Welcome to Vancouver

Abstract

Vancouver is a very different city today than it was thirty years ago. As late as the early 1970s over 85 percent of the residents of Greater Vancouver were of European origin, and more than 60 percent still identified with family ancestry in Britain. A provincial city of less than one million people tied historically to the resource economy of the surrounding hinterland, Vancouver was – in the oft-repeated words of journalist Allan Fotheringham – “a village on the edge of the rainforest.”