Search for B.C.'s Best Small Town: Championship semifinals
CBC
The finalists from the Interior and north in the Search for B.C.'s Best Small Town are separated by 950 kilometres, several mountain ranges, and at this time a year, an hour on the clock.
And yet, Smithers is a mid-sized mountain town with a postcard-worthy main street.
So is Kimberley.
"We're incredibly similar at first blush," said Kimberley Mayor Don McCormick.
"The ski hill, the tourism, the former mine, you kind of go town the list and it's check check check."
Both towns have hit that spot of being appealing to tourists without too much of a backlash from locals concerned the community will be overrun. They're large enough to support a wide variety of small businesses, but not big enough to have a Walmart.
But their paths to this point have been slightly different.
"It's always had forestry, transportation, agricultural. There's been a strong visitor economy. So it's, it's a very mixed community," said Smithers Mayor Gladys Attrill.
"And I think it's part of what people here are really proud of and really feisty about protecting."
Unlike the two remaining towns in the competition, Smithers hasn't seen a big population boom in the last 15 years. But it's long been a hub for the Bulkley Valley, and the different economic sectors have created stability.
"We've seen other communities really struggle and it's not that we haven't had ups and downs, but having a good mix of the way people make their living in a community allows us to ride things out," said Atrill.
Kimberley is one of those towns that have had ups and downs.
"When you're a one-trick pony, and you lose the pony, it's pretty devastating," said McCormick, recalling the closure of the Sullivan Mine in 2001 — which at its height employed around a quarter of Kimberley residents — and the town's economic diversification strategy.
"Thankfully, there was a fair degree of warning of the closure," he said, detailing how the area invested in the Kimberley Nature Park, the largest municipal park in B.C., and golf courses in the years beforehand to augment its ski hill.
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