Vancouver

Vancouver is Canada's third-largest city and principal Pacific gateway, set between the Coast Mountains and the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia. The city of roughly 675,000 people within a 2.6 million metro area has the highest population density of any Canadian municipality, and its port handles more than 140 million tonnes of cargo annually, North America's third-busiest by tonnage. Vancouver's economy spans technology, film production, resources finance and tourism, and it consistently ranks among the world's most liveable cities.

Vancouver's own World Cup ledger is still being drawn up: early figures put the city's hosting costs somewhere between CAD 532 million and CAD 624 million, and a full account of what it spent against what it earned won't land until a formal reconciliation in spring 2027. Hotel occupancy in the meantime fell 20.9% year on year over the tournament's first 17 days, the steepest such drop of any host city reporting a decline . That caution over costs sits beside a longer civic habit of hosting on its own terms: Vancouver staged the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics at the same BC Place venue, under the same retractable roof, and its no-ICE World Cup stance extends that same willingness to set conditions its larger neighbours do not.