[1] British Columbia then joined the four-year-old Confederation and became the sixth province of Canada on July 20, 1871.
Other articles dealt with parliamentary representation, postal services, customs tariffs, interprovincial trade, lighthouses and facilities such as a quarantine medical station and a criminal penitentiary.
The terms promised a trans-continental railway and a first-class graving dock for ship repair of a port on the Pacific Ocean coast at Esquimalt.
[2][3] The Terms of Union also addressed Indian land policy in a manner that would effectively perpetuate BC's pre-Confederation practices, through "a policy as liberal as that hitherto pursued by the British Columbia Government shall be continued by the Dominion Government after the Union".
Post union, Canada would learn that the policies of British Columbia with regard to lands and Indigenous peoples were not at all "liberal".