Boundary-Similkameen.
3 candidates, one seat.

The Okanagan Nation Alliance describes the Syilx Okanagan Nation as a group of member communities in British Columbia and in Washington State. Two of them are in this district. The Osoyoos Indian Band lies in the southern Okanagan Valley between Oliver and Osoyoos and has a land base of 13,045 hectares. The Lower Similkameen Indian Band is a small community in the Similkameen Valley. The Alliance says it manages 15,276.4 hectares in 11 reserves, divided into pockets of land that stretch over 90 kilometres. The Upper Similkameen Indian Band has its head office in Hedley. Its website says that its Sməlqmixʷ People have lived throughout the valley from the earliest times, according to its oral history, names its language nsyilxcən, and counts a membership of more than 300.

The Osoyoos Indian Band says on its website that the Okanagan Nation's traditional territory once spanned 69,000 square kilometres between present-day British Columbia and Washington State. It says the band's area of leadership and business responsibility extends from the South Okanagan into the Boundary and Kootenay regions. The Upper Similkameen Indian Band says ochre was traded for thousands of years across western North America, as far south as the Navajo and as far east as the Blackfoot. BC Geographical Names records an outcropping of red ochre on the banks of the Tulameen River near Princeton, prized by Indigenous peoples for face paint, which gave the settlement there its early names Vermilion Forks and Red Earth Forks.

Fur traders reached the south of the district first. The Canadian Encyclopedia says Hudson's Bay Company brigades travelled through the Osoyoos area between 1812 and 1848, and that a customs house was set up at the narrows in 1865. John Carmichael Haynes, the customs collector and justice of the peace, settled there and built up a holding of 8,900 hectares for ranching. The same article dates the first commercial orchard nearby to 1890. BC Geographical Names records that the name Osoyoos Lake appears on maps by Trutch in 1866 and 1871, and that the word comes from an Indigenous language and has several meanings, among them 'where two lakes come together'.

In the Similkameen Valley, BC Geographical Names records that the Hudson's Bay Company set up a trading post at Keremeos in 1860, after Fort Okanogan closed, and kept it until 1872. The Keremeos post office opened on 1 August 1887. Barrington Price built a water-powered grist mill beside Keremeos Creek in 1877. The Canadian Register of Historic Places calls it the last surviving pioneer flour mill in British Columbia with its historic machinery still in working condition, and records that the province designated it a heritage site on 19 November 1974. The same office records that Alexander Ross wrote of the 'Samilkameigh River' after his 1812 visit to the Kamloops area. Governor Douglas commissioned John Fall Allison to inspect gold strikes on the river, and Allison reported a new low pass between the Skagit and Similkameen rivers. Allison Pass carries his name.

The first large mines in the Boundary country produced copper. The Canadian Encyclopedia says prospecting for copper ore began in 1886 and that the Mother Lode mine at Deadwood, 3 km west of Greenwood, was discovered in 1891. Greenwood's townsite was laid out in 1895 and the town was incorporated as a city in 1897. Its population reached 3,000 by 1899. The BC Copper Company opened a smelter in 1901 that employed up to 450 men in its mine and smelter. A fall in copper prices after the First World War closed both. The City of Greenwood says its population had dropped to a few hundred by 1940.

Grand Forks grew in the same years. BC Geographical Names records that it was incorporated as a city on 14 April 1897 and amalgamated with Columbia on 4 May 1899. The Canadian Encyclopedia says the Granby Company opened its smelter there in 1900, that it employed 400 men at its height, and that it closed in 1919. Midway began as a townsite in 1893 under the name Boundary City, which conflicted with nearby Boundary Falls, and was renamed Midway the following year. In the Similkameen Valley the first mining claim on Nickel Plate Mountain near Hedley was staked in 1894. When the main mines there shut in 1955 they had produced 52,900 kg of gold, and the Nickel Plate mine produced another 25,600 kg from 1985 to 1996.

The Canadian Society for Civil Engineering says Andrew McCulloch was chief engineer of construction of the Kettle Valley Railway from 1910 to 1916. The main line from Hope to Midway was built from 1911 to 1915, and the Vancouver, Victoria and Eastern Railway built the Princeton to Brookmere section from 1911 to 1914. The system stretched 500 km across three mountain ranges. The Town of Princeton says copper and coal mines led to the building of the Great Northern and Kettle Valley railways, and that the last spike of the Kettle Valley Railway was driven at Princeton. BC Geographical Names describes Midway as a divisional point on the Kettle Valley Railway and the terminus of the Columbia and Western Railway. The Canadian Pacific Railway took control in 1931 and abandoned the main and branch lines in stages between 1961 and 1990.

A road to the coast came later. The Okanagan Archive Trust Society says the final construction contract for the Hope-Princeton Highway went to J. Tomlinson and E. Anderson in 1945, that the project cost $12,000,000 and took four years, and that Premier Byron Johnson officially opened the road at a ceremony at Allison Pass on 2 November 1949. The Canadian Encyclopedia also dates the opening of the highway to 1949.

A provincial irrigation scheme turned dry land beside the Okanagan River into farms. The Town of Oliver says the Province began in 1918 by buying 22,000 acres, and that the South Okanagan Lands project began in 1919. It aimed to convert 8,000 acres of desert land on each side of the Okanagan River into farmland and to sell it at a reasonable cost to soldiers returning from the First World War. The town is named after Premier John Oliver. Work on the canal began in 1919 and employed 100 to 150 men. The canal reached Testalinda Creek in 1923 and was completed in 1927, with a length of 37 kilometres from the bluff to the US border. In 2020 it provided 601 irrigation water services to 5,200 acres of farmland.

The Kettle Valley Railway added an Oliver branch in 1923 and an extension to Osoyoos in 1944. The Canadian Encyclopedia says Oliver was incorporated as a village in 1945 and as a town in 1991, and Osoyoos as a town in 1946. It adds that Oliver has the highest concentration of vineyards and wineries in the province. Windspeaker reported in 2002 that the Osoyoos Indian Band had grown grapes on its reserve since 1968, and that its development corporation had opened Nk'Mip Cellars with the partner Vincor. The report counted more than 1,200 acres of vines planted on the band's lands.

The Canadian Encyclopedia says many settlers who arrived at Grand Forks from Saskatchewan beginning in 1909 were Doukhobors. The Doukhobor Heritage website, written by the researcher Jonathan J. Kalmakoff, says their leader Peter Lordly Verigin bought the land. Twelve men came to Grand Forks by train in March 1909 with two women to cook for them, another 14 people arrived in April, and families joined them that summer. The purchases totalled 4,182 acres in five properties, including the Coryell Ranch, Murray Creek (Outlook), the Vaughan Ranch, 4th of July Creek (Spencer) and the Collins place. The site gives a figure of 1000 people living near Grand Forks in 1913 and presents it as an estimate. The community ran a brickworks from 1909 on a former Coryell site, which by 1910 produced 22 to 24 thousand bricks a day and 2 million bricks over one summer.

The City of Greenwood says that in 1942 it became British Columbia's first Japanese Canadian internment camp, and that 1,200 people were housed in its vacant buildings. The Canadian Encyclopedia gives the same figure and says the camp closed in 1946. The city says that unlike other communities, Greenwood welcomed these residents after the war. Its Nikkei Legacy Park carries 80 plaques that honour the people who were interned there. The city also lists more than 60 surviving heritage buildings, among them a courthouse built in 1903 and a 36-metre brick smokestack from the BC Copper smelter.

The British Columbia government's Emergency Management and Climate Readiness blog says that on 10 May 2018 the Kettle and Granby rivers exceeded a one-in-200-year flood level, and that thousands of people in Grand Forks and the Boundary region were forced to evacuate. It reports that the Province has provided more than $44 million since 2018 for recovery and flood protection. The projects include a new dike and drainage system, the planting of 45,000 trees and shrubs along the Kettle River channel, and nine hectares of floodplain restoration. At the time of the post, on 28 November 2024, the city's flood mitigation program was more than 75 per cent complete.

In Princeton the emergency began on 14 November 2021. The Town of Princeton's record shows that evacuation orders for the downtown and Allison Flats areas were issued that night at 10:30 pm, and that the last evacuation orders were rescinded on 3 February 2022. Global News reported on 15 November 2021 that the Tulameen River had breached dikes in several places and that 290 families had been evacuated.