New Westminster-Coquitlam.
4 candidates, one seat.

The City of New Westminster's heritage statement for the McBride-Sapperton neighbourhood says the Qayqayt, Kwantlen and Stó:lō First Nations lived in the Brunette River valley for thousands of years and used the mouth of the Brunette for seasonal fishing. The statement for Quayside, on the Fraser River south of Columbia Street, records that reserves were allocated to the Qayqayt in 1859. One was a 22-acre parcel near the present Kruger paper mill site and another was on Poplar Island. BC Geographical Names lists an Indigenous name for the Brunette River, Che'tsh lus, and gives no language group or meaning for it.

Recent names in the district use First Nations languages. New Westminster Schools says its board approved the name Skwo:wech, the Halq'eméylem word for sturgeon, on 25 May 2021 for the new elementary school in Sapperton. Chief Rhonda Larrabee of the Qayqayt First Nation was consulted, and the school district gathered more than 250 suggestions. The City's aquatic and community centre at 65 East Sixth Avenue, which opened on 29 April 2024, is named təməsew̓txʷ, the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ words for sea otter house. A panel with members from the Qayqayt, Kwantlen, Musqueam and Squamish Nation helped choose it. Musqueam and Kwantlen also gave the Pattullo Bridge replacement its name, stal̕əw̓asəm, which the project office explains as a space where you can view the river.

The City's heritage statement for McBride-Sapperton says the Royal Engineers were stationed at New Westminster from 1859 to 1863. Their camp stood on the site later used for the penitentiary and was known as Sapper's Town, which gave Sapperton its name. The soldiers were called sappers. The Engineers surveyed Sapperton into blocks in 1860, and the first trail from the camp, North Road, was built in 1859. Heritage Burnaby says Colonel R.C. Moody planned the road to link New Westminster with Burrard Inlet as a way to help defend the city against an American attack, and it calls North Road the oldest road in the Lower Mainland. The City's statement says North Road later became East Columbia Street, the main shopping street of Sapperton.

The Engineers also marked out the land that became Queen's Park. The Queen's Park statement says they set out wide streets, boulevards, land reserves and squares there in 1859 and surveyed 75.5 acres for the park itself in 1860. The first house in the neighbourhood went up in 1862. Residents told the City's consultants that the boulevards on Second and Fifth Streets frame the grounds between Queens and Royal Avenues, which were meant for a legislative building that was never built. Fraser Health says Royal Columbian Hospital first opened in 1862, and the Sapperton statement says the new legislative council held its first session on the future penitentiary grounds in 1864. Veterans Affairs Canada says the Royal Westminster Regiment dates its founding to 1863.

The McBride-Sapperton statement says St. Mary the Virgin Anglican Church, designed and built by former sappers in 1865, marked the start of Sapperton as a permanent community. The BC Penitentiary opened on a hillside above the Fraser River in 1878, the same year the Brunette Sawmills were established. The Jamieson Brewery was founded in 1879 at Brunette and Columbia Streets and later became the New Westminster Brewery. The statement says Sapperton became part of the City of New Westminster in 1889. That year the Royal Columbian Hospital opened in Sapperton, moved from its first site downtown, and a nursing school was added there in 1901.

Industries set up along the Brunette River and the railway. The statement lists the Brunette Sawmills, the BC Distillery, Swift's slaughterhouse, the brewery and the Canada Western Cordage factory, which opened in 1921. BC Geographical Names says the Brunette River was named in 1860 by a settler on its banks named Holmes, because the water, which drains peat bogs above Burnaby Lake, is brown. By the 1970s, the statement says, years of industrial and household waste had left the river severely polluted. It was mainly through the efforts of the Sapperton Fish and Game Club that the river became clean enough for fish to spawn again.

The Canadian Pacific Railway branch line reached New Westminster in August 1886, according to the City's statement for Quayside, with a station at Columbia and Eighth Streets. The Downtown statement says Columbia Street between Fourth and Eighth Streets took on its present appearance between 1887 and 1892. Queen's Park gained a street railway in 1891. The Queen's Park statement says the mansion Blossom Grove became Columbian Methodist College in 1893, which the City's statements describe as the first post-secondary institution in British Columbia. The college closed in 1936 and its buildings were torn down. The same statement says Queen's Park became the first fully serviced neighbourhood in the city, with a sewer system in 1912 and street curbs in 1913.

The Armoury of the Royal Westminster Regiment was built from 1895 to 1896 at Sixth Street and Queens Avenue by the contractor David Bain. Parks Canada designated it a Recognized Federal Heritage Building on 18 June 1987 and says it is unique because armouries of its time were normally brick and this one is built entirely of wood. A fire on 10 and 11 September 1898 destroyed a third of the city, the City's statement for Quayside says, and one estimate left almost half the population homeless. The Downtown statement says the fire destroyed all but two buildings downtown. Many people rebuilt farther from downtown along the new streetcar lines, and the Dominion Trust Block of 1907 became Downtown's first high-rise.

Harbour improvements finished in 1913 gave New Westminster a deep sea port, and Pacific Coast Terminals opened its freshwater port operation downtown in 1929. The Quayside statement says the terminals could handle cargo such as lumber, wood pulp, flour and grain, and that ships came from ports such as Yokohama, Hamburg and Liverpool. Local 502 of the longshore union was chartered in 1944. The Pattullo Bridge opened in 1937 and linked New Westminster to Surrey and the highway to the United States. The Downtown statement says that until the George Massey Tunnel was built, the route through New Westminster was the main link between Vancouver and the south.

Retail grew with the port. The Downtown statement says Columbia Street had the highest sales per square foot in the province from 1946 to 1952 and was called the Golden Mile, and that Eaton's opened there in 1949. A new City Hall opened at Sixth Street and Royal Avenue in 1953. Woodward's opened in Uptown in 1954, and a downtown business association formed that year. In Sapperton, the McBride-Sapperton statement says Hume Park was created in the 1930s as a Depression-era employment project in a gravel quarry, Pacific Veneer opened in 1938 and became the city's largest employer in the 1950s, and Labatt's bought the Westminster Brewery in 1958 and expanded it into the largest and most modern brewery in British Columbia.

The McBride-Sapperton statement says the Centennial Community Centre was built in 1967 and the Canada Games Pool in 1972. The waterfront lands were sold in 1979, and Pacific Coast Terminals moved its operations to Port Moody in 1981. The Quayside statement says use of the docks fell from the late 1970s, in part because they had been built for general cargo and became too narrow for bulk and container ships. The BC Penitentiary, a federal prison, operated from 1878 to 1980. The City says the federal government sold the site in 1985 and that it was developed in stages for housing, with two significant buildings kept as heritage buildings. A City notice of 2018 says the penitentiary cemetery was established in 1913 for inmates unclaimed by family, that burials continued until 1968, and that the City restored it.

TransLink says SkyTrain began service on 11 December 1985 with eight days of free rides, and charged fares from 3 January 1986. The line connected downtown Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster. Douglas College opened its downtown campus in 1984 and the City bought the sternwheeler Samson V that year to make it a floating museum. The Westminster Quay Public Market opened in 1986, and the Plaza 88 development, with a shopping centre and three condominium towers, was finished that year. The McInnes Street overpass opened in 1987, the same year Tower 1, the oldest building in Quayside, was built. The Skybridge carried SkyTrain across the Fraser River to Surrey in 1990.

Waterfront Esplanade park opened in 1998 on land that had been the deep sea port, and Sapperton Landing Park was established in 2001. The Millennium Line began running in 2002 with Sapperton and Braid stations in McBride-Sapperton. The Fraser River Discovery Centre opened in 2008, and in 2010 Interfor closed the last mill on the New Westminster waterfront. Westminster Pier Park opened in 2012 on the abandoned Pacific Coast Terminals wharves, and Anvil Centre opened in 2014 with a conference centre, a theatre, the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame and the City Museum and Archives.

École Qayqayt Elementary stands at 85 Merivale Street on the site of St. Mary's Hospital, which the Sisters of Providence opened in 1886 and which closed in 2005. A provincial release of 2013 said the school was named after the local First Nation band. Skwo:wech Elementary moved into its new building at 331 Richmond Street in 2022, and təməsew̓txʷ Aquatic and Community Centre opened on 29 April 2024. The centre covers 10,644 square metres and has an eight-lane 50-metre pool, and it replaced the Canada Games Pool and the Centennial Community Centre.

On 22 May 2026 the Province announced that the new Jim Pattison Acute Care Tower at Royal Columbian Hospital would open to patients on 31 May 2026. The release describes a tower of 10 storeys with 388 beds and 17 operating rooms, and says the units for births, children, newborn intensive care and surgery would open that fall. The project office for the Pattullo Bridge replacement says the stal̕əw̓asəm Bridge is open and that removal of the Pattullo Bridge is underway, to be finished by the end of 2027.