The five teams in the West Division are the BC Lions, Calgary Stampeders, Edmonton Elks, Saskatchewan Roughriders, and Winnipeg Blue Bombers.
The now-defunct Las Vegas Posse and Sacramento Gold Miners from the mid 1990s United States expansion of the CFL also played in the West Division.
Football was being played in what was to become Alberta and Saskatchewan by 1890, and by 1907 the new provinces had organized their own respective competitions and agreed to adopt the rules of the national governing body, the Canadian Rugby Union.
The collapse of the last such "major" Western hockey league in 1926 opened a void that was quickly filled by football, with a provincial union finally being formed in British Columbia that same year.
It was not until 1921 that a Western team was finally allowed to compete in the Grey Cup game, when the Edmonton Eskimos lost 23–0 to the Toronto Argonauts.
Initial challenges for the trophy met with futility – a large factor in this lack of success was the requirement that the Western champion travel to the East to compete in the championship game, but the main reason was that clubs in the larger Eastern markets were able to make the transition from amateur to professional status more quickly.
The first attempt to create a unified Western circuit came in 1928 when Regina, Moose Jaw and two Winnipeg sides formed the Tri-City Rugby Football League.
However, the league notably introduced the concept (then established in hockey, but unheard of in gridiron football) of an automatic end-of-season playoff between the regular season winner and runner-up.
The Great Depression, which had caused serious financial difficulties for professional sports across North America, hit Western Canada particularly hard.
Moreover, by the 1930s the top Western teams had begun to tap the massive U.S. talent pool, signing American players who had been passed over by the National Football League and its rivals south of the border.
In a bid to stabilize and improve the quality of the game in Western Canada, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers of the MRFU, the Regina Roughriders of the SRFU and the Calgary Bronks of the ARFU decided to break away from their provincial unions and form a new elite competition, the Western Interprovincial Football Union.
The WCRFU insisted that Western teams could only compete for the Grey Cup by remaining in their respective provincial unions – meaning that the new WIFU faced the threat of being branded an "outlaw" league.
Regina would go on to win the first Western championship following the formation of the WIFU, only to find themselves barred by the CRU from competing in the Grey Cup.
The WIFU had ignored a rule implemented by the CRU immediately following Winnipeg's first Grey Cup win strictly limiting the use of American players in Canadian football.
This came to a head in 1940 when the CRU again barred the Western champion Blue Bombers from the Grey Cup on the grounds that the West had played using rules that differed from those in the East.
Perhaps the most important pre-war development, implemented in both East and West on a permanent basis for the 1936 season, was the introduction of automatic divisional playoffs.
The WIFU's increasing professionalism, combined with the growing use of air travel in Canada, made expansion to Vancouver a more feasible option.
Although the amateurs would not be formally locked out of Grey Cup play for another four years, 1954 is usually viewed as the start of the modern era of Canadian football.
The new league also assumed control of the Grey Cup, though it had been the de facto professional championship of Canadian football for four years before then.
In an effort to bolster the league's stability, CFL clubs decided to proceed with a complete merger of the two regional conferences.
In 1993, the CFL decided to expand to the United States, leading to the addition of the league's first American-based team, the Sacramento Gold Miners.
Prior to the 1996 season, however, all of the American clubs disbanded, with the Stallions ownership establishing a revived Alouettes franchise in Montreal.
The pre-1987 divisional alignment was restored, only to see Winnipeg return to the East after one season when the Ottawa Rough Riders folded.
The Blue Bombers returned to the West in 2002 after an expansion franchise named the Renegades was granted in the nation's capital.
With the launch of the Ottawa Redblacks in 2014, the league briefly considered temporarily leaving Winnipeg in the East in an effort to keep the divisions relatively equal in strength, but the Blue Bombers successfully lobbied to be moved back to the West immediately.