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When the Big One finally hits coastal B.C., while Vancouver’s earthquake-proof skyline and the region’s many wood homes will come out largely unscathed, the province’s iconic Parliament Buildings will most likely topple.

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That’s at least according to Zeidler Partnership Architects, the firm hired by the province in 2005 to find out how the Richter would treat their legislative home. The firm did not mince words: Parliament will be rubble, ministers will be dead and a stunned populace would be left to “more easily turn to civil disorder.”

The only solution, concluded Zeidler Partnership, is a $250-million upgrade to the copper-domed structure. At that price, making sure the building does not fall over could well cost as much as it took to put it up in the first place.

It is why, better yet, the province could do what British Columbians have yearned to do for more than a century: Pull up the stakes of their geriatric, island capital and ship it across the water to Vancouver.

After all, of all Canada’s 14 capital cities, Victoria is easily the most isolated and dissimilar to the province it is tasked to govern.

Geographically, Victoria is literally as far away from the rest of the province as possible on a peninsula that is flanked on three sides by U.S. territory. In a province continually transformed by new waves of Asian immigration, Victoria’s ethnic mix has flatlined for decades. And while B.C. remains a province in which resource revenue pays the majority of the government’s bills, Victoria has not seen a logging truck or a coal train in several generations.