria, unlike most other major metropolitan areas, isn't treated as one city but rather as thirteen smaller cities rubbing up against each other: each one has its own mayor, local emergency services and is responsible for its own infrastructure.[6] Amalgamating the municipalities into one less than thirteen has become something of a hot-button issue and demonstrated itself to be at least popular with the majority of Victorians.[7]
[edit] Other Cities
After that it's places nobody outside of Western Canada has heard of, like Kamloops, Kelowna, and Prince George. (B.C. should be thankful no one has ever heard of Prince George though) For this reason, nearly everyone outside B.C. believes that everyone from B.C. comes from Vancouver, and they are statistically usually correct.[8]
[edit] Climate and geography
Vancouver and the coast of B.C. is envied by much of Western Canada for it's mild winters. Of course, it has Noah's Flood rivalling rainfall and it's pretty close to a fault line. Also home to a (temperate) rainforest.
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ In particular due to their disregard for labour unions. Don't get us started.
- ↑ By the way, he tried to implement the HST in spite of his insistence that he wouldn't because MUH TAXES!
- ↑ Yes, we managed to outdo Alberta in one particular shitty stat.
- ↑ Sit down Calgary.
- ↑ It's nigh impossible to talk about basketball in Victoria without mentioning Steve Nash.
- ↑ If this sounds like a bad idea, it is.
- ↑ As you can see here, but note that per capita income of municipality citizens is largely inversely proportional to support for amalgamation. Wouldn't want ARE TAXDOLLARS going to them filthy poors!
- ↑ But then again, if you have a spine, chances are you're a fish.