Provincial Legislative change needed

To the Honourable the Legislative Assembly of the Province of British Columbia, in Legislature Assembled:

The petition of the undersigned, “Call-to-Action: Removal of discriminatory restrictive covenants”, of West Vancouver, states that:

Exclusionary, demeaning, and racially charged hate language has no place in our legal documents today.

The petition was written by Michele Tung, a resident of West Vancouver. She was asked by the City of West Vancouver to submit documents containing the following racist language. Failure to submit this document would have delayed issuance of her improvements permit:

6. No Poultry, swine, sheep, cows, cattles, or other livestock shall be kept on the premises. 7. No person of the African or Asiatic race or of African or Asiatic Descent (except servants of the occupier of the premises in residence) shall reside or be allowed to remain on the premises.

Your petitioners respectfully request that the Honourable House consider the following actions:

1. Currently, once a land title is identified as having similar offensive discriminatory language, there is only a strike-out which leaves the hateful speech still visible. This language has no value or place in our society today.

a. It is respectfully requested that the province please review the process to completely blackout or remove this language in its entirety.

b. A blackout can be done with reference to Land Title Act 222 (1978)

1. That developers/owners that still exist and profit in our community today, take the financial and legal responsibility to identify the properties that they have written this discriminatory language on and be legally responsible for the removal of this language from the restrictive covenants before they are granted any further development permits and profit from the peoples they once excluded.

   1. Companies that have written this hate speech should be put to the same standard of cleaning up their social toxic waste, like companies that have spilled chemical waste in our environment.

3. Enact legislation in the province that requires municipalities recorder of each municipality to establish a restrictive covenant modification programme to assist in the identification and redaction of unlawfully restrictive covenants in public land records. The law would require the municipality recorders to develop an implementation by September 1, 2022. This has been done for example in the State of California.

4. Require that LTSA fees related to the Municipalities identification of discriminatory language on land titles be waived out of concern for public interest.

Date 30th day of May 2022.

1. I am hopeful that with you, Karin Kirkpatrick, FCPA, FCMA, championing this in the BC Legislative Assembly that we will see some change at the provincial level. It would be wonderful if we can see (1) the removal of this language in its entirety, rather than just a strike-out which leaves the offensive language underneath; (2) have companies that continue to profit from the people they once excluded and wrote such disdainful language on their covenants on land titles, take financial and legal responsibility for cleaning up their social toxic waste before they are granted any further development permits; (3) have LTSA fees related to the Municipalities identification of discriminatory language on land titles be waived out of concern for public interest; (4) Enact legislation in the province that requires municipalities to establish a restrictive covenant modification programme to assist in the identification and redaction of unlawfully restrictive covenants in public land records. A law that would require municipalities to develop an implementation plan by September 1, 2022 as an example.