Salmon Arm-Shuswap.
5 candidates, one seat.

Splatsin describes itself as the southernmost tribe of the Secwépemc Nation. It gives its territory as stretching from Mica Creek in the north to Kettle Falls, Washington in the south, and from Monte Lake in the west to Nelson in the east. Its website says Splatsin means riverbanks, where the Splatsinac, the Splatsin people, lived along both banks of the Shuswap, Eagle and Salmon Rivers. Before contact with European settlers, it says, there were Splatsin village sites at Sek’maws (Sicamous), Splatsinuwi (Enderby), Swiwaso’s (Mara Lake) and Cqlqin (Mabel Lake). The Sicamous & District Museum records that before the smallpox epidemic of 1862 there were 32 bands within Secwépemc territory, and that 17 remain.

The Adams Lake Indian Band, whose Secwépemc name is Sexqeltqín, writes that pit-house remains on the shores of its lakes and rivers are as old as nine thousand years. It says the Joint Reserve Commission allotted seven reserves to the Band in 1877, a total the Band gives as 2,785 hectares. Reserve 6, Sxwetsmèllp, lies on the western limits of the municipality of Salmon Arm, and Reserve 7 lies west of the Salmon River within the city. The Neskonlith Indian Band lists a reserve of 517 hectares, Switsemalph IR 3, on the western boundary of the city of Salmon Arm.

The Okanagan Nation Alliance, which uses the name Syilx Okanagan Nation, lists the Okanagan Indian Band as a member community at the head of Okanagan Lake. The Alliance counts six reserves for the Band, spread from Armstrong to Winfield and the west side of Okanagan Lake. The Band's own website counts seven reserves of 11,282 hectares in all. The commission's report places Okanagan 1 in this district. It records that residents of that reserve told the commission they would prefer a Vernon district, that other Band reserves lie in Salmon Arm-Shuswap, and that moving Okanagan 1 would have raised the population of Vernon-Lumby and made the boundary changes there harder. The reserve stayed.

BC Geographical Names lists Shuswap Lake as a name from the Secwepemctsín language. The Geographic Board of Canada adopted the spelling on 30 June 1902, following Arrowsmith's map of 1859, and the Names Office records earlier spellings, Schewhap on a map of 1832 and Shoushwap on one of 1837. It adds that an older name for the lake is said to mean spider or insect because the arms of the lake look like the legs of an insect.

Salmon Arm takes its name from the southwest arm of the lake. The Names Office quotes a book of British Columbia place names which says salmon swarmed up the creeks and river there in such numbers that settlers pitchforked them out of the water and used them to fertilise their fields. The Sicamous post office opened on 1 November 1887, and its name is linked to the Schikmouse Narrows that Moberly's map of 1866 shows. One account the Names Office quotes, printed in the Vernon News on 18 July 1918, gives the meaning as River circling mountains.

The Falkland post office opened on 1 January 1898. From 1 July 1906 to 1 October 1912 it was named Slahaltkan, and then it took back the name Falkland. The Names Office says the place is named for Colonel Falkland George Edgeworth Warren (1834 to 1908), who retired from the Royal Horse Artillery and came to the area in 1893.

The Sicamous & District Museum says Walter Moberly and his team found the Eagle Pass in 1865 and that it became the route of the overland railway. In 1883 the province commissioned a wagon road from Eagle Pass Landing, now Old Town Bay, to Revelstoke, and the railway of 1885 destroyed part of it. Before and during construction, the museum says, paddlewheel steamers carried most people and freight between Savona, Kamloops, Chase, Seymour Arm, Salmon Arm, Eagle Pass Landing, Sicamous and Enderby. Most of them disappeared once the railway and the roads were finished.

The Salmon Arm Museum's short history says rumours that the railway would bridge the lake from Engineer's Point to Sunnybrae led T.H. Hatherly and his son James to homestead on the north side in 1885. They became, in the museum's words, the first white settlers in the area. Track layers passed through Salmon Arm in the first week of September 1885. The museum says Salmon Arm officially began in 1890, when residents petitioned the federal government for a post office.

At Sicamous, the museum says, the railway needed timber for bridges, ties and buildings, and that gave a boost to a growing lumber industry. A large farm at Malakwa sent early potatoes, celery and lettuce to Calgary by the railway car load, and settlers from Finland came to the Cambie and Malakwa area. The railway company added junction equipment and a hotel in the late 1890s and early 1900s, supplied water and electricity to its buildings and to homes on what is now called CPR Hill, and stayed the largest employer in Sicamous until the 1950s.

The Encyclopedia of British Columbia says the Shuswap & Okanagan Railway was incorporated in 1886 to build a line from the Canadian Pacific main line at Sicamous to Okanagan Lake near Vernon. The 82-kilometre line, leased by the Canadian Pacific, was completed in 1892. A 1976 article in Canadian Rail, the magazine of the Canadian Railroad Historical Association, gives June 1893 for the completion to Okanagan Landing and describes the line running from Sicamous down the west shore of Mara Lake, through Mara and Grindrod, Enderby and Armstrong to Vernon. BC Geographical Names says the Enderby townsite was surveyed in 1885 and first called Belvidere, that the place was known as Lambly's Landing after the brothers Thomas and Robert Lambly, who built a freight warehouse there in 1878, and that one account has the name Enderby chosen at an afternoon tea in 1887, after a poem by Jean Ingelow. The Enderby post office opened on 1 November 1887, and the City of Enderby was incorporated on 1 March 1905 with George Bell as mayor.

Salmon Arm became a municipality on 15 May 1905, according to the Salmon Arm Museum, after a majority of residents signed a petition for incorporation. Armstrong's post office opened on 1 July 1892. The City of Armstrong says the town is named for William Charles Heaton-Armstrong, who arranged the bond issue for the railway, and that in 1892 it consisted of one boxcar that served as a station and a home for the rail agent. People from Lansdowne, then the largest settlement in Spallumcheen, moved their buildings to the tracks. BC Geographical Names records a second account that names Hector Armstrong of London. The City gives its incorporation date as March 26, 1913, and BC Geographical Names gives 31 March 1913.

The Salmon Arm Museum credits A.J. Palmer with starting the custom of displaying produce and stock, and it dates the first horticultural exhibition in Salmon Arm to c. 1897. By 1915 enough dairy farmers had settled in the valley to form the Salmon Arm Co-operative Creamery Association. Butter output was 28,000 pounds in the first year and 480,000 pounds in 1944. The fruit pack topped 400,000 boxes in 1946 and held steady until the winter of 1949 to 1950, when freezing temperatures that the museum calls unprecedented damaged fruit operations across the city. In the 1950s lumber and plywood manufacturing grew in the local economy, and former fruit land became small holdings and housing subdivisions.

The Greater Vernon Museum says residents of the Village of Armstrong founded a creamery in 1902 by selling shares in land. In 1916 it joined the North Okanagan Creamery Association, and by 1923 it produced 12,000 pounds of butter a month. A fire destroyed the creamery in 1927. A cheese factory opened in 1938, the Armstrong Cheese Co-Operative was incorporated in 1939, and sales reached 820,000 pounds a year by 1943. Saputo closed the Armstrong plant in 2004, and the Village Cheese Company had opened in Armstrong in 1998. The Armstrong IPE & Stampede says on its website that its fair has been held since 1901.

The Sicamous & District Museum says that by the early 1960s, with better highways, tourism had become a larger part of the economy of Sicamous. The houseboat industry that began in the late 1960s led the way, and snowmobiling followed in the early 1990s. The museum says Sicamous incorporated in 1989 and became the District of Sicamous in December of that year. BC Geographical Names gives the date as 4 December 1989.

The Salmon Arm Museum says provincial approval for urban status came on March 12, 1912, that the city reverted to a village in 1958 for more favourable treatment under the Municipal Act, and that in 1970 village and city voted to unite as a city municipality. BC Geographical Names records the form Salmon Arm (Village) from 1 September 1958, and the form Salmon Arm (community) from 1 September 1970, following the amalgamation of the village area within the District Municipality of Salmon Arm. It records that the municipality was re-incorporated as a city by provincial Order in Council 89 of 11 February 2005, effective 14 May 2005, as the City of Salmon Arm.

The Province's summary of the 2023 wildfire season lists the Bush Creek East fire (K21633) as discovered on 12 July, naturally caused, and 45,613 hectares in size. It says Bush Creek East and the Lower East Adams Lake fire (K21620) in the Shuswap merged. The Columbia Shuswap Regional District reported that as of 4 September 2023 at 2 PM there were 176 total structure losses and 50 partially damaged structures in the North Shuswap area. It called the numbers approximate, because a full damage assessment could not be completed while the fire was still burning. Its update of 20 August 2023 describes crews at work north of Shuswap Lake, in the Celista and Magna Bay area, and a task force above Sorrento putting hand line in above homes.