Summary:
We have a very simple situation where we have a company, the British Pacific Properties Ltd., that was racist, they are still in business today, they have not cleaned up their social toxic waste, but they are being granted permits and are profiting from people they once excluded, they are leaving it up to taxpayers to clean up their deplorable past.
Opinion Text:
I was born in the USA to Canadian parents who graduated from UBC. My grandfather flew with the Flying Tigers during WWII, he spoke flawless English; my mother a university professor at Wharton, and my dad an architect. In my school in the mid-west there were only 3 minority children - an adopted child from Vietnam, the son of a local African American basketball player, and then me as the only Chinese.
Like my classmates, at that time I was monolingual with English as my mother-tongue, I loved pizza and watching Three’s Company. I could never understand why I was treated differently until I moved to Vancouver at the age of 11. That’s when I realized it was because I was ethnically Chinese.
Within a month of moving here, my father, who was raised in England, was being yelled at in our garden by a neighbour with a thick accent “Go back to where you came from!” How could someone that was so clearly a new immigrant, tell my father to go back to where we came from. Where was he suggesting? England, Canada or the USA?
Three decades have passed since then, but from my most recent experience with the District of West Vancouver, it seems that society hasn’t changed that much. I have shared this experience in my petition after which a local West Vancouver Councillor Craig Cameron called me a liar and accused me of conducting a smear campaign. When I started the petition, I had someone contact Marcus Wong on my behalf about the restrictive covenants. Councillor Wong is the one that presented the motion to Council 2.5 years ago, he said that he did not have time to discuss the issue until two weeks later. In my opinion, we have a situation where there is no urgency nor willingness to change. What is worse is that we have had someone in our Chinese community that was supposed to represent our voice but did not follow-through. Now it gives the other Mayors and Councillors the excuse to say that they tried to do something but Marcus Wong never followed-up.
The Council will discuss the District’s report on Monday, 30 May 2022, a document which seems to be about what the District can’t do, without even recommending simple operational procedures at the municipal level to flag offending land titles in their permitting department. The supporters of my petition on the other hand will now have their voice heard by the BC Legislature on Monday, 30 May 2022. The request will be to completely remove all racist language from land-titles.
Even without legislative change, there is way to get rid of this racist language in its entirety in some cases. For example, if we take the case of the British Pacific Properties (BPPs) who created these racist covenants back in the 1930s to 1960s on the North Shore. The BPPs, as the original land developers, could simply work with current owners to rewrite and remove their hate speech.
If a company was to pour toxic chemicals into a river, they would be expected to clean it up. Why aren’t companies, like the BPPs, held to the same standard to clean up their social toxic waste?
Instead, what we are seeing is that this company is being granted thousands of new permits. They will profit and market their homes to Chinese and others who they once excluded. The BPPs are not being held accountable for their past actions. The District says it will cost $1m+ to pay a third party (LTSA) to identify the properties. Why would the District not go directly to the source? The BPPs exist today and have all of this on record. Arguably not all 17k properties mentioned in the report belong to the BPPs, but as the second largest land-owner after the Squamish Nation, one can conclude a large portion of those titles were theirs.
When the District of West Vancouver continues to condone and entertain development applications from a company that refuses to clean up their social toxic waste, then this shows me that this District is out of touch with Canadian reality. We need our leaders to demonstrate their commitment to ending systemic racism and to hold people accountable, rather than idolize colonial history.
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