Kootenay-Rockies.
5 candidates, one seat.

The Ktunaxa Nation says Ktunaxa people have occupied the lands next to the Kootenay and Columbia Rivers and the Arrow Lakes for more than 10,000 years. The Ktunaxa Nation Council has its headquarters on Cranbrook Street in Cranbrook. Its website lists four member nations: ʔaq̓am, ʔakisq̓nuk First Nation, yaqan nuʔkiy and Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi'it. Two of them have communities in this district.

ʔaq̓am, also known as St. Mary's Indian Band, lies where the St. Mary's River meets the Kootenay River. The British Columbia government lists 396 members and says the band is at Stage 5 of the treaty process, negotiating to finalize a treaty through the Ktunaxa Kinbasket Treaty Council. Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi'it First Nation has its office in Grasmere. Its website says its members, the ʔakanuxunik', are the people from where the water comes out of the mountain, and that they have been stewards of their unceded lands since time immemorial. The government lists 285 members and the same Stage 5 treaty status.

The BC Geographical Names Office records that the area around Cranbrook was called Joseph's Prairie, after a Kootenay Indian chief, and that a Kootenay Indian village stood there. The Canadian Encyclopedia calls it a prehistoric population centre of the Upper Ktunaxa.

The Canadian Encyclopedia dates the Wild Horse Creek gold rush to 1864 and says the ferry over the Kootenay River was run by John Galbraith, so the crossing was called Galbraith's Ferry. Tensions between the Ktunaxa and the new settlers led to the first North-West Mounted Police post west of the Rockies in 1887. Samuel B. Steele commanded it until 1888. The BC Geographical Names Office calls the post Kootenay Post and says the place was renamed Fort Steele in 1888 in honour of Superintendent Steele, who is recorded as having eased the tensions.

Mining of gold, lead, zinc and silver grew from 1892. In 1898 the BC Southern Railway was built to Cranbrook, and commercial activity moved there from Fort Steele. Order in Council 550 of 6 March 1961 created Fort Steele Park. In 1988 the site became a Provincial Heritage Property. The Canadian Encyclopedia counts more than 60 original and recreated buildings on it today, and Fort Steele Heritage Town was a voting place in 2024.

The Sparwood Virtual Museum says Michael Phillipps prospected the Elk River valley for gold in 1873 and found coal instead. George Mercer Dawson's geological survey of 1884, released in 1886, brought the coal to national attention. Dawson named Michel Creek in 1883 after Phillipps, according to the BC Geographical Names Office. Colonel James Baker and William Fernie formed a syndicate in 1887 to develop the coalfields. The City of Fernie says they spent ten years trying to raise the money for mines and a railway.

In 1897 the Canadian Pacific Railway received a government subsidy of $11,000 per mile for the Crowsnest line. Mining began late that year, when twenty miners from Cape Breton arrived at Coal Creek near Fernie, and the line was finished by the end of 1898. Fernie's post office opened on 1 August 1898. The town was incorporated on 28 July 1904, with Fred Stork as its first mayor.

Baker had settled in 1885 and named his estate Cranbrook Farm after his home town in Kent, England. A townsite was laid out in 1897, the post office reopened on 1 September 1898, and Cranbrook became a city on 1 November 1905. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes it as a railway centre with divisional operations. Elko's post office opened on 1 August 1899, and the record dates the Canadian Pacific station there to 1905.

Moyie lies on the east side of Moyie Lake, south of Cranbrook. Its post office opened on 1 January 1899. The name comes from the French word mouiller, which means to make wet. Trappers used it for the river because of the damp conditions that David Thompson described in 1808.

The BC Geological Survey's MINFILE record for the St. Eugene mine says James Cronin recorded the deposit in 1893. It lists production from 1899 to 1929 of 1.475 million tonnes, with 113 million kilograms of lead and 182.7 million grams of silver. The St. Eugene Consolidated Mining Company developed the mine, and the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company took it over in 1905. The record gives the average grade of the ore as 7.7 per cent lead and 124 grams of silver per tonne.

ʔaq̓am's own history page says the community stands where the St. Eugene Mission was. Parts of the mission church were prefabricated in Italy and brought to the site in 1897. The church opened for worship on Palm Sunday in 1898, and band members helped to build the interior. The community says extensive renovations and restorations have taken place since 2011.

The Canadian Encyclopedia says St. Eugene Mission, formerly a residential school, now operates as a resort. Global News reports that the site reopened as the St. Eugene Resort in 2000. On 30 June 2021 the Lower Kootenay Band announced the results of a ground search. Its news release said: "In the ground search conducted by the community of ʔaq'am, the findings revealed 182 human remains in unmarked graves." ICT News reported that the search used ground penetrating radar and took place in 2020.

The Fernie Museum records that 128 miners were killed in the explosion at the Coal Creek Mine on 22 May 1902, and that 28 of them were Italian. It remains Canada's third worst mining disaster. Trains carried the bodies to Fernie for burial, and the museum shows crosses in St. Margaret's Cemetery in Fernie.

Fire destroyed the downtown commercial district in April 1904, and Fernie was incorporated later that year. On 1 August 1908 a second fire burned the town in less than 90 minutes. The museum says only the mine office was left standing. City council then ordered that every building in a ten-block area be made of fireproof material. Many of the new buildings used locally produced yellow brick, and the museum says most of the downtown buildings date from 1908 to 1912.

Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Columbia River Treaty on 17 January 1961. The treaty was ratified on 16 September 1964. It allowed the United States to build Libby Dam in Montana, and the reservoir behind it reaches north into this district. The Canadian and United States geographic names bodies adopted the name Lake Koocanusa on 17 June 1968. It combines Kootenay, Canada and USA, and won a naming contest entered by Alice Beers of Rexford, Montana. British Columbia had proposed Kitunaha.

The British Columbia government says the treaty dams and reservoirs displaced more than two thousand residents as well as First Nations, and flooded traditional First Nations sites. It states that consultation and mitigation at the time could be considered inadequate to non-existent by today's standards. Baynes Lake, on the east side of the reservoir, is named for Andrew Bain, who located land there in 1896. In 2024 the Ktunaxa Nation announced that Canada and the United States had reached an agreement-in-principle on modernizing the treaty. Ktunaxa Nation Chair Kathryn Teneese said the Nation has communities on both sides of the border.

The Sparwood Virtual Museum says the Crowsnest Pass Coal Company sent test shipments of coal to Japan in the early 1960s, and that contracts in 1968 started a new period of mining, with surface mines replacing underground ones. The Fernie Museum dates the start of open pit mining to 1968 and the closing of the last underground mine to 1986. Coal dust affected Natal and Michel. A 1965 plebiscite showed 95% of residents in favour of moving to Sparwood, and Kaiser Resources bought mining rights in 1968. Sparwood became a district municipality on 12 May 1966 and took in the Village of Natal that day.

Elkford was built by Fording Coal Ltd., a subsidiary of Cominco, at the meeting of Boivin Creek and the Elk River, to supply 45,000,000 long tons of coking coal to the Japanese steel industry. It was incorporated as a village on 16 July 1971 and became a district municipality on 9 October 1981.

On 26 March 2021 the Provincial Court of British Columbia fined Teck Coal $60 million on two counts about selenium and calcite released in 2012 from the Fording River and Greenhills mines, the Narwhal reported. On 11 July 2024 Teck completed the sale of its 77% interest in its steelmaking coal business to Glencore, and the operations became part of Elk Valley Resources.