Nanaimo-Gabriola Island.
3 candidates, one seat.

Snuneymuxw First Nation describes itself as a Coast Salish People in the centre of Coast Salish territory, on the eastern coast of Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands, the Fraser River, Burrard Inlet and the Howe Sound. The Nation says its people have lived in that territory since time immemorial. Its language is Island hul'q'umi'num', one of three dialects of hul'q'umi'num', and the Nation says only a small number of Elders and members remain fluent. The Province's page for the Nation places it in the Nanaimo River watershed, including Gabriola Island and other adjacent islands, and gives its population as 1,943.

BC Geographical Names records that Nanaimo is an English form of a Halkomelem word, and that the translations offered include meeting place and people of many names. It lists five fall and winter villages of the Nanaimo Coast Salish, which the anthropologist D. Jenness named as Solachwan, Tewahlchin, Anuweenis, Kwalsiarwahl and Ishihan. It says summer villages stood at Gabriola Island and along the lower Fraser River.

The Gabriola Museum dates the first summer villages on Gabriola to 8000 BCE or earlier and says the largest stood near False Narrows, on the southwest shore. It counts more than 100 archaeological sites on the island, among them shell middens, petroglyphs and burial sites. On the Vancouver Island side, the City of Nanaimo's history says the Snuneymuxw settled at what are now Departure Bay and Nanaimo, and lived in cedar-plank longhouses that each held several families.

BC Geographical Names quotes John Walbran's 1909 book on coast names. It says the island's name adapts the Spanish name Gaviola or Gabiola, which Jose Maria Narvaez gave to the east end of the island in 1791. The Gabriola Museum says the Spanish officers Galiano and Valdes moored for several days at Pilot Bay in 1792 and called it Cala del Descanso, which means small bay of rest. BC Geographical Names adds that a British Admiralty chart of 1863 carried the name Gabriola Island and that the Geographic Board of Canada identified it in 1906.

After the Hudson's Bay Company opened its mines at Nanaimo, coal miners and former gold miners moved to Gabriola in the mid-1850s and the 1860s, and started farms to supply the growing town, the museum says. By 1872, 18 families lived on the island. The Gabriola Millstone Quarry ran from 1887 to 1936 and supplied building stone for large buildings in Victoria and Vancouver. The first federal voters' list for Gabriola, compiled in 1887, named 47 men, 34 of them farmers.

The first government vehicle ferry, the Atrevida, began service to Gabriola in 1931 and carried 6 cars. Hydroelectric power reached the island in 1955. Between 1960 and 1969 more than 3000 lots were approved for subdivision across the Gulf Islands. In 1969 the provincial government set a minimum parcel size of 10 acres on every island in the Strait of Georgia, and in 1974 it passed the Islands Trust Act, whose mandate is to preserve and protect the Gulf Islands' amenities and environment. The museum records 4,033 people on Gabriola in 2016, and 87% of voters rejecting incorporation as a municipality in 2004.

The Hudson's Bay Company began coal mining in what is now downtown Nanaimo in 1852, says the Nanaimo Museum. Parks Canada calls it the first commercial coal mine in British Columbia and records that the company built the Bastion in 1853 to protect the miners and settlers. BC Geographical Names says company officers named Newcastle Island in 1853 after the coal city of Newcastle upon Tyne, and that coal was mined on the island from 1853 to 1883.

The Canadian Encyclopedia says 24 families arrived from England in 1854 to settle in Colvile Town, the first name of the settlement, and that the name was little used after 1860. The City of Nanaimo's history says the town was renamed Nanaimo in 1860. In 1862 the company sold its mines, buildings and 6,193 acres of land to the Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company.

On 23 December 1854 Snuneymuxw and the Crown, which is the government acting for the British monarch, entered the Sarlequun Snuneymuxw Treaty of 1854. The Nation says the treaty promised to protect its villages, cultivated fields and rights to hunt and fish, and that the coal could be shared while the land and water were preserved. The Gabriola Museum says the treaty gave the Crown access to land and coal. It adds that in 1862 the Crown moved the Snuneymuxw from their village by Cameron Island to their southern village site, now Reserve 1. The Nation says the treaty is protected under section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982.

In 1864 the Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company hired an architect in Britain to draft a town plan. The City of Nanaimo says the plan gave downtown its fan-shaped pattern of streets that run down to the harbour, and that the company then auctioned city lots. BC Geographical Names records that Nanaimo was incorporated as a city on 24 December 1874.

Other coal fields opened nearby. The City says Robert Dunsmuir opened the Wellington Mine in 1869 and built a rough railway from Wellington to Departure Bay to ship its coal, and that the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway, also built by Dunsmuir, gave the city its first land route to Victoria in 1886. Waste rock from the mines was used to extend the waterfront and to fill the tidal inlet that once divided downtown along Terminal Avenue.

BC Geographical Names says officers of the Hudson's Bay Company named Departure Bay in the early 1850s as a good place from which ships could leave, and that a map of 1852 labels it Departure Harbour. The City says Chinese workers came to Nanaimo as early as the 1860s, and that Japanese families settled at Brechin, near the Newcastle waterfront, where they ran herring salteries and boat works. At Cedar, BC Geographical Names records a post office that opened on 1 April 1888 and says the community was named for the profusion of cedar trees.

On 3 May 1887, shortly before 6:00 pm, two explosions struck the No. 1 Esplanade Mine, says the City of Nanaimo. The City calls it the worst mining disaster in British Columbia and the second worst in Canada, after the Hillcrest disaster of 1914 in Alberta, which killed 189 miners. A jury blamed an unprepared and badly planted charge that ignited gas fuelled by coal dust. The City's notice of 2021 speaks of 150 lives lost, and its council resolution of 2015, which lowers City flags to half mast every 3 May, names 148 miners.

The Canadian Encyclopedia reports that coal output from the three main seams peaked in 1923, when more than 1 million tonnes were mined. Once the easily reached coal was taken, mining grew dangerous and costly, and by the early 1950s the city turned to forest products. The City's history adds that a pulp and paper mill at Harmac opened in 1950, outside the city limits.

The City says Nanaimo's last Chinatown, said to have 1,200 residents at its largest, was destroyed by fire on 30 September 1960 and was never rebuilt. The City names the Chinese Exclusion Act, the slowing of the coal industry and the move of residents into other neighbourhoods as reasons its population began to fall in the 1920s.

BC Geographical Names records that the Canadian Pacific Railway bought Newcastle Island in 1930 and made it a resort with a dance pavilion, wading pool, tea house, playing fields and a floating hotel. The City of Nanaimo acquired the island in 1955, and the Province's release of 2021 says the marine park was established in October 1961. The Province adds that middens on the island show at least two Salish villages that were deserted before coal was found in the area in 1849.

The City's history lists Swy-A-Lana Park, built in 1984, and the waterfront promenades, begun in 1988, among the most recent additions to the land made from mine waste along the harbour.

Vancouver Island University says it began as the Dominion-Provincial Youth Training Centre in 1936, became Malaspina College in 1969 and Malaspina University-College in 1989, and took its present name in April 2008. Its main campus in Nanaimo covers 92 acres on the territory of the Snuneymuxw First Nation, and Elections BC's 2024 results list a voting place at Building 300 of the university in this district.

The Union of BC Municipalities records that the City of Nanaimo and Snuneymuxw First Nation signed a memorandum of understanding in 2005 and a protocol agreement in 2009. In 2017 the Nation removed its flag from Nanaimo city hall, which the Union describes as a sign of a breakdown in the relationship. The two governments signed a renewed protocol agreement in May 2019 and have since discussed returning the flag. They have also partnered on a ferry service to Saysutshun (Newcastle Island).

In September 2020 British Columbia and Snuneymuxw signed a Reconciliation Implementation Framework Agreement and a Land Transfer Agreement. The Province's release says the land package covers 1,003 hectares at Mount Benson and 2,097 hectares at Mount McKay, and that Snuneymuxw agreed to end a court case begun in 2001 over log booming in the Nanaimo River estuary. Both agreements build on a reconciliation agreement of 2013. On 28 July 2021 the Nation, British Columbia and Canada signed a three-party memorandum of understanding whose priorities include implementing the 1854 treaty.

On 6 December 2021 the Province renamed Newcastle Island Marine Park as Saysutshun (Newcastle Island Marine) Park. The name refers to the island's use as a place of preparation. On 27 January 2024 Snuneymuxw and Canada signed an Interim Land Reconciliation Agreement that allocates 80.09 hectares, the Camp Nanaimo Lands on Te'tuxwtun, to be set aside as a reserve. Canada's release says the lands were used by Western Forest Products, by the Department of National Defence and as the site of the Nanaimo Indian Hospital.

On 15 July 2024 the Province and Snuneymuxw announced the return of 2.67 hectares of the sxwayxum village site, also called Millstone River Village, at 1 Terminal Avenue in downtown Nanaimo. The purchase of the property and the lots next to it cost $28.5 million. The release says the site lies next to Swy-A-Lana Lagoon and Maffeo Sutton Park, and that it once held a hotel, a parking lot and other businesses.