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Burnaby is a city in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia, Canada. Located in the centre of the Burrard Peninsula, it neighbours the City of Vancouver to the west, the District of North Vancouver across the confluence of the Burrard Inlet with its Indian Arm to the north, Port Moody and Coquitlam to the east, New Westminster and Surrey across the Fraser River to the southeast, and Richmond on Lulu Island to the southwest. It has a population of 249,125 as of the 2021 census.
Burnaby was incorporated in 1892 and achieved its city status in 1992. A member municipality of Metro Vancouver, it is British Columbia's third-largest city by population (after Vancouver and Surrey), and is the seat of Metro Vancouver's regional district government. 25% of Burnaby's land is designated as parks and open spaces, one of the highest in North America.
The main campuses of Simon Fraser University and the British Columbia Institute of Technology are located in Burnaby. It is home to high-tech companies such as Ballard Power (fuel cell), Clio (legal software), D-Wave Systems (quantum computing), and EA Vancouver. Burnaby's Metropolis at Metrotown is the largest mall in British Columbia, the third most visited in Canada and the fifth largest in the nation. Canada's largest film and television production studio and more than 60% of BC's are in Burnaby, contributing to the growth of Hollywood North.
The city is served by SkyTrain's Expo Line and Millennium Line. Metrotown station in Metrotown is the busiest station on weekends and the second-busiest on weekdays in regional Vancouver's urban transit system as of 2021.
The Coast Salish people living in BC and Washington state numbered more than 100,000 people, a level of population density supported by agriculture in other geographies. Techniques to preserve and store surplus food sustained a hierarchical society. Burnaby's marshlands along its rivers and lakes were cranberry harvesting areas for numerous villages, some numbering over 1,000 residents. Indigenous people travelled through Burnaby to reach the mouth of Brunette and Fraser River for the bountiful fishing seasons, eulachon in the spring and sockeye salmon in the late summer. Early European explorers and fur traders introduced diseases that decimated the Indigenous population. This false appearance of Burnaby as a vast open space, along with traditional Indigenous farming techniques which did not permanently alter the landscape, meant Indigenous land in Burnaby was mislabelled as terra nullius.
Settlers in Burnaby acquired land through a process called pre-emption which allowed people to claim a piece of land by clearing forests and building houses. Indigenous people were excluded from pre-emption. Royal Engineers dispossessed land from Indigenous people with the assistance of military force including the original routes of North Road, Kingsway, Canada Way, and Marine Drive. Logging permits given to settlers destroyed the forests of southern Burnaby which had provided vital sustenance for Indigenous people.
The City of Burnaby is named after Burnaby Lake, in turn named after Robert Burnaby, who was a Freemasonry, explorer, and legislator. He was previously private secretary to Colonel Richard Moody, the first land commissioner for the Colony of British of Columbia. In 1859, Burnaby surveyed a freshwater lake in the city's geographic centre. Moody named it Burnaby Lake.
Burnaby was established in 1891 and incorporated a year later in 1892. In the same year, the interurban tram connecting Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster began construction.
As Vancouver expanded and became a metropolis, Burnaby was one of the first-tier suburbs of Vancouver, along with North Vancouver and Richmond. During the suburbanization of Burnaby, "Mid-Century Vernacular" homes were built by the hundreds to satisfy demand by new residents. The establishment of British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) in 1960 and Simon Fraser University (SFU) in 1965 helped Burnaby gradually become more urban in character. In 1992, one hundred years after its incorporation, Burnaby officially became a city.
Since the 1970s, Burnaby has seen a decline in resource sectors and a subsequent rise of high value-added services and technology sectors. The presence of BCIT and SFU promoted research & development in the area. For example, manufacturing plants near Still Creek closed in the late 1970s, only to reopen few years later as film production studios. The continued expansion of media production in Burnaby contributed to Hollywood North.
Burnaby is home to many industrial and commercial firms. British Columbia's largest (and Canada's second largest) commercial shopping mall, Metropolis at Metrotown, is located in Burnaby, as well as malls in Brentwood and Lougheed town centres. Still, Burnaby's ratio of park land to residents is one of the highest in North America. It also maintains some agricultural land, particularly along the Fraser foreshore flats in the Big Bend neighbourhood along its southern perimeter.
Burnaby has an oceanic climate (Cfb) with mild, dry summers and cool, rainy winters.
In 2016, the median age is 40.3 years old, slightly younger than the British Columbia median of 43.0 years old.
| + Panethnicity groups in Burnaby (2001–2021) ! rowspan="2" | Panethnicity group ! colspan="2" | 2021 ! colspan="2" | 2016 ! colspan="2" | 2011 ! colspan="2" | 2006 ! colspan="2" | 2001 | ||||
| East Asian | 94,895 | 89,470 | 79,205 | 71,435 | 59,090 | |||||
| European | 74,860 | 79,575 | 86,015 | 86,560 | 95,165 | |||||
| South Asian | 23,155 | 18,735 | 17,480 | 16,840 | 14,960 | |||||
| 20,560 | 17,620 | 16,850 | 10,915 | 7,965 | ||||||
| Middle Eastern | 8,975 | 6,660 | 5,975 | 3,700 | 3,580 | |||||
| Latin American | 6,155 | 4,630 | 3,765 | 2,785 | 3,020 | |||||
| African-Canadian | 4,985 | 3,670 | 3,445 | 2,450 | 2,480 | |||||
| Indigenous | 4,175 | 4,195 | 3,295 | 3,005 | 3,145 | |||||
| Other/multiracial | 7,965 | 5,530 | 4,220 | 3,170 | 1,975 | |||||
Major technology firms such as Ballard Power (fuel cell), D-Wave Systems (quantum computing), Clio (legal tech), Creo (imaging), and Electronic Arts Canada (studio) have their headquarters in Burnaby.
Metropolis mall located in the Metrotown neighbourhood, the Downtown of Burnaby, is the largest mall in British Columbia with West Vancouver's Park Royal in second place. It is the second largest in Canada behind the first-place West Edmonton Mall in Alberta. Metropolis was the second most visited mall in Canada in 2017 and third most visited in 2018.
Heavy industry companies including Chevron Corporation and Petro-Canada petroleum Oil refinery Petroleum on the shores of Burrard Inlet.
Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, Pacific Blue Cross and Nokia have significant facilities in Burnaby.
Other firms with operations based in Burnaby include Canada Wide Media, Doteasy, Telus Communications, Teradici, Mercedes-Benz Fuel Cell, HSBC Group Systems Development Centre, and TransLink. eBay ceased local operations in 2009.
The British Columbia School for the Deaf is located on the same grounds of the Burnaby South Secondary School.
British Columbia Institute of Technology's main campus in Burnaby, home to more than 49,000 full-time and part-time students, was established in 1964. A new $78 million, net-zero emission Health Science Centre, expected to open in late 2021, will accommodate 7,000 students.
Burnaby Public Library was first established in 1954. It currently has four locations throughout the city, including the Bobbie Prittie Metrotown, McGill, Tommy Douglas and Cameron branches in each of the four town centres. The library system holds over three million items in circulation, with more than 5,000 visitors per day.
Many cultural facilities are located in or around Deer Lake Park, including the Burnaby Art Gallery, Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, and the Burnaby Village Museum.
Michael J. Fox Theatre, a community theatre that seats 613, with 11 wheelchair spaces, is situated within Burnaby South Secondary School.
Burnaby co-hosted the 1973 Canada Games with New Westminster.
Burnaby Velodrome hosted the National Junior and U17 Track Championship in 2014.
Burnaby was the host for the 2014 IQA Global Games, the second edition of the international quidditch championship.
The Expo Line, completed in 1986, crosses the south along Kingsway. The Millennium Line, completed in 2002, follows Lougheed Highway. The SkyTrain has encouraged closer connections to New Westminster, Vancouver, and Surrey, as well as dense urban development at Lougheed Town Centre on the city's eastern border, at Brentwood Town Centre in the centre-west, Edmonds–Highgate in the southeast and, most notably, at Metrotown in the south.
Major north–south streets crossing the city include Boundary Road, Willingdon Avenue, Royal Oak Avenue, Kensington Avenue, Sperling Avenue, Gaglardi Way, Cariboo Road, and North Road. East–west routes linking Burnaby's neighbouring cities to each other include Hastings Street, Barnet Highway, the Lougheed Highway, Kingsway (which follows the old horse trail between Vancouver and New Westminster), Canada Way and Marine Drive/Marine Way. Douglas Road, which used to cross the city from northwest to southeast, has largely been absorbed by the Trans-Canada Highway and Canada Way.
Since the 1990s, more than of bike routes and urban trails have been laid in Burnaby.
The city is served by Metro Vancouver's bus system, run by the Coast Mountain Bus Company, a division of TransLink, the region's transportation authority. The 49 bus route, connecting Metrotown and the University of British Columbia, is the second most boarded bus route after route 99, which is the busiest bus route in North America. Burnaby is also served by the R5 Hastings St RapidBus.
The 2050 Burnaby Transportation Plan, adopted in December 2021, outlines three targets: to reduce traffic fatalities to zero, to increase public transit and active transportation to 75 percent of all trips, and to reduce vehicle emissions by 100 percent.
| + Burnaby provincial election results ! colspan="2" scope="col" | Year ! colspan="2" | BC Liberal ! colspan="2" | Green ! colspan="2" scope="col" | New Democratic | |
| ! 202029% | 22,149 | 12% | 9,097 | 59% | 45,721 |
Politically, Burnaby has maintained a left-wing city council closely affiliated with the provincial NDP and school board for many years, while sometimes electing more conservative legislators provincially (from the Social Credit and BC Liberal parties) and federally (from the Reform, Alliance, and Conservative parties). Its longest-serving politician had been Svend Robinson of the New Democratic Party (NDP), Canada's first openly gay member of Parliament, but after 25 years and seven elections he resigned his post in early 2004 after stealing and then returning an expensive ring. Burnaby voters endorsed his assistant, Bill Siksay, as his replacement in the 2004 Canadian federal election. In the May 2013 provincial election, residents of the city sent 3 NDP MLAs and one Liberal MLA to the British Columbia legislature. The NDP MLA for Burnaby-Lougheed, Jane Shin, faced controversy after the election for misrepresenting herself as a physician despite not having completed a medical residency nor holding a licence to practice medicine.
According to a 2009 survey by Maclean's magazine, Burnaby was Canada's best-run city. The survey looks at a city's efficiency, the cost of producing results, and the effectiveness of its city services. However, Maclean's did note that Burnaby has one of the worst municipal voter turnouts in the country, at 26 percent. In 2015, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) included Burnaby as a Vancouver periphery to rank eighth for entrepreneurial communities.
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