ABSTRACT
The history of regional/metropolitan governance in British Columbia (BC) is both long and short. Short because its recent past dates only from the mid-1960s when BC established a province-wide system of Regional Districts-a template for mostly voluntary, largely indirectly elected, service delivery institutions to provide a range of intermunicipal/jurisdictional functions.1 One of these-the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD)—was established in 1967, just forty years ago (Oberlander and Smith, 1993). The history is long because despite this rather recent experience in metropolitan governing, Greater Vancouver, and its adjacent metropolitan neighbors, have a much longer history of city-regional cooperation (Oberlander and Smith, 1998; Smith, 1994). What has been distinctive about the Vancouver metropolitan region is that much of this experience of determining regional solutions to local challenges has been the result of local recognition of need and intermunicipal initiatives rather than provincial action. Where provincial action has occurred, it has often been described as “gentle imposition.”2 Examples of this interlocal cooperation include creation of a regional sewerage and drainage district before World War I, a new regional water board in 1926, health boards in the 1930s and 1940s, and the establishment of the Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board (LMRPB) in 1948 (Oberlander and Smith, 1993). In this local inclination to regional collective action, the Vancouver city-region stands out as something of a metropolitan exception in Canada.
