Vancouver-Strathcona.
4 candidates, one seat.

Three Nations describe the land around Burrard Inlet as their territory, each in its own words. Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw, the Squamish Nation, says its traditional territory takes in all of Howe Sound, Burrard Inlet and English Bay, and that it holds 23 villages on 28.28 square kilometres of land. səlilwətaɬ, the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, translates its name as People of the Inlet and says that archaeological evidence and its oral history show its people have lived in the territory for thousands of years. Musqueam says its ancestors have lived throughout the Fraser River estuary for thousands of years, and that portions of its territory are called Vancouver and Burnaby today.

The Canadian Encyclopedia says that local Coast Salish people knew the future site of Gastown as a portage between Burrard Inlet and False Creek, where Carrall Street runs today. At high tide a canoe could be paddled between the two bodies of water. On the Inlet side stood a landmark named Lekleki, which the encyclopedia translates as grove of beautiful trees, between today's Abbot Street and Carrall Street. A large maple in that grove later served as a gathering place for the first settlers.

The City of Vancouver says Strathcona grew from the shacks and small buildings around the Hastings Mill site, and that the area was called the East End after the East End School at the corner of Powell Street and Jackson Avenue. The streets were named after directors of the Vancouver Improvement Company, which owned and subdivided the land. The City lists the groups who lived there in turn: British, Irish, Russian, Croatian, Greek, Scandinavian, Japanese and Chinese, many of whom later moved to other parts of the city.

City planners began to call the area Strathcona in the 1950s, after the elementary school built in 1897 at Jackson Avenue and Keefer Street. The City names Lord Strathcona School as one of the oldest school buildings still standing in Vancouver, and Seymour School No. 1, built in 1900, as the oldest wooden school building in the city. Gregory Tom, principal of Strathcona School, built the Principal's House at Princess Avenue and Keefer Street in 1900. St. Francis Xavier Church at 579 East Pender Street was built in 1919. It housed Swedish, Greek and Ukrainian congregations and now serves the Chinese Canadian Catholic community.

The Canadian Encyclopedia says that in September 1867 John Deighton, nicknamed Gassy Jack, paddled to the Burrard Inlet shore with a barrel of whisky, two hens and a dog. According to legend, he offered the sawmill workers whisky in exchange for building him a saloon. The shack measured 12 by 24 feet, and the Globe Saloon was open within 24 hours. The settlement that grew around it between Carrall and Cambie Streets was surveyed in 1870 as Granville Townsite, though most people called it Gastown. The large maple at Lekleki burned in the fire of 1886 and is remembered in the name Maple Tree Square, the central intersection of Gastown.

The City of Vancouver was incorporated on 6 April 1886. On 13 June 1886, the encyclopedia says, a Canadian Pacific Railway land-clearing fire went out of control and burned Vancouver to the ground. The Canadian Register of Historic Places counts 141 buildings in the Gastown Historic District, built mostly between 1886 and 1914, and says the provincial government designated Gastown a heritage area in 1971. The Government of Canada recognized the district as a national historic site in 2009. The commission's report places Gastown and Yaletown in one district, Vancouver-Yaletown, and draws the western boundary of Vancouver-Strathcona through Gastown at Abbot Street, so this district holds the part east of that street.

Parks Canada says Vancouver's Chinatown began in the early 1880s, when Chinese people settled at the end of Carrall Street. After Vancouver was incorporated in 1886, the Chinese were granted a 65 hectare lease on the outskirts of town, and by the end of that year a small settlement stood on Dupont Street, named East Pender Street after 1904, west of Main Street. Parks Canada gives the neighbourhood's population as 6,484 in 1921. Many of the buildings standing today went up in the 1910s and 1920s, among them commercial buildings put up by Chinese merchants and society buildings for the cultural associations. Parks Canada says the neighbourhood went into a period of stagnation after the Chinese Immigration Act was implemented in 1923.

The Wing Sang Building at 51 East Pender Street was built in 1889 by the merchant Yip Sang. The Register says its 1889 portion is reportedly the oldest extant building in Chinatown, and that a six-storey residence and warehouse was added at the rear in 1912. It also says Yip Sang is reported to have claimed compensation in 1907 and 1908 for damage done in the anti-Oriental riots of 1907. The City dates those riots to a white supremacist rally in September 1907. The Chinese Canadian Museum says the building became the home of the Vancouver Chinese Independent School in 1914, and the museum itself opened there on 1 July 2023.

Vancouver's Chinatown was designated a national historic site of Canada in June 2010, according to the Register, which records the formal recognition in 2011. The Register lists the Chinese Cultural Centre, built from 1981 to 1986, the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Chinese Classical Garden and Park, dated 1986, and the Millennium Gate of 2002 among the newer works that add to the traditional character of the area. It says the area has been protected since 1971 under provincial and municipal heritage law, and that Chinatown was the leading Chinatown in Canada from the early 1900s until the 1970s.

The City of Vancouver says the Powell Street area was tied to Japanese Canadian social, economic and cultural life from the 1890s to 1942. Residents called it Nihonmachi, Japantown or Little Tokyo. The City says the number of Japanese workers at the Hastings Mill passed the number of Chinese workers, and that boarding houses stood along Alexander, Powell, Cordova, Carrall and Main Streets. In September 1907 a white supremacist rally led to anti-Asian riots aimed at the Chinese and Japanese neighbourhoods. Shortly afterward, the City says, immigration from Japan was limited to 400 individuals per year.

The Vancouver Japanese Language School was founded in 1906. Parks Canada says the present Art Deco building at 487 Alexander Street went up in 1928 after community fundraising, and that the school was the first and largest of its kind in Canada. The Vancouver Asahi baseball club was formed in 1914 and played at the Powell Street Grounds, officially named Oppenheimer Park, the Canadian Encyclopedia says.

In 1942 the federal government ordered Japanese Canadians out of a zone within 100 miles of the BC coast. The Nikkei National Museum says most of the people removed were Canadian citizens and that more than half were born in Canada. Parks Canada says the government seized all property owned by people of Japanese descent in 1943. It used the language school building but did not sell it, and returned it to the community in 1953. The Powell Street Festival Society says its festival first took place in 1977.

The City says that in the 1950s its planners chose Strathcona for a redevelopment of public housing in blocks of identical apartment buildings and townhouses, together with an inner-city freeway that would have destroyed Gastown and Chinatown. Strathcona residents organized against the plans. By the time the proposals were shelved, 15 blocks of the neighbourhood had been demolished. In 1968 the community persuaded the federal, provincial and municipal governments to support a $5 million rehabilitation project for homes, streets and sidewalks, with new parks.

Hogan's Alley was another name for Park Lane, which ran between Union and Prior Streets from near Main Street to Jackson Avenue, the City says. It describes the lane as the home of Vancouver's largest Black and African diaspora community, and lists its own actions toward the area: a 1931 bylaw zoning it as industrial, a 1957 study naming Strathcona among the City's worst areas in need of redevelopment, and a transportation plan presented to Council in 1967. From 1967 to 1972 the City acquired the land, demolished buildings and completed the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts. The City of Vancouver Archives says a 1965 public vote (a plebiscite) approved replacing the Georgia Viaduct.

The City says the community was displaced over decades by its actions. Council has approved a memorandum of understanding with the Hogan's Alley Society for the block at 898 Main Street, where the Northeast False Creek Plan includes a cultural centre. The City says that redevelopment needs the removal of the viaducts and a new street network.

The City of Vancouver says the original civic centre of the Downtown Eastside stood around Main and Hastings Streets, with City Hall, the City Market, the Carnegie Public Library and many theatres, while the Hastings Mill and much of the early industry lay farther east. Downtown's focus moved west after the courthouse opened on Georgia Street in 1906. The City dates the end of street car service and the closing of the interurban station to 1958, the end of the North Shore ferries to 1959, and the closing of Woodward's department store to 1992. It credits housing projects funded by the Province and the City, and the initiatives of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, with improving conditions for low-income residents.

The Supreme Court of Canada, in its reasons of 30 September 2011, records that injection drug use in the Downtown Eastside reached crisis levels in the early 1990s, that epidemics of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C followed, and that a public health emergency was declared there in September 1997. Insite, a site where people inject drugs under medical supervision, received a conditional federal exemption in September 2003 and opened days later. The federal government did not extend the exemption in 2008, and the court ordered the Minister of Health to grant one.

The Canadian Encyclopedia says BC Housing bought at least 16 Downtown Eastside hotels ahead of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games to keep them as social housing. The City says it completed a Downtown Eastside community plan in 2014.

Only parts of Mount Pleasant and Grandview-Woodland lie in the district. The City says Mount Pleasant was named in 1888 after the Irish birthplace of the wife of H.V. Edmonds, clerk of the municipal council in New Westminster and the first owner of much of the land. By 1904, it says, the area had a tannery, two slaughter houses, four breweries and a train station. During the First World War the tidal flats of False Creek from Main Street to Clark Drive were filled to make room for two railway terminals and railyards, which removed half of Mount Pleasant's waterfront and filled the mouth of Brewery Creek.

In Grandview, the City says the first house was built in 1891, the year the interurban railway to New Westminster opened with hourly runs along Park Drive, renamed Commercial Drive in 1911. Italian, Chinese and East European immigrants arrived after the First World War, and a second wave of Italian immigrants came after the Second World War. Britannia Community Services Centre, west of Commercial Drive at Napier Street, was built in 1975 and combined recreation, learning and social services. The City adds that residents in the 1970s joined a successful lobby against a freeway down Venables Street. Elections BC lists Britannia Community Centre, Mount Pleasant Community Centre and Queen Alexandra Elementary School among 15 voting places inside the district in 2024.