Chilliwack North.
3 candidates, one seat.

The Province of British Columbia lists the Stó:lō Nation as 11 member bands in the Fraser Valley, among them Popkum, Skowkale, Tzeachten and Yakweakwioose, with a population of 2,742. It says all 11 bands are negotiating land and resource issues outside the British Columbia treaty process. For Popkum Indian Band the Province gives a population of 14. BC Geographical Names records Popkum as a community south of the Fraser River.

Cheam First Nation, in its own spelling Xwchíyò:m, has its office at 52161 Victor Drive in Rosedale, and the Province gives its population as 585 and its location as near Rosedale. The Nation's land base page lists two reserves: Cheam 1 of 332.6 hectares and Tseatah 2 of 93.4 hectares, 426.0 hectares in all. Its home page states: "We have never ceded or surrendered title to our lands, rights to our resources, or authority to make decisions within our territory." The Chilliwack Museum and Archives says archaeological sites near Mount Shannon show that Stó:lō people lived in and travelled through the Cheam area before settlers came. The museum's timeline records that in 1991 the Cheam Band shut down the Canadian National main line to draw attention to a dispute with fisheries.

BC Geographical Names says the name Chilliwack comes from Tcil'Qe'uk, a Halkomelem word meaning valley of many streams, and that it is also the name of the tribe of this area.

The Chilliwack Museum and Archives says the first businesses of Chilliwack stood at Chilliwack Landing, at the foot of Wellington Avenue on the Fraser River. From 1858, the year of the Fraser River gold rush, riverboats landed there and served a small farming community. In the early 1860s Jonathon Reece, John Lawrence, William Teague, and Isaac and James Kipp pre-empted land east of the Landing on a large clearing known as Chilliwack Prairie. A First Nations reserve laid out after 1867 surrounded the Landing, and the land beside it flooded, so a new commercial centre was needed.

A road and a church supplied the reason. By 1873 work had started on Yale Road, which joined the coast to the interior. On a promise from Bishop Hills, a frame building from Port Douglas on Harrison Lake was moved to the place where Landing Road met Yale Road, and it became St. Thomas' Church. A blacksmith shop, a school, houses, a flour mill, a general store and McKeever's Hotel then gathered around it. The museum says the post office moved from the Landing to this centre, called Five Corners, in 1887. The place had been known as Centreville, and the post office adopted the name Chilliwack that year. The museum describes Five Corners today as a heritage district.

The museum says the completion of the Yale to New Westminster wagon road in 1873 or 1874 led directly to the settlement of Rosedale. J.C. Henderson and T.H. Henderson acquired land near the town site in the early 1880s. By 1890 a one-room school with fifteen students stood at the corner of Yale and McGrath Roads, and that corner became the commercial centre. Population grew for more than thirty years from the 1890s, fuelled by logging, the railway and farming, and farms replaced sawmills. A Methodist church (now United, 1908), a hotel (1910), an Anglican church (1912) and a four-room school (1914) were built in that period.

In East Chilliwack the museum names Charles Brown and D. Wedler as the first settlers, who arrived in 1869 or 1870. Banford Road dates from 1879, Upper Prairie Road from 1886 and Gibson Road from 1896, and a school was built by 1890. The museum calls the East Chilliwack Women's Institute Hall the first Women's Institute hall in British Columbia owned and built by a Women's Institute. On Fairfield Island, between the Fraser River and Hope Slough, the Province created the School District of Fairfield Island on May 11, 1892. Strathcona Elementary opened there as a two-room school in 1909, sat unused for some years in the late 1950s, and reopened in September 1961 as the area became residential. Strathcona Elementary and East Chilliwack Elementary were both voting places in 2024.

The museum says Greendale was called Sumas until 1951, when the name was changed because too many towns had the same name. In 1858 the Royal Engineers of the Boundary Survey set up a camp at Sumas, and a supply hut and a Hudson's Bay Company saltery near the mouth of the Sumas River were the first colonial buildings there. A colonial post office opened in 1867 in David W. Miller's store at Miller's Landing. The Sumas School District was created on October 13, 1871, and a new school opened in spring 1873 on land given by George Chadsey. Chadsey also gave the land for the Sumas Methodist Church, built in 1886. The church closed in 1971 when its members joined Carman United Church in Sardis.

Mennonite families came to Sumas as the bed of Sumas Lake was turned into farmland. In April 1930 a wooded lot of 686 acres owned by the Northern Construction Company was divided into 28 lots of 18 to 25 acres each, offered at $42.00 per acre to Mennonite families only. The museum says this sale led to the commercial core of Sumas, and that businesses later grew along the Trans-Canada Highway, which ran through the area after the Vedder Canal bridge was finished in 1925. Greendale Elementary Community School was a voting place in the district in 2024.

The Chilliwack Museum and Archives says the Fraser River began to rise on May 19, 1894 after a hot spell in the interior, and reached its maximum height of 25.75 feet on the Mission gauge on June 6. The whole Chilliwack community was under water and crops and livestock were badly damaged. The only flood control measure at the time was a dam across Hope Slough at Rosedale, built in 1892. The museum's timeline records that the dyking contract was completed in 1903 after three years, at a cost of $265,000. The museum's history of downtown says the dykes extend from Rosedale to Sumas Mountain.

In 1948 the dyke at Agassiz broke on May 26, and the river peaked in early June at 24.73 feet on the Mission gauge, one foot lower than in 1894. People were evacuated from Greendale and Herrling Island. The museum says civilian crews and troops from the army base at Vedder Crossing reinforced the old dykes, and that the dyke broke at Greendale. Its timeline records that the first survey of the damage found two thousand homes flooded. Federal and provincial governments spent $1,359,745 on the Sumas and Chilliwack dykes after the flood. At the end of February 1951 a winter flood covered most of downtown Chilliwack.

The Chilliwack Progress says it was founded in 1891 by W.T. Jackman. BC Geographical Names records that the Township of Chilliwhack was incorporated on April 26, 1873 and the City of Chilliwack on February 21, 1908, and the museum's timeline lists the first city council, with Samuel A. Cawley as mayor by acclamation. A fire in 1906 wiped out seven stores on the north side of Wellington Avenue. The first British Columbia Electric Railway train entered Chilliwack in 1910, and the museum says the steamboat era ended when it did. A new post office opened in 1911, and the hospital, City Hall and Chilliwack High School in 1912.

The Canadian Register of Historic Places says Chilliwack City Hall, designed by Thomas Hooper and built from 1910 to 1912, is the only pre-1930 Canadian municipal hall constructed entirely of reinforced concrete. It was recognized as a National Historic Site on November 23, 1984. The building stopped serving as the municipal hall in 1980 and now houses the Chilliwack Museum at 45820 Spadina Avenue. A war cenotaph on the grounds dates from 1923. On January 1, 1980 the City and the Township merged into the District of Chilliwack, which became the City of Chilliwack again in 1999.

Yale Road was the first long road through the district. The museum says work on it had started by 1873. Its timeline records that in 1931 it was officially announced that the Trans-Canada Highway would follow the old Yale Road south of the Fraser River. In the Greendale area the museum says the highway ran through the community after the Vedder Canal bridge was completed in 1925, and that a few cement mileage markers from the old highway can still be seen along Yale Road.

East of Rosedale the Fraser River was crossed by the Agassiz-Rosedale Bridge, which opened in 1956. The museum's timeline says the city was in a gala mood for the opening. The Province gives the bridge a length of 1,870 metres and says it lies on the Fraser River between Agassiz and Rosedale and Bridal Falls, and carries two lanes of Highway 9 between Highway 1 and Highway 7.