A
It’s also worth noting that British Columbia has construction trades as one of its top priorities for its quota for the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) immigration pathway.
https://www.welcomebc.ca/immigrate-to-b-c/about-the-bc-provincial-nominee-program?
My sense is that it’s more about the timing of the agricultural to urban transition in Western Europe and the UK, and where and when the immigration flowed in relation to that.
Western Canadian usage can be quite different but my partner and I (both originally from BC) both grew up with supper as the usual evening meal while dinner was a formal event or a large midday meal among farm families.
BC had a very large wave of UK immigrants in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the early 1970s, over 40% of the adult BC population were UK immigrants. So, BC has quite a different history or English usage than elsewhere in Canada. Tea, or more specifically high tea, as a term for a late afternoon or early evening meal, was known and used among English expats but wasn’t as generally used.
English speakers who settled on the Prairies also were mostly directly from the UK, or in the case of southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, were failed farming pioneers recruited from the midwestern and prairie United States.
Ukrainians and other Eastern European settlers kept dinner as the large midday meal and supper as the evening meal. Two breakfasts were a thing.
Meanwhile, in Quebec ‘diner’ remains the midday meal and ‘souper’ the later evening one, and déjeuner is breakfast in the old European tradition — also the usage in Belgium and Switzerland — while in France it’s petit déjeuner, déjeuner then diner.
