About Vancouver
If you look at the map, Vancouver is located at a far distance from Great Britain, following the trade wind. That makes a lot of difference during the time when exploration was mostly powered by wind -- if a location is farther from the origin from trade wind's perspective, it will be explored later. From that perspective, Vancouver is farther from Britain comparing to New York. Indeed, the Russians arrived in the coastal areas earlier than the British, But the British were able to establish a more successful colony here as part of British Columbia in the mid 1800s. That is one of the reasons why the city is a lot less populated than other North American cities like Toronto or New York which were established a few hundreds years earlier
About the people
People here appear to be laid back but they work hard to meet the high cost of living here. Rental or real estate cost is high and people pay the same price for gadgets as New Yorkers, like iPhones, but they are happy most of the time as the weather is moderate and the environment is beautiful.
One thing that may capture your attention if you are from other North or South American cities is that there are many more Chinese in the city comparing to other cities, about 1/4 are Chinese in Vancouver. Is that a high percentage? Not really. Back in the 1800s, 1/3 of the world population were Chinese.
My question is indeed from the opposite: why Chinese did not establish colonies as successful as the British in the last few centuries. After going through the historical archives I found one very important reason: national policy. For a long time it was illegal to emigrate from the country (back in the 1600s). Even for those who dared to escape from the country, they were stripped away all the benefits , for instance , the right to take national civil examination in their next generations. After all, livelihood was not that bad living in a Chinese village so most people preferred to stay until the late 1800s when livelihood became really bad that some Chinese decided to leave the country to make a living in North America.
Now of course that got changed if the next generations became more successful. For instance Robert Hotung(the grandfather of Stanley Ho, one of the richest men in Macau today), being born in a British colony of Hong Kong from a Dutch/Chinese family, was not allowed to take traditional Chinese education to become a civil servant in China; he took education from a western college instead in the late 1800s and then became a very successful businessman and the richest man in Hong Kong, without engaging in trade of weapons or illegal drugs.