Powell River-Sunshine Coast.
3 candidates, one seat.

The shíshálh Nation describes its swiya, the territory of the shíshálh people, as lying between Queens Reach in lekw’emin (Jervis Inlet) and Howe Sound. Its website names four main settlements of the past: kalpilin (Pender Harbour), ts’unay (Deserted Bay), xenichen (the head of lekw’emin) and tewankw near alhtulich (Porpoise Bay). The Province of British Columbia gives the swiya as 514,520 hectares, from x̱enichen to kalpilin, reaching kwekwenis (Lang Bay) in the west and xwesam (Roberts Creek) in the southeast.

Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada gives the traditional territory of the Tla’amin Nation as 609,000 hectares, including marine areas. The BC Treaty Commission describes it as the area around Powell River, including Lasqueti and Texada islands, and the Province lists a Tla’amin population of 1,248. BC Geographical Names records the word qathet as belonging to the ʔayʔaǰuθəm language. The qathet Museum & Archives says archaeological evidence indicates that the Tla’amin people have occupied the region for at least 7,600 years.

On the northern mainland the commission's map labels the reserves Hamalco 1 and Klahoose 1. The Homalco First Nation calls itself χʷɛmaɬkʷu, the people of the fast-running waters, and says its territory goes up Toba Inlet to Brem River and up Bute Inlet. The Klahoose Nation says its traditional territories span from Cortes Island to Toba Inlet. The BC Treaty Commission lists the Homalco and Klahoose treaty tables at Stage 4, the stage of talks toward an agreement in principle.

BC Geographical Names says the shíshálh people live today mostly at Ch’átlich, in the Sechelt Indian Government District, where Paul Durieu established a Roman Catholic Oblate mission in 1868. It says a large church and a residential school were built there later. A separate record gives ch’atlich as the shashishalhem name for the site of Sechelt, meaning the side of land facing the far out water, on advice from the Nation's stewardship division in 2019. The same record says the shíshálh people carried canoes across the narrow strip of land there as a short cut to Sechelt Inlet. The Sechelt post office opened on 1 March 1896, and the settler community began in the 1890s with a hotel and a store. Sechelt was incorporated as a village on 15 February 1956.

The Encyclopedia of British Columbia says Gibsons was named for George Gibson, a retired British naval officer who arrived in 1886, and that the place was known as Gibson’s Landing. It says that in 1892, when the post office needed a name, many residents preferred Elphinstone and Gibson, the first postmaster, preferred Georgetown. BC Geographical Names says Gibsons Landing was incorporated as a village on 4 March 1929 and became a town on 17 December 1982. The Encyclopedia places Gibsons in Squamish Nation territory. The Sunshine Coast Regional District says its communities lie in the territories of the shíshálh and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nations.

The Raincoast place names encyclopedia says Robinson Henry Langdale pre-empted land on the creek at Langdale in 1893 and received a Crown grant, the legal title to the land, in 1908. In 1955 the Black Ball Line moved its ferry dock to Langdale from Gibsons.

BC Geographical Names says Powell River and Powell Lake were named in 1880 by Lieutenant Colonel Vere Orlebar of HMS Rocket, for Dr. Israel Wood Powell, who was superintendent of Indian affairs for the province from 1872 to 1889. The qathet Museum & Archives says the river had been known for thousands of years to the local peoples as tiskʷat, and it gives tiskʷat as the name of the Townsite as well. The same BC record says the community formed around one of the first pulp and paper mills in the province, built in 1910 to 1912 by Brooks, Scanlon & O'Brien Co. The mill was later owned by Macmillan, Bloedel & Powell River Co. and was at one time the largest in the world, with 2,000 employees.

Canada's Register of Historic Places says the Powell River Company developed the Townsite in 1911. George F. Hardy, a New York engineer, carried out the early plan, and the architect John McIntyre later enlarged it. The register says the boundaries reached their current limit in 1930 and that more than 97 percent of the existing buildings date from before 1940. It records that the Townsite was recognized as a national historic site in 1995, and that the designation refers to the planned housing sector. The museum says the Townsite contains over 400 historic buildings, with homes built by the company for its employees.

The Townsite Heritage Society text on the museum's website says the Powell River Company was founded by Dr. Dwight D. Brooks, Anson Brooks and Michael J. Scanlon and incorporated in 1909, and that construction of the mill and a hydroelectric dam began that year. It says the Townsite was complete in 1930, apart from housing for returning veterans of the Second World War. The museum also says Dr. Andrew Henderson and the Powell River Paper Company started the first medical plan in British Columbia in 1910, with mill workers paying $1.00 per month, and that St. Luke's Hospital, the first permanent hospital in Powell River, was completed in 1913.

The qathet Museum & Archives page on tiskʷat, the Townsite, draws on research by Colin Osmond published in the Tla’amin Nation's Nehmotl newsletters in February and March 2018. It says tiskʷat was inhabited by the Tla’amin people long before European contact. It says that in 1878 the Government of BC sold a large part of Tla’amin traditional territory, labelled Lot 450, to Robert Paterson Rithet, and that the lot included the village of tiskʷat. Tla’amin chiefs made several trips to Victoria to protest the sale.

The museum says the land commissioner Peter O'Reilly met the Tla’amin in 1888 to survey reserves, and that surveyors allotted six reserves for the Tla’amin people, the first of them Sliammon IR 1. It says that by 1895 the Indian Land Commission had used up its funds and could not continue, which left all Tla’amin land outside the six reserves legally open to settlement and resource extraction. The BC government's page on the Nation lists two agreements about tiskʷat, a memorandum of understanding signed in 2023 and a protocol for environmental and archaeological work dated 2024.

The museum also says the village at Sliammon was rebuilt after a forest fire in 1918, and that the people were taken to Harwood Island with no casualties. It records that Status Indians in British Columbia gained the right to vote in provincial elections on 1 January 1949.

BC Geographical Names says the Spanish officer Jose Maria Narvaez named Texada Island in 1791, and that it was adopted as an official name on 27 April 1945. It says the island has three small communities, Van Anda, Gillies Bay and Blubber Bay. The Texada Island Heritage Society says that a fisherman and homesteader named Harry Trim examined a rusty red area on a hillside west of Gillies Bay in 1871, and that this began the island's mining period.

The Canadian Encyclopedia says American capital started the first of several iron and copper-gold mines near Van Anda in 1883, and that mining was a mainstay until the 1920s and again from the Second World War to 1976. The Heritage Society says Ed Blewett and Harry Treat incorporated the Van Anda Copper and Gold Company by 1896. A smelter at Van Anda ran until 1903, reopened in 1910 and operated until the mines closed in 1919. Later the building held a crushing mill that made white marble limestone for stucco, and the buildings were bulldozed and burned in the 1970s.

The Canadian Encyclopedia adds that limestone quarries and lime kilns on the island have supplied material for cement, stucco and kraft pulp since the 1890s, and that the island produces most of the limestone in British Columbia. The encyclopedia gives that last statement without a year.

The qathet Museum & Archives says Lund, ƛaʔamɛn, was first a village site of the Tla’amin people, and that in 1889 Fred and Charles Thulin settled there and named it Lund. It says Lang Bay, mɛtokomɛn, was the site of logging and shingle-bolt companies from the 1890s, and that Lang Creek has always been important in Tla’amin territory because of its salmon runs. It says homesteaders arrived at Wildwood in 1914 and that the area has become known for agriculture and its Italian culture.

The museum says the independent villages of Wildwood, Townsite, Cranberry and Westview were amalgamated in 1955 and together became the Municipality of Powell River. Many street names were changed in 1959 because some names had been used in more than one village. BC Geographical Names says Powell River was incorporated as a district municipality on 15 October 1955 and as a city, effective 15 October 2005.

The Sunshine Coast Regional District was incorporated on 4 January 1967, and the Powell River Regional District on 19 December 1967. In June 2017 Elders of the Tla’amin Nation gave the word qathet to the Powell River Regional District. It means working together, and the Province changed the district's name to qathet Regional District by order on 5 July 2018.

The members of the Sechelt band approved legislation for self-government in a referendum on March 15, 1986, according to the preamble of the federal shíshálh Nation Self-Government Act. The Act was assented to on 17 June 1986 and, apart from sections 17 to 20, came into force on 9 October 1986, the day lands were transferred to the Sechelt Indian Band. A 2022 amendment continued the band under the name shíshálh Nation and the Sechelt Indian Government District as the shíshálh Nation Government District. BC Geographical Names says the District of Sechelt was re-incorporated as a district municipality on 30 June 1986. The Nation describes its government as a model of self-government since 1986.

Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada says the Tla’amin Nation entered the BC treaty process in May 1994, and that Canada, British Columbia and the Nation initialled the Tla’amin Final Agreement on October 21, 2011. Members approved it in a community vote on July 10, 2012. British Columbia's act received royal assent on March 14, 2013, and the federal Tla’amin Final Agreement Act received it on June 19, 2014. The community ratified the Tla’amin Constitution in October 2009, and the agreement took effect on April 5, 2016. The federal page gives the treaty settlement land as 8,323 hectares, made up of 1,917 hectares of former reserves and 6,405 hectares of former provincial Crown land.

On 4 October 2018 the shíshálh Nation and British Columbia signed a Foundation Agreement. The Province's news release says it covers land transfers, a land-use planning process and shared decision making, starting with forestry. A provincial fact sheet says the Province has transferred three parcels of land, restored twelve shíshálh place names, among them lekw’emin for Jervis Inlet and kalpilin for Pender Harbour, and renewed the agreement in 2025. The Province's page, updated on 23 March 2026, says negotiations on the Nation's Aboriginal title have not started.