Search for B.C.'s best small town: Southwest region, Round 1

Clearwater Mayor Merlin Blackwell can ring off the reasonshis community of 2,400 people is the best in the province.

"We have access to pretty much anything you want to do in the natural environment: mountain biking, whitewater rafting, kayaking, this beautiful lake right in the middle of town," he said.

"You can go mountain hiking within 15 minutes, and you're still close to a big city like Kamloops, where you can get all the things you want from a metro area."

But he's not above some gentle campaigning to defeat his town's first round opponent.

"We're way cooler than Chase," he said.

"A younger council, more beautiful environment there's so much to do here. We're a town on the way up, not a town that's slowly easing into their golf carts to get around town."

From 128 communities to 1

After a 2019 competition to find Metro Vancouver's best neighbourhood, we're doing a sequel but this one is beyond Hope.

The Search for B.C.'s Best Small Town is underway, and over the next seven weeks a friendly competition will determine (unofficially) which community reigns supreme.

We included every community in the province that was either:

• a municipality with under 12,000 people, based on the 2021 Census;
• an unincorporated community, small island or Indigenous community with at least 500 people, based on estimates from the 2021 Census.

A series of play-in votes were conducted last month to narrow the field down to 128 entries, leaving us with 32 towns that roughly fit into each of the following four areas of the province:

• Vancouver Island (voting on Tuesday).
• Southwest B.C. (voting on Wednesday).
• Interior (voting on Thursday).
• The North (voting on Friday).

Each day from Tuesday to Friday, there will be a new series of one-on-one votes in a different region. Each week, we'll narrow the field down from 128 to 64, 64 to 32, and so on, until we have a champion.

But we'll also use the Search for B.C.'s Best Small Town to explore the opportunities and challenges the majority of communities in this province face.

Lytton included

Because of the limited number of small towns in and around Metro Vancouver compared to the rest of the province, the Southwest B.C. region includes the Gulf Islands, Sunshine Coast, and Thompson-Nicola-Cariboo region to ensure four even groupings of 32 towns.

That means it also includes Lytton, the town at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson rivers that suffered catastrophic damage in a 2021 wildfire.

"It's the pace of life, the tranquility, the fact we all know the people in town," said Mayor Jan Polderman, when asked what makes his town the best.

As his town begins a rebuilding process, Polderman has high hopes for keeping the parts of the town that made it desirable in the past.

"Lytton is a very affordable place to live. And as a result, we have some very colourful characters here in town," he said.

"I'm hoping that going forward we create a new economy so that it'll be affordable for the average person to buy a house and live the Canadian dream."

Voting will take place until 10 p.m. PT each day, starting with the first 16 matchups for the Southwest B.C. region that you'll find at the end of this article.