In contrast to Alberta’s lovely, verdant prairies, building railways and roads through BC’s mountains required countless tons of dynamite and cost hundreds of human lives. State-led developmentalism was a hallmark of the province’s greatest Social Credit leader, former premier William Andrew Cecil Bennett, who believed that the provincial government had to clear the way so that “free enterprise” could take off.

Long before Bennett, in 1871, BC entered Confederation only after receiving Ottawa’s promise to build a railway across the province to the West Coast and assume the debt of the then-Colony of BC. Canada needed its Pacific gateway and paid a heavy cost for it, while BC was transformed from colony to province largely on its own terms.

This established a lasting pattern in BC’s relationship with Ottawa: the province could negotiate terms and reliably extract concessions from the federal government. Canada has little choice but to accommodate BC, especially today, when the Liberal government speaks of diversifying trade, particularly with Asia, as that trade must flow through BC to reach the Pacific.

Meanwhile, Alberta and Saskatchewan had very different origins as provinces. Unlike BC, which negotiated its entry into Canada as a colony, both were statutory creations of the Dominion government in 1905, carved out of the then-centrally governed North-West Territories.

The long push for responsible government within Canada was followed by another struggle over the two new provinces’ public lands and resources, control of which was not devolved to Alberta and Saskatchewan until 1930. BC, on the other hand, generally retained control of most of its own resource base during that period, apart from tracts of land that concerned building railways.

Provincial equality was withheld from Alberta and Saskatchewan for far longer, and that disparity has left a seemingly permanent impression. Immigration patterns also helped distinguish BC from its Western cousins. Alberta’s agrarian movements received a huge shot in the arm from American migrants, such as the Missouri-born farm leader Henry Wise Wood, who helped organize both farmers’ political action and cooperative wheat marketing.

The Prairie populist spirit owes much to these newcomers, as well as to the many Ukrainian immigrants who came to Canada to escape the oppressive Russian Empire. These arrivals did not always fit comfortably within the imperial and, later, Laurentian systems.

BC, meanwhile, received a much larger influx of immigrants from the British Isles. With political and economic power concentrated on the coast, Vancouver and Victoria were home to British magnates and marked by strong Royal Navy connections and imperial political loyalties.

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