Karl Sterzer was elected Canal Flats’ mayor with 70.7 per cent of the vote.
Marie Delorme, Bill Lake, Douglas McCutcheon and Kimberly Swerdferger were elected councillors.
Candidates
Mayor:
Gord Donaldson
Karl Sterzer (elected)
Brian Woodward
Council:
Benoit Charbonneau
Marie Delorme (incumbent and elected)
Bill Lake (elected)
Paul Marcil (incumbent)
Douglas McCutcheon (elected)
Todd Rotvold
Kimberly Swerdferger (elected)
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Roy Webb
Boundary
Canal Flats is situated at the southern tip of Columbia Lake in the Kootenay region. It’s located about 83 kilometres from Cranbrook.
Population (2016)
668
History
The Ktunaxa Nation made their home in the area near Canal Flats for millennia before the village’s history began in the 1880.
Back then, William Adolphe Baillie-Grohman, an English game hunter, saw that the Kootenay River and the Columbia River system were only one kilometre apart.
He had an idea to divert flood waters from the Kootenay River into the Columbia so that land in the Creston area could be farmed.
Grohman was given 73,000 acres of land in the Creston and Kootenay Lake area in exchange for building a canal that would divert the waters.
After the project hit a snag with the federal government, construction on the canal began in 1887 with the labour of immigrant workers from China.
It was finished two weeks later.
Grohman would later establish a post office that received the name “Canal Flat” in 1913.
It’s not certain how it became Canal Flats, but it could have been a mistake that was made in highway signage.
Median total income of couple economic families with children (2015)/B.C. median
$113,408/$111,736
Political representation
Federal
Wayne Stetski (BC NDP)
Provincial
Doug Clovechok (BC Liberals)