Victoria-Beacon Hill.
3 candidates, one seat.

The Songhees Nation's page on the Signs of Lək̓ʷəŋən says the land of the lək̓ʷəŋən People is known today as the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations. The page describes seven bronze markers created in 2008 for the Inner Harbour and surrounding areas, cast from cedar carvings by Coast Salish artist Butch Dick and his son Clarence Dick Jr. It says the lək̓ʷəŋən People have hunted and gathered here for thousands of years, and that when James Douglas anchored off Clover Point in 1842 he saw the results of their land management, including controlled burning and food cultivation.

The page places six of the markers in downtown Victoria, James Bay and Beacon Hill Park. One marks the site of Fort Camosun, later Fort Victoria, on Wharf Street, where the page says lək̓ʷəŋən men and women built a wooden fort in exchange for trade goods. One stands outside City Hall, where willow-lined creeks and berry-rich meadows once ran down to the ocean and where the name means bitter cherry tree. One marks the lower causeway of the Inner Harbour, a place the page translates as place of mud, with wide tidal flats and some of the best clam beds on the coast. The page says the flats were covered when the area was filled in to build the Empress Hotel. A fourth marker, at Laurel Point, marks a nineteenth century burial ground where small shelters with carved figures stood until the 1850s. A fifth stands at the Royal BC Museum, at the corner of Government and Belleville Streets, which the page says holds cultural objects that the Lək̓ʷəŋən have loaned.

The sixth marker stands off Circle Drive in Beacon Hill Park. The page says the name of the hill means warmed by the sun, that a small village protected by a wooden wall at its foot was occupied from time to time between 1,000 and 300 years ago, and that the camas bulbs gathered in the area were an important food. BC Geographical Names records a second meaning, belly, from 1991 advice of the Songhees Band, and notes the anthropologist Wilson Duff's record of Meeqan as warmed by the sun. The Esquimalt Nation says its members belong to the Lekwungen peoples, gives its traditional name as Xʷsepsəm, and lists Sxʷeŋxʷəŋ (James Bay) among its sister nations.

BC Geographical Names records that James Douglas, a chief factor (a senior officer) of the Hudson's Bay Company, chose this area in 1841 for a new post, spent the summer of 1842 mapping the land between today's Oak Bay and Esquimalt, and on 15 March 1843 selected the site of the fort. Work began on 4 June 1843, with cedar posts for the fort wall cut on Cedar Hill, now Mount Douglas. In December 1843 the post was named Fort Victoria, and in 1852 a townsite and streets were laid out beside it. The same record says the fort was demolished on 24 November 1864.

On 30 April 1850 the chiefs and people of the Swengwhung tribe signed a deed at Fort Victoria for the land from the Island of the Dead, in the Camoson inlet, east to the Fountain Ridge and on to the strait in the bay east of Clover Point. They received 75 pounds sterling. The Chilcowitch tribe signed a deed on the same day for the land from Sandy Bay, east of Clover Point, to Point Gonzales, for 30 pounds. Both deeds say village sites and enclosed fields were kept for the people's own use and that they remained free to hunt on unoccupied land and to fish as before. Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada publishes the texts.

The Royal BC Museum says the Old Songhees Reserve, with its extensive Lukwungen village, stood across Victoria harbour from the museum's Thunderbird Park from 1844 until 1911. It describes the reserve as a gathering place for visitors from along the coast who came for ceremonies, trade and paid work in the growing city. The Songhees Nation's page says its people moved from the reserve at Songhees Point to their present reserve in 1911. The City of Victoria was incorporated on 2 August 1862, and BC Geographical Names records that it has been the provincial capital since the union with Canada in 1871.

BC Geographical Names says officers of the Hudson's Bay Company named Beacon Hill after two beacons, one on the hill and one on the bank to the south-west. When the two were lined up, sailors could steer past Brotchie Ledge into Victoria Harbour. An Admiralty chart of 1847 labelled the hill Mount Beacon. Governor James Douglas reserved the land for a park in 1858, and the Victoria Heritage Foundation says settlers already used it for horse racing and cricket, with Circle Drive now built over the race track.

The Foundation says the City of Victoria became trustee of the park in 1879 and that the park was granted to the City in trust in 1882 for public recreation and enjoyment. In the early 1880s the BC Supreme Court stopped the Agricultural Association from taking parts of the park for farming. The City held a competition for a landscape plan in 1889. The architect Henry J. Cresswell won it, and the Foundation says the City selected the designs of John Blair. Blair's plan included lakes, bridges, a zoo that opened in 1890 at Cook and Dallas, a bear pit and a deer enclosure. BC Geographical Names adds that development work began in 1888 and that Mile Zero of the Trans-Canada Highway stands on the south-west side of the hill.

The Victoria Heritage Foundation calls James Bay the oldest residential neighbourhood in Victoria. Its walking tour brochure says that when Europeans arrived, seasonal camps of the ancestors of the Songhees First Nation stood along the cliffs and a burial ground lay at Laurel Point. After James Douglas set up the fort in 1843, he reserved much of the peninsula for Beckley Farm, which supplied Hudson's Bay Company staff. The brochure says Douglas built a house in 1852 and that his son-in-law, Dr. J. S. Helmcken, built next door in the same year. BC Geographical Names says the bay is named for Douglas.

According to the brochure, the first legislative buildings of the Colony of Vancouver Island went up in 1858 to 1860, and the first James Bay Bridge in 1859, on the line of today's Causeway. The area then drew the colony's social and political leaders. Woodlands, built in 1861 at 140 Government Street, is the oldest surviving residence still in use in James Bay. In the 1880s and 1890s the west end became an industrial area with a flour mill, grain elevator, shipyard, furniture factory, biscuit factory, woollen mill and fish-processing plant, and South Park School opened in 1894.

The Foundation says the Parliament Buildings at 501 Belleville Street were built in two stages, from 1893 to 1898 and from 1911 to 1916, to designs by Francis Rattenbury, and that the earlier buildings of 1859, nicknamed the Birdcages, served for 30 years. The Legislative Assembly says Lieutenant Governor T. R. McInnes formally opened the new buildings on 10 February 1898 and that they cost over $300,000 more than the original $600,000 budget.

The Canadian Register of Historic Places says work on the Empress Hotel began in 1905, after the Inner Harbour Causeway was built and the James Bay mud flats were filled, and that the hotel at 721 Government Street was built from 1905 to 1908. The Royal BC Museum adds that the old James Bay bridge stood where Government Street now runs in front of the hotel. The Ogden Point Breakwater, completed in 1917, was built from more than 10,000 granite blocks to serve the shipping expected after the Panama Canal opened. The brochure says redevelopment from the 1950s to the 1970s destroyed many historic buildings, and that community action in the 1970s led the municipal government to limit high-rises and keep some heritage buildings.

Parks Canada lists 1858 to 1923 as the significant years of Victoria's Chinatown and 1875 to 1923 as the years its buildings went up. It says the district is the oldest surviving Chinatown in Canada and was the largest urban centre of Chinese population in Canada through the first decade of the twentieth century. For nearly three decades before the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed, Victoria was the first port of entry for most Chinese immigrants. Parks Canada describes a three-block area of downtown Victoria focused on Fisgard Street, reached through alleys and passages. The national designation of 24 November 1995 covers two groups of buildings and the open spaces between them.

The Victoria Heritage Foundation says North Park was the first suburb to which wealthy Chinese businessmen and their families moved before the First World War, and that by the Second World War many Chinese families lived there. Their children went to George Jay School for regular lessons and to the Chinese School on Fisgard Street after hours. The Foundation also records that storms in 1909 washed away part of Ross Bay Cemetery, including many graves of Chinese and Japanese people, and that the Chinese community moved many of the remaining Chinese graves to its new cemetery at Harling Point.

The Victoria Heritage Foundation's Fernwood walking tour says James Douglas bought the land around Fort Victoria for the Hudson's Bay Company in 1850 and sold large parcels to early colonists. Ten acres were set aside as a school reserve, which is now the site of Central Middle School. The surveyor Benjamin Pearse bought the 95-acre parcel east of Fernwood Road, and in 1860 he built a fieldstone villa named Fernwood Manor, which was torn down in 1969 and gave the neighbourhood its name. Springs in the gravel ridge supplied drinking water for the town until the mid 1870s, when Victoria began piping water from Elk Lake. Gravel from the ridge paved roads and sidewalks and filled the James Bay mud flats for the Causeway and the Empress Hotel. A streetcar line from James Bay to Fernwood opened in 1891, and the Foundation dates today's streets and many houses to 1890 to 1912.

North Park lies next to the downtown core. The Foundation's North Park tour says its northern part was developed later than the south because it belonged to Rock Bay, the farm estate of Roderick and Sarah Finlayson. Finlayson, an officer of the Hudson's Bay Company, was in charge of Fort Victoria from 1844 to 1849 and bought 103 acres from the company in the 1850s. He died in 1892 and Sarah Finlayson in January 1906, and the estate was then divided into lots. Many North Park homes were built from 1907 to the start of the First World War, in what the Foundation calls Victoria's greatest building boom, and George Jay Elementary and Victoria High School were built nearby.

The Victoria Heritage Foundation's Fairfield tour says the low-lying south-west part of Fairfield was once open meadow, grassland and marsh with two small streams, which the Songhees used as a winter route for carrying canoes overland to avoid the harbour entrance in heavy seas. It says James Douglas landed at Clover Point in 1843 to set up a trading post, then bought 418 acres for himself and named the land Fairfield Farm. To the east lay the land of Joseph Pemberton and of Isabella Ross, whom the Foundation calls the first female landowner in British Columbia. A military presence stood on the waterfront between Cook Street and Clover Point as early as 1866, and a rifle range operated there from 1900 to 1931.

Streetcars opened Fairfield to building. The Foundation says the No. 6 Foul Bay line began running in 1909, during the building boom of 1907 to 1913, and that Fairfield grew into a suburb along the streetcar route. Craigdarroch Castle was built in Rockland from 1887 to 1890 for the coal industrialist Robert Dunsmuir. The Canadian Register of Historic Places says the castle stands on a remnant of the original 11-hectare Dunsmuir estate and dominates the surrounding Rockland neighbourhood. Ross Bay Cemetery received its first burial in December 1872 and opened officially in 1873, after residents objected to a site in James Bay. The Foundation records that the City bought 12 acres from Robert Burnaby, and that storms in 1909 led the City to build a seawall along Ross Bay.