Columbia River
The Columbia drains an area of about . Its drainage basin covers nearly all of Idaho, large portions of British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington, ultimately all of Montana west of the Continental Divide, and small portions of Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada; the total area is similar to the size of France. Roughly of the river's length and 85 percent of its drainage basin are in the US. The Columbia is the twelfth-longest river and has the sixth-largest drainage basin in the United States. In Canada, where the Columbia flows for and drains , the river ranks 23rd in length, and the Canadian part of its basin ranks 13th in size among Canadian basins. 
The Columbia shares its name with nearby places, such as British Columbia, as well as with landforms and bodies of water.
Hydraulic fracturing in Canada
In 2013, the Fort Nelson First Nation, a remote community in northeastern B.C. with 800 community members, expressed frustration with royalties associated with gas produced through hydraulic fracturing in their territory. Three of British Columbia's four shale-gas reserves – the Horn River, Liard and Cordova Basins are on their lands. "Those basins hold the key to BC's LNG ambitions."
The Bakken shale oil and gas boom underway since 2009, driven by hydraulic fracturing technologies, has contributed to record growth, high employment rates and increase in population, in the province of Saskatchewan. Hydraulic fracturing has benefited small towns like Kindersley which saw its population increase to over 5,000 with the boom. Kindersley sells its treated municipal wastewater to oilfield service companies to use in hydraulic fracturing. As the price of oil dropped dramatically in late 2014 partially in response to the shale oil boom, towns like Kindersley became vulnerable.