Lower Mainland

Geographic region at the mouth of the Fraser River in the southwest corner of the Canadian province of British Columbia, traditionally encompassing area code 604. Anchored by the city of [Vancouver], the region includes West Vancouver, North Vancouver and Deep Cove to the north (by some counts as far as Lions Bay, Squamish and Whistler), Richmond, Surrey (which will someday supplant Vancouver as the main driver of the region), Delta and Tsawassen to the south (up to the US border at the 49th parallel in other words), Burnaby, New Westminster, Langley, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Abbotsford, Chilliwack and on up the Fraser Valley until Hope (where Highway 1 enters the Coquihalla Pass) to the east, and the UBC grounds to the west. In some circles the description is equivalent to the labels "Greater Vancouver", Metro Vancouver or the GRVD.

It is its own little world, separated from the other main urban regions of Victoria, BC by the Salish Sea (the Sunshine Coast is excluded from most conceptions of the Lower Mainland, given that though it is still part of the mainland, ferries are still required to visit portions of it) and Seattle, Washington by the US/Canada border. Other large Canadian cities are quite remote (Calgary is the next province over, on the other side of the Rocky Mountains, and in the time it takes to drive there you could head south and visit Portland, Oregon and northern California. Consequently anyone you met calling local BBSes in the 20th century in the Lower Mainland was very likely living somewhere in this little bottled-up cul-de-sac constrained by the ocean on the west, the border on the south, the mountains on the north and the incredible distances to the east. But confined as it is, it still sprawls enough that callers within the same area code sometimes would be long distance from each other -- memorably, a caller from North Vancouver was long distance from a caller from Surrey, but Vancouver was a local call to both of them, so a Vancouver BBS is where they conducted their interactions at no cost.

Culturally and climatically the Lower Mainland has traditionally had more in common with Seattle and Portland (and broadly, the American Pacific Northwest) than with other major Canadian cities. They are all relatively young Pacific coast seaports living, in a sense, in the resource-extraction West Coast counter-cultural shadow of San Francisco. Latitudinally it is also more in line with Microsoft in Redmond, Apple in Cupertino and Google in Mountain View -- the Silicon Valley tech axis vs. the old money and other established industries on the east coast. And of course there is immigration and there are cultural connections across the Pacific with Japan, China, Korea and India. Relative to the east coast, ties to Europe are considerably weaker. And as with other West Coast locales in the Pacific Time Zone (but now locally UTC-7 year-round), if you find yourself up late chatting on the [IRC], you stand a better chance of interacting with daywalking Hawaiians and Australians than with other North Americans.