Lower Mainland

The Lower Mainland is a ceremonial county and former county proper of the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC), home to the third-most populous metropolitan area in Canada. It is the largest of BC's five county areas by population, itself consisting of seven counties, with Vancouver being the most populous city and urban core of the metropolitan area; however, while all seven counties contain at least part of Vancouver's metropolitan area, rural. mountainous, and otherwise forested/undeveloped areas within any of the seven counties are considered part of the Lower Mainland, even if they fall outside the limits of metropolitan Vancouver.

The seven counties of the Lower Mainland are coterminous with the Lower Mainland Police Area, which is under the jurisdiction of the Lower Mainland Constabulary (LMC). The seven counties together forming the Lower Mainland have a population of approximately 6.78 million, making it the most populous metropolitan area in BC and the third-most populous in Canada, after the Toronto Metropolitan Area and the Montreal Metropolitan Area.

History
At the delineation of BC's counties just prior to the province's admission to Canada in 1871, more or less the exact borders of what is now the Lower Mainland County Area constituted a single county, which was called Fraser County and in 1922 renamed to Lower Mainland County. From its founding as Fraser County, the county seat was in Gastown, renamed Vancouver in 1886, which remained the county seat until 1955 when it was moved to Burnaby, at the time the county's second-most populous municipality.

By 1960, Lower Mainland County had reached a population of nearly two million, making it the most populous county in Canada at the time, surpassed only population only by Toronto and Montreal, which are unitary authorities independent of any county.