Diocese of British Columbia Diocese of British Columbia The Diocese of British Columbia is a diocese of the Ecclesiastical Province of British Columbia and Yukon of the Anglican Church of Canada. Despite the name, the diocese comprises only the 32,630 square kilometres of Vancouver Island and the adjacent Gulf Islands in the civil Province of British Columbia. Its see city is Victoria, and it presently maintains fifty-five parishes serving nearly 13,000 Anglicans. The diocese was established in 1859, and is the oldest in the ecclesiastical province, once extending over the entire civil province of British Columbia, hence the origin of its name. Its first
British colonization of the Americas 1867, the colonies of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the Province of Canada (the southern portion of modern-day Ontario and Quebec) combined to form a self-governing dominion, named Canada, within the British Empire (the term "kingdom" was avoided so as to not provoke the United States). Quebec (including what is now the southern portion of Ontario) and Nova Scotia (including what is now New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island) had been ceded to Britain by the French. The colonies of Prince Edward Island and British Columbia joined over the next six years, and Newfoundland joined in 1949. Rupert's Land and