Qathet Regional District
The qathet Regional District (, qRD) is a regional district in the Canadian province of British Columbia. It includes the City of Powell River and a number of unincorporated areas. The district encompasses a land area of . The district was formerly known as the Powell River Regional District. Because of frequent confusion between the identical names of Powell River district and city, the district's name was changed in 2018 to qathet, from "", meaning "working together, bringing together" in the Comox language of the Tla'amin Nation. The District is bounded by the mainland portion of the Strathcona Regional  District to the north, and to the east by the Squamish-Lillooet and Sunshine Coast Regional Districts. On the mainland, this includes the area southeast of Powell River to the ferry terminal at Saltery Bay and northwest of Powell River to Desolation Sound and the terminus of Highway 101 in Lund. Lasqueti Island and Texada Island, along with the southernmost Discovery Islands (including Hernando and Savary), are included, as are the largely uninhabited lands to the north and west of this area. As of the 2006 census, 19,599 people lived in the District. Its head offices are located in Powell  River. The District is governed by a board of seven directors: five electoral area directors who are elected for a four-year term by voters in the electoral areas, and two municipal directors who are first elected to the City of Powell River’s council and then appointed by council to the regional board. The board chair is elected annually by all directors. Demographics. As a census division in the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada, the qathet Regional District had a population of living in of its total private dwellings, a change of from its 2016 population  of . With a land area of , it had a population density of in 2021.