It was a home then — several homes actually. Before it became Stanley Park in 1888, small settlements with people of Indigenous, European, Chinese and Hawaiian ancestry dotted the forested peninsula to the west of Vancouver, then just in its infancy.

There were roaming horses and pigs and cows, whose milk Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Chief August Jack X̱ats’alanexw said his mother would deliver to the Hastings Mill, the city’s early industrial heart. In the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh village of Chaythoos, which once stood at Prospect Point, his family had a little vegetable garden where they grew potatoes and carrots. Then came the swing of an axe, a presage of what would come after.

Shortly before Stanley Park was established, a young X̱ats’alanexw and his family were sharing a meal inside their Chaythoos home when road surveyors began chopping at the side of the house. His sister, Louise, the only one who could then speak English, tried to figure out what was happening.

“We’re surveying the road,” one of the workers told her. “Whose road?” she asked. “Is it whiteman’s?” They assured the family the road would run around the home. That wasn’t true. It would soon cut straight through where their home once stood, displacing the family, along with the rest of the village. Over the coming years, the remaining residents of what is now Stanley Park were also uprooted, sometimes through violence.

“Of course, whiteman did not say park,” Chief X̱ats’alanexw recalled decades later. “They did not call it park then.”

This poignant scene arrives about 50 pages into Conversations with Khahtsahlano, a sprawling book of letters, illustrations, documents and, fundamentally, more than two decades of conversations between the famed Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Chief and Major J.S. Matthews, Vancouver’s first archivist. Less a literary work than a scrapbook, it provides an invaluable window into Sḵwx̱wú7mesh life, culture and tradition around the time of Vancouver’s founding.

After decades out of print, Vancouver-based Massy Books and Talonbooks, in collaboration with the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nation, have now republished a facsimile copy of Conversations. (The book’s full title is Conversations with August Jack Khahtsahlano, born at Snauq, False Creek Indian Reserve, circa 1877, son of Khaytulk and grandson of Chief Khahtsahlanogh.)
It’s a fitting moment. Last week, the Squamish Nation broke ground on its much-talked-about Sen̓áḵw development, an ambitious 11-tower residential project located on a sliver of reserve land — once a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh village called Sen̓áḵw — near the south end of the Burrard Bridge. The 6,000-unit development, all of which is expected to be rental housing, has roiled nearby residents.

The book paints a vivid picture of Sen̓áḵw long before the area became home to Vanier Park, the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, the Museum of Vancouver and countless other attractions.

It’s where Chief X̱ats’alanexw and his family migrated after they were pushed out of Stanley Park. By this time, the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh settlement was known as Kitsilano Indian Reserve No. 6. Then it became the site of another forced eviction when the provincial government expropriated the reserve in 1913. Chief X̱ats’alanexw was this time driven from an area named — as he was — after his own grandfather, placed on a barge and dropped on the North Shore. The village was razed.

But that injustice gets scant mention in Major Matthews’ book. For the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and neighbouring Coast Salish peoples, Conversations is an indispensable record; it’s been used to support land claims. Still, it’s hard to read the book without wondering what the archivist may have left out.

‘It’s like talking to an Elder’

It was Linda Daniels, one of Chief X̱ats’alanexw’s great-granddaughters, who pushed to have Conversations reprinted. She first discovered it nearly 30 years ago, then unaware that she was related to the book’s subject. It immediately connected with her, particularly the text’s repetitive, conversational cadence.

“It’s like talking to an Elder,” Daniels, now 70, said. “They’re repetitive. They always say it more than once. They want you to remember it…. They repeat the story until it becomes our story.”

Her mother, X̱ats’alanexw’s granddaughter, had seldom talked about her own family after she married Daniels’ dad. She too fell in love with the book, sleeping with it under her pillow. “It became a part of our lives,” Daniels said. But when her mom called Chief X̱ats’alanexw grandpa, she didn’t take it literally at first. (“We call a lot of people ‘grandpa’ or ‘uncle.’”)

Daniels ended up buying 40 copies from the city archive, which had only printed 500 when it released the book in 1967, only months after X̱ats’alanexw died. It’s unclear if the city ever printed more. Daniels handed them out to other Sḵwx̱wú7mesh people and sold them to interested students until she ran out.

“I was always on the search for the book,” she said. “In all of the bookstores, garage sales. Anywhere I went, I looked for the book.”

But they were rare and could sometimes fetch upwards of $600. When she found out Conversations had entered the public domain, she started looking for someone who could print more, which led her earlier this year to Patricia Massy, owner of Massy Books in Vancouver’s Chinatown. “It wasn’t a hard sell,” Massy said. Since the April announcement that the book was being reprinted, Massy Books has received at least 400 preorders.

‘A guest of the city’

Centred on countless interviews with X̱ats’alanexw — all dutifully typed and indexed by the archivist’s assistant, Mrs. Alera Way — Conversations reads, and was written, in fits and starts. There are no chapters, the page numbers are inconsistent, and the book frequently bounces between topics, interpolated with little sketches or photos or contextual notes.

It can make for a disjointed read, but it brims with vivid detail: Sḵwx̱wú7mesh vocabulary and local place names (and corresponding maps); family lineages and lore; traditional Sḵwx̱wú7mesh duck hunting techniques, architecture, social organization, canoe design, tools, diet and customs. There are detailed transportation routes, appraisals of local rumours and casual commentary on the myriad effects of colonialism: “Everywhere whiteman goes, he change food.”

Some of the most memorable passages come when Chief X̱ats’alanexw recounts his experience with displacement. Here he talks about what happened after the province expropriated the Kitsilano reserve:

“The remains of those buried in the graveyard on the reserve close to First Avenue, about the foot of Fir or Cedar Street, were exhumed and taken for reburial at Squamish,” Chief X̱ats’alanexw told Major Matthews, though his account appears to have been reworded for the book.

“The orchard went to ruin, the fences fell down, and the houses were destroyed. A few hops survived and continued to grow until the building of the Burrard Bridge covered them up. I received a formal invitation to be present at the opening of the great bridge as a guest of the city.” (Emphasis, my own.)

In her short story “Goodbye Snauq,” the late Stó:lō writer Lee Maracle says the ancient settlement, long a seasonal outpost among the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, once stretched along False Creek, all the way to Clark Drive in East Vancouver. Like Major Matthews, Maracle spells Sen̓áḵw differently.

“It was a common garden shared by all the friendly tribes in the area,” Maracle wrote. Fish, ducks, oysters, clams, wild cabbage, mushrooms, berries, camas, a purple flower from the asparagus family. “Summer after summer the nations gathered to harvest, likely to plan marriages, play a few rounds of that old gambling game Lahal.”

British Columbia’s attorney general, William Bowser, who was instrumental in pushing the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh out of Sen̓áḵw, described the village as an “eyesore to the citizens of Vancouver” and the eviction as “one of the best real estate transactions ever carried out in the province.”

In his own words — sometimes

Chief X̱ats’alanexw was, by all accounts, a darling of the Vancouver aristocracy. Newspaper reports have the “prominent Indian” lunching and exchanging gifts with the mayor. After X̱ats’alanexw was forced out of what’s now Stanley Park, he was asked to perform a dance at the opening ceremony, which he did once more at a rededication to the park in the early 1940s.

An article published in the Vancouver Daily Province a few days later revealed that X̱ats’alanexw was, at the same time, fighting to be compensated for the land his family lost when Chaythoos was destroyed. The headline reads “Indian Seeks Cash.” The family was told they’d receive a sum for their loss, X̱ats’alanexw later told Matthews. “But they have not paid yet.”

It’s clear that X̱ats’alanexw was holding conflicting truths; he had the attention of people in power, but he was also living at their behest. Still, in their conversations, there’s a genuine warmth between Chief X̱ats’alanexw and Major Matthews.

“Two men, one white, one brown, sat side by side on a cottage verandah on a sunny summer’s evening at Kitsilano Beach,” Matthews wrote in early October 1937. “Old friends, enjoying each other’s company, and with a tray of tea and iced cake between them, watching the blue sea beyond the sandy beach of Kitsilano. It was a tranquille [sic] happy scene.”

X̱ats’alanexw is “as kindly a gentleman — and a wise one, too — as ever I knew,” Matthews writes at one point. But it can also be jarring to see how Matthews describes X̱ats’alanexw, and Indigenous people in general, at other times. The archivist, who likely fancied himself an amateur ethnographer, cannot seem to shake the romanticized, often patronizing lens with which he views his friend.

“He is an entirely different character to those Indian entertainers who are ‘show men,’ who are said to make up Indian tradition and lore to suit their audience. August is dependable,” Matthews wrote to a colleague at the Public Archives of Canada.

He goes on to describe X̱ats’alanexw as a “living link” to the Stone Age. The Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Chief countered by dubbing Matthews a “relief age man,” in reference to the many Canadians on government support at the height of the Great Depression.

Matthews says he “put down what he said in his own words the day he said it, and frequently read back to him what I had typed, and he corrected or added.” But there are moments that put his commitment to accuracy in doubt. When X̱ats’alanexw tries to correct where he was born — Chaythoos, not Sen̓áḵw — Matthews says it would be “more in keeping if he was born in Kitsilano” because of his name.

It’s true that much of the text is in the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Chief’s own words, but it’s also curated (and sometimes paraphrased) by a man — although progressive for his time — who worked for a city that had recently displaced X̱ats’alanexw and his entire community.

Major Matthews was surely a product of the (Eurocentric) society he was living in, says Rudy Reimer, a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh archeology professor at Simon Fraser University, whose ancestral name is Yumks. He keeps an original pressing of the book, gifted to him by an Elder, in his office.

But unlike other ethnological works, the book doesn’t treat Indigenous people in a clinical, dehumanizing fashion, he says. It doesn’t omit X̱ats’alanexw’s voice or his sense of humour. “With Conversations, it’s front and centre.”

Sen̓áḵw returns

Amid a worsening housing crisis, the new Sen̓áḵw has become a hot-button issue among locals frustrated by a lack of community input. (Since the project will be built on reserve land, the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh can bypass municipal zoning and public consultation.) Many say they’re worried the neighbourhood can’t handle the dramatic influx of new residents.

Besides a NIMBY’s worst nightmare, Sen̓áḵw might also be one of the most tangible examples of Indigenous reconciliation in Canada.

The development will sit on a small piece of the old Kitsilano reserve. Following a long legal battle, about 10 acres in reserve land was was repatriated to the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh in 2003, along with $92.5-million. (That’s about one-eighth of its former size.)

A significant number of the units will be set aside for Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nation members. Revenue from the development could improve the nation’s access to education, social services, health care, language, and arts and employment opportunities, according to recent research by Tiffany Kaewen Dang, a geographer whose work focuses on the use of parks as a tool of colonization. Sen̓áḵw could also be used to fund other land claims, notoriously expensive endeavours.

“Khatsahlano dreamed of being buried at Snauq,” wrote Lee Maracle in “Goodbye Snauq.” “I dream of living there.”

Maracle was born in North Vancouver, the granddaughter of Oscar-nominated actor and səlilwətaɬ Chief, Dan George. And though she came to identify as Stó:lō, she spent a lot of time with X̱ats’alanexw when she was a girl. The Chief left a mark on her, and he features heavily in “Goodbye Snauq.” Maracle wrote the story in the wake of the 2003 land claim settlement, something the narrator — who bears more than a passing resemblance to the author herself — has trouble celebrating. She mourns the old Sen̓áḵw, the one her ancestors knew. She can’t foresee the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh development that will soon transform the area.

Maracle dreamed of living at Sen̓áḵw. Soon, many Sḵwx̱wú7mesh will.

It’s a story of reclamation that Conversations with Khahtsahlano helped bring to fruition. It affirms the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nation’s historical connection to Sen̓áḵw and the surrounding area in a way that few other books do.

That’s its power, said Syex̱wáliya, also known as Ann Whonnock, a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nation councillor and grandniece of X̱ats’alanexw.

“This is making us visible again,” she said. “We’re no longer invisible. I’m still here.”

This story appeared originally in The Tyee

The post ‘Like Talking to An Elder’ appeared first on Ben Mussett.

About 300 people live in Tahsis, and one of them is noted author Anne Cameron. In 2002, an interviewer asked Cameron what the aspirations of British Columbians were. She answered: “I think our main aspiration is to be left alone.” Cameron, who is 81, lives in a trailer home with her teenage granddaughter, a duo of dogs she calls the Pug Brigade, and Brat-Cat the cat. There, she grows pussy willows and tries to figure out whether her latest novel — which would be her first book published in 16 years — is done or not.

And sometimes, when she feels like being with others (at least digitally), she pops up in the comments sections of stories that appear in The Tyee, sharing her tough-minded, wise-cracking perspectives on what’s wrong with the world and right about life in Tahsis.

Cameron holds an esteemed place in B.C. literature. In 2010, she won the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award, an honour she shares with, among others, Joy Kogawa and Alice Munro. She received the recognition for her more than 30 books of adult fiction, poetry and children’s stories.

Cameron said that others had preceded me in visiting her in Tahsis, “shiny-eyed” fans who hoped she’d tell them “something timeless and wise.” One woman recently made the trip up from Washington state to ask whether she should continue her master’s degree or give it up and find a job. (Cameron told her to keep at it.)

It was a dreary November afternoon — the kind that feels like it’s raining even if it’s not — when Cameron greeted me at her door. She wore tie-dye, denim and big round glasses that magnified her sharp, turquoise eyes. In a home packed with Indigenous art, she poured me tea that she later joked might be poisoned. As she smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, she offered her perspectives on many things, including, from her vantage on the other side of the goat track, the City of Vancouver. Its mayor, Kennedy Stewart, is “a great big bowl of blancmange.” Its nighttime buzz is cautionary. “There was just one light after another light, building after building, three o’clock in the morning,” she said, describing her last visit. “All of the lights were on cars passing this way, cars going that way. And the sound in the middle of the night. The sound coming up from the city is like a huge critter, an animal, the beast breathing.”

Daughters of Copper Woman, published in 1981, is Cameron’s most celebrated book and a continued source of controversy. In it, she offers a collection of stories she says Nuu-chah-nulth Elders told her about the pivotal role women played in pre-contact times, as well as the secret matriarchal society that sustained that precious knowledge. In the early 1980s, the book struck a chord with North America’s burgeoning feminist movement. One university professor of mine called the book a revelation, saying it opened her settler eyes for the first time to Indigenous culture.

In 1986, Cameron published Dzelarhons: Mythology of the Northwest Coast, a book featuring Haida storytelling. Two years later, at a Montreal literary conference, Lee Maracle, a Sto:lo poet and author, reportedly asked Cameron to “move over” and make way for Indigenous writers. Maracle later denied asking Cameron to move out of the way. Instead, she said she asked her to “stop stealing our stories.” An English professor on Vancouver Island told me to this day some of her students refuse to read Cameron’s work.

In the 2002 preface to Daughters, Cameron writes that Elder women of the Nuu-chah-nulth Nations, from the west coast of Vancouver Island, instructed her “to put the stories on paper and have them published, for all of our children and grandchildren, but especially for the ones who have been deprived of some of the healing aspects of their grandmothers’ culture.” That explanation did not satisfy Maracle, who Cameron calls a longtime friend.

“What our Elders did not know, and I know no white person has ever explained to them, is that once you give away the story, that is it, your children are disinherited,” Maracle wrote in her 2017 book My Conversations With Canadians. “Some Elders don’t mind that but some do, and that should have alerted the white writer to something being wrong here. Who would give away their children’s inheritance if they were aware that that is what they were doing?”

I reached out to Maracle for comment, but she declined an interview.

After the confrontation in 1988, Cameron says she respected Maracle’s request. “I understood her point of view.” Since then, she hasn’t released a work of adult fiction inspired by Indigenous legends, although she has published several children’s books based on Indigenous legends, including a 1998 collaboration with Sue Pielle, an Elder storyteller from the Tla’amin Nation on the upper Sunshine Coast.

When I first met Cameron at her home in Tahsis, she emphasized the importance of receiving consent to tell the stories Indigenous Elders have shared with her. “I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had people tell me some absolutely incredible stories, but I haven’t been given the permission to pass [some of those] stories on. Stories and songs and dances and poems are the personal possession of the people who are telling them. They’re not yours to tell.”

Still, Cameron said “at least half” of the characters in her books are First Nations people. “I just don’t say so. You know, they live among us, eh?” she said sarcastically.

There’s an added layer of fierce humour to that statement. Most of Cameron’s grandchildren are Indigenous, including the granddaughter who lives with her now. Of her grandkids, Cameron said, “Being First Nations is not the be-all, end-all and final descriptor of who they are any more than me being primarily Scottish defines who I am.”

When Cameron was 20, she met a French-Canadian pilot. Soon after they married; then three children arrived. They stayed together for more than a decade and a half. When it was over, Cameron made sure she got custody of the kids and, like so many of the resourceful women in her stories, she scraped by. “We ate a lot of macaroni.” Eventually, she sold a screenplay to CBC in the mid-1970s and then came the books and more scripts and film and literary awards. She never kissed a man again.

According to BC Stats, Tahsis was the second-fastest growing community in the province in 2019, swelling by just under nine per cent. That means an additional 24 newcomers showed up. Buildings along the shoreline sit empty and boarded up. But, a few decades ago, when the sawmills were at their peak, nearly 2,500 folks lived here. In a 2005 dispatch for The Tyee, Cameron described it this way: “It was boom time then, three mills going around the clock, the noise rose from the machines and echoed off the bluffs, back and forth across the valley until I felt as if it was all happening behind my eyes, filling my head with rhythmic pounding.”

After that last mill in Tahsis shut down about 20 years ago, the log booms that once crowded the inlet disappeared along with roughly 85 per cent of the population. The port now sits fenced off and quiet. Tahsis is trying to reinvent itself as an ecotourism destination for summer travellers seeking to fish, kayak, hike and explore caves.

Up and down the coasts of Vancouver Island, other mill towns have suffered similar fates: Gold River, Youbou, Bamfield, Jordan River, Holberg. Dr. John Lutz, a historian at the University of Victoria, keeps track of the decline. He says fewer people live on the west coast of Vancouver Island today than did a century ago. “I mean, capitalism does this, right? At least resource capitalism,” he told me. “It has no sense of attachment to the place and very little to the people. It just has an attachment to the extraction of wealth.”

Cameron knows this truth well. She was born into a family of coal miners in Nanaimo and moved to Tahsis… well, she doesn’t really remember exactly when. (“You keep asking me, ‘What year was this? And what year was that?’ And I will be damned if I know.”) The stories she’s written are full of loggers, tree planters and the sturdy women that so often hold these towns together. “I don’t think anyone has captured the idiom of the working-class, B.C., coastal small community as well as she has,” Howard White, Cameron’s longtime publisher, said to me. “I sort of think of her as the William Faulkner of the B.C. coast.”

Here’s an old joke Cameron likes to tell: “God must love poor people because she made so many of them.” She laughed. “And that’s true of workers.” She refuses, though, to wax sentimental about workers clinging to jobs in the struggling oil and gas industry. She thinks energy companies have duped some into thinking that nothing else exists for them beyond fossil fuel extraction. “When they scream and yell to protect the jobs they presently have, they don’t seem to realize that they are at the same time admitting they’re too fucking stupid to learn how to do something else,” she said.

“Not all that long ago,” she told me, “there was a really good job going around the village at night lighting lamps, but we don’t have any lamplighters working today, and nobody misses it. Who misses the guys who steered the 20-mule teams that took the Borax across, you know, Death Valley? Nobody’s worrying about their jobs. Jobs come, and jobs go.”

Listen carefully to Cameron’s profane lectures and the deeper empathy surfaces. She speaks hard truths about what it means to be working class in Canada today, while directing her anger at those who reap the profits.

“When I was still young, back when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, we all just knew, the way we knew the tide comes in and the tide goes out, we knew we were going to get a job, we were going to save some money, and we were going to buy our own house, or build our own house.”

“My grandchildren,” Cameron said. “They might inherit this trailer, but they will never be in a position of buying one themselves.”

Well into spring, low-hanging fog off the mountains makes it feel like Tahsis is fully insulated from the world’s chaos. But Cameron won’t avert her eyes. She’s a keen follower of the news. A few months after visiting Tahsis, I gave her a call. At the time, Canada was gripped by nationwide protests in support of the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs’ demand that no pipeline be built without recognizing their people’s title to the land it would cross, and their right to say no. The stand-off in northern B.C. had rippled out, and Indigenous people and allies were blocking trains not just in B.C. but in Ontario and Quebec. The country’s social fabric, let alone any earnest effort at reconciliation, felt like it could unravel.

As usual, Cameron didn’t mince her words. “How many times do people have to be kicked in the head before something happens, like a blockade on the railway?”

“Both the province and the federal government have been saying things and then not backing it up at all,” Cameron continued. And then she referenced another obstacle the federal government had recently created for members of First Nations. It was fighting a $6-billion class-action lawsuit that demanded the government compensate First Nations children who were denied adequate health services or were otherwise suffering as a result of Canada’s underfunded on-reserve child welfare system.

“I mean who the hell in their right mind is going to be talking reconciliation while taking Native children to court to try to cut down the amount of settlement that had been decided on? Now, what kind of cheap shit is that? I don’t see how you can call it reconciliation when there was never any conciliation to begin with.”

Cameron concluded that the pipeline protests and rail blockades were “just one manifestation of a really, really deep-rooted anger. You can’t keep pushing people around and expect them to just keep smiling.” Canadians are “very lucky,” she said, that Indigenous people in this country “are as patient as they are.”

Two years after her divorce, in or about the early 1970s, Cameron fell in love with a woman from B.C.’s mainland. They got together after Cameron figured out what she was feeling inside. “I was quite puzzled for a while,” she recalled. “It’s not like suddenly, in flaming letters across the sky, the finger of God drew a message to me.”

When Cameron was around 13, her mother Annie became a Jehovah’s Witness and began dragging her to the local Kingdom Hall. Her brother never had to go, but Cameron’s two sisters remain members of the church, as do their children. For Cameron, “It never took.”

Cameron and her mother never discussed her sexuality, but she’s sure her mom knew. Did it change their relationship? “No,” she cackled. “She had disapproved of me for a long time.” She elaborated. “It was a strange relationship with my mom because I knew — the way I knew the sun rises, and the moon shines in the sky, and the tide comes in, and the tide goes out — I knew my mother loved me. But I don’t think she liked me.”

Over the phone, I could hear the claws of the Pug Brigade tap along the linoleum floor of Cameron’s home. It was five o’clock, the dogs’ dinner time. “Honest to God, they have alarm clocks in their heads,” she moaned, imagining out loud the dogs’ thoughts. “’What if she forgot tonight? What if she’s forgotten? What if she’s forgotten?′

“And they keep it up, and the little toenails go ticky-ticky-ticky-ticky-ticky. It can drive a sane person mad. I’m insane, so it doesn’t bother me.”

Two years after her divorce, in or about the early 1970s, Cameron fell in love with a woman from B.C.’s mainland. They got together after Cameron figured out what she was feeling inside. “I was quite puzzled for a while,” she recalled. “It’s not like suddenly, in flaming letters across the sky, the finger of God drew a message to me.”

When Cameron was around 13, her mother Annie became a Jehovah’s Witness and began dragging her to the local Kingdom Hall. Her brother never had to go, but Cameron’s two sisters remain members of the church, as do their children. For Cameron, “It never took.”

Cameron and her mother never discussed her sexuality, but she’s sure her mom knew. Did it change their relationship? “No,” she cackled. “She had disapproved of me for a long time.” She elaborated. “It was a strange relationship with my mom because I knew — the way I knew the sun rises, and the moon shines in the sky, and the tide comes in, and the tide goes out — I knew my mother loved me. But I don’t think she liked me.”

Over the phone, I could hear the claws of the Pug Brigade tap along the linoleum floor of Cameron’s home. It was five o’clock, the dogs’ dinner time. “Honest to God, they have alarm clocks in their heads,” she moaned, imagining out loud the dogs’ thoughts. “’What if she forgot tonight? What if she’s forgotten? What if she’s forgotten?′

“And they keep it up, and the little toenails go ticky-ticky-ticky-ticky-ticky. It can drive a sane person mad. I’m insane, so it doesn’t bother me.”

This story appeared originally in The Tyee

The post At Canada’s End of the Road, a Visit with Anne Cameron appeared first on Ben Mussett.

But after trying to chase down a company hired to support and help secure compensation for renters displaced by new housing development, she didn’t think she’d ever see the money.

“They just left me hanging,” the 32-year-old marketing professional said of her “really frustrating” experience last winter with Sommerville Community Relations.

It wasn’t until after Stephens sought help from the Vancouver Tenants Union and threatened to involve the city and the provincial tenancy branch that she received a cheque last March — nearly three months after she had moved, the last stage at which departing tenants must be compensated, according to Vancouver’s much-touted tenant relocation and protection rules.

“My honest opinion is that if I hadn’t put pressure on them, I wouldn’t have got anything,” she told The Tyee.

Rather than helping Stephens navigate Vancouver’s web of policies, the company proved “a barrier to even receiving the compensation,” she said. “The whole thing felt kind of sketch.”

She’s not the only renter who was frustrated when dealing with Sommerville, which the city says is involved in the most development applications across the ambitious Broadway Plan among so-called “tenant relocation co-ordinators.”

Across 500 blocks on the busy arterial south of downtown, Vancouver is embarking on a decades-long push to build more than 40,000 new homes, displacing thousands from affordable rental units in the process.

City council passed the plan in 2022 after the approval of a new subway line along Broadway. Along with the push for higher-density development came enhanced renter protections to blunt the impact on tenants in what is home to the city’s largest stock of purpose-built rental housing.

These policies, which former mayor Kennedy Stewart hailed as the “strongest” renter protections in Canada, require that tenants be generously compensated if they permanently move. Tenants who want to return when the new building is completed are entitled to compensation to cover the difference in rent while they wait, and then are supposed to be offered a similar-sized unit in the new building at about the same rent they were previously paying.

However, The Tyee’s reporting raises questions about potential holes in Vancouver’s Tenant Relocation and Protection Policy, or TRPP, and revealed tension between the city and Sommerville, whose founder’s development firm is also heavily involved in the Broadway Plan, including on several projects where Sommerville is handling tenant relocation services. The city’s tenant relocation policy is up for review this year.

In addition to Stephens, The Tyee spoke with two other tenants at different buildings connected to Sommerville who have also struggled to secure compensation they’re entitled to. One said she nearly defaulted on a loan because the funds arrived months late. Another is still fighting to be paid.

Other tenants Sommerville has been assigned to help told The Tyee they had a hard time getting hold of the company’s employees and were sometimes given confusing or inaccurate information about city policy.

In response to The Tyee’s questions, Sommerville maintained that it “diligently helps” tenants it is designated to support, adding that the company rarely receives complaints.

Tenants currently seeking compensation opted to move years before they would have received formal eviction notices, the company also noted, with many projects still far from shovels in the ground.

“We are committed to the highest standards of communication,” Sommerville said in a statement shared through the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. “We are genuinely concerned to hear that several tenants feel we have fallen short.”

Sommerville also suggested that city staff’s evolving TRPP guidance hasn’t always been clearly communicated and is partly to blame for tenant frustrations.

Nor should Sommerville be considered responsible if its clients refuse to compensate tenants in a timely manner, the company said.

When reached by The Tyee, the city challenged both claims.

Although development applicants — either a landowner or a developer working on their behalf — are ultimately responsible for issuing compensation to tenants, a City of Vancouver spokesperson said Sommerville and other tenant relocation co-ordinators are the primary liaison.

“As such, responsibility for timely compensation rests in part with [Sommerville],” Kirsten Langan, a city spokesperson, said in an email to The Tyee.

Any guidance intended to clarify Vancouver’s tenant protection rules has been “shared directly” with Sommerville, Langan added.

Tenant relocation company and real estate developer share owner

Sommerville bills itself as a “boutique firm” that strives to make “tenant relocation a more personable and collaborative process.”

The Vancouver-based company was founded in 2020 after local developer James Tod recognized a growing demand to assist renters, municipalities and developers navigate layers of policy, according to the company’s managing director, Matthew Thiesen.

Since then, Sommerville, which employs “four to five” staff members, says it’s assisted thousands of households across six B.C. municipalities and is on track to support hundreds of tenants affected by the Broadway Plan.

Of the more than 150 projects currently proposed in the Broadway Plan area, Sommerville is co-ordinating tenant relocation for 26, more than any other tenant relocation co-ordinator, according to the city.

Meanwhile, JTA Development Consultants — the real estate development company Tod founded — is leading 11 development applications across the Broadway Plan, more than any other developer, the city told The Tyee. Sommerville is handling tenant relocation for all but one project, which doesn’t include rental housing.

That means Sommerville is responsible for helping explain to eligible tenants in those buildings what entitlements they’ve been granted through Vancouver’s citywide TRPP, as well as enhanced protections the city has extended to renters affected by the Broadway Plan, Rupert and Renfrew Station Area Plan and some other projects.

Renters in the Broadway Plan area — running from Clark Drive to Vine Street, between First and 16th avenues — whose current building will be redeveloped or replaced with new rentals could be eligible for some or all of the following:

• Option to come back to the new rental building at the same rent you are currently paying or a 20 per cent discount to citywide average rents, whichever is lower
• Option of a monetary rent top-up to avoid paying more in rent while you wait to come back to the new building
• Financial compensation of between four to 24 months’ rent based on how long you have lived in your rental home
• Payment of your moving expenses with a flat rate of $750 for a studio or one bedroom apartment, and $1,000 for two or more bedroom apartments
• Help finding a new rental home that meets your needs
• Additional financial compensation and assistance if you have a low income or face other barriers to housing

“The social acceptance of the Broadway Plan, and the pretty major redevelopment that’s going to happen as a result, depends on these policies working as they’re meant to work,” said Craig Jones, associate director of the University of British Columbia’s Housing Assessment Resource Tools project.

And they’re “quite generous,” added Jones — as long as they’re adhered to.

The city requires development applicants to show they’ve followed the tenant protection rules in order to secure permits necessary to start building, he noted.

While the city said its tenant protection policies have remained “largely unchanged” since they were approved by council in 2019, a bulletin to clarify how they should be implemented has been updated periodically.

“We’ve counted six changes in two years to the policy bulletin, and that’s extremely frustrating for people,” said Sommerville’s Thiesen, who, according to his LinkedIn profile, previously worked for JTA Development Consultants.

A few weeks before Stephens received her compensation last March, the city updated its bulletin to clarify that tenants who have opted not to return to the redeveloped building must be compensated before or on the day they move out.

“That update was a clarification intended to formally document what had already been standard practice through implementation,” Langan, the city spokesperson, told The Tyee.

But even after the city made clear that departing tenants must be paid before they move, some tenants have continued to face delays.

A wild goose chase

Nicole’s experience with Sommerville felt like a wild goose chase.

After hearing that her building in Kitsilano would be redeveloped, she opted to move last May. But it took several months and bypassing Sommerville — which she described as “impossible to get a hold of” — before she secured more than $9,000 in owed compensation.

The Tyee agreed not to publish Nicole’s surname due to concerns she could face repercussions at work for speaking out publicly.

The 32-year-old first responder had informed Sommerville about her plans to move in early April 2025. In July, the company told Nicole it had contacted the property owner applicant regarding her compensation on a weekly basis without success, according to emails reviewed by The Tyee.

By early September, Nicole’s cheque finally appeared to be ready — except it included the name of her ex-partner, who no longer lived with her. (She told The Tyee she had previously flagged that the company appeared to be working off an old lease.)

A Sommerville representative said she could simply cross his name out, but the bank still rejected the cheque.

When she alerted Sommerville, a representative suggested her former partner’s departure sounded “informal,” said they had again contacted the development applicant and encouraged Nicole to follow up in a month’s time, according to an email shared with The Tyee.

“After I heard that I just went, ‘Fuck this,’” said Nicole.

She decided to contact the owner of her former building and said she was told Sommerville had only requested the first cheque earlier that month. The Tyee reached out to the building owner for comment but did not hear back.

Then, she said, a receptionist working for the building’s owner called her saying Sommerville had now instructed them not to issue a new cheque because of lingering confusion about her old partner and that the payment would have to go through Sommerville.

Nicole then reached out to her former building manager, who sent her the updated lease, which she passed on to the building owner. She was finally paid by them a few days later.

“I had to go and take a loan out because I was relying on that money,” said Nicole, who has since moved away from Vancouver. “That shouldn’t be a position people are put in.”

Sommerville said it could not publicly discuss specific tenant cases.

After not hearing from Sommerville for several months, Nicole recently received a letter from JTA saying the proposed redevelopment at her former building was now “dormant” and that Sommerville’s “involvement will be on hiatus until the project returns to an active status.”

JTA would not clarify to The Tyee whether Sommerville continues to be active on other projects.

Another tenant named Sam is still seeking thousands of dollars in compensation after moving out of a different building this past November. The Tyee has changed their name because the tenant fears their decision to speak out could compromise their compensation.

After Sam let Sommerville know they’d be moving, they were informed the building’s redevelopment had entered a “dormant stage.”

“While tenants will remain eligible for the TRPP, the applicant is not providing payments [at this time],” Sommerville said in emails shared with The Tyee.

“If the applicant is choosing not to compensate, we do not have any ability or mechanism within policy to force them to comply,” Sommerville later told Sam.

The city, however, told Sam that unless a development application has been formally withdrawn, applicants are still required to compensate tenants who choose to permanently move or risk being denied necessary permits.

“I just want to get my money and cut ties,” said Sam, who’s now planning to reach out to a lawyer to discuss their options.

Unlike the other tenants in this story, Grant Roberts has chosen not to leave his low-rise Kitsilano building. He plans to stay until he’s evicted and return once it’s redeveloped in a few years.

The 71-year-old, who described himself as a low-income senior, has lived in his one-bedroom apartment steps from Kitsilano Beach since 2002. That means Roberts must be offered a choice between a one-bedroom and a studio, according to the city’s tenant protection guidelines.

But initially, he said, Sommerville told him he would be given a studio in the new building instead of a one-bedroom unit. When Roberts told Sommerville he’d spoken to a tenancy lawyer about the offer, he said the company changed its tune.

“They said I would be eligible for a one-bedroom, but that’s only after I called them on it.”

In an emailed statement, Sommerville said it was unaware of such a case, but again pointed to the city’s evolving guidance on its tenant protection rules, noting that language in the bulletin saying one-person households must be offered a choice between a studio and a one-bedroom only came later.

“Sommerville has been advocating for years to the city to take better steps to clarify policy,” the company said.

In correspondence with The Tyee, Langan, the city spokesperson, said the city “consistently advised” that returning tenants must be given that option if both unit types are available in the redeveloped building, calling it “long-standing practice.”

Updates to the policy bulletin “do not introduce new requirements,” Cecilia Ho, another city spokesperson, later added.

Emails involving other renters confused about the city’s policy also show city staff refuting information Sommerville had provided tenants.

“The applicant’s interpretation is their own and not supported by the policy nor by city staff,” an employee with Vancouver’s planning department told a tenant who had reached out for help this past summer, according to emails reviewed by The Tyee.

Sommerville says it prevents homelessness

Tenant relocation specialists are not necessarily a new phenomenon.

And “there’s nothing necessarily untoward about a tenant relocation company being a subsidiary of a developer,” said Jones, the UBC researcher. Many development firms do this work in-house, he noted.

But some tenants The Tyee spoke to felt differently about the ties between JTA and Sommerville — or at least what they considered a lack of transparency.

During a tenant town hall meeting, Jane asked a Sommerville representative about the company’s connection to JTA, the project’s developer. According to meeting minutes Sommerville provided to tenants, the company refused to answer: “That’s a question that is outside of [the] purpose of the meeting here.”

That answer left Jane — whose name The Tyee has changed to ensure her tenant entitlements are not compromised — wondering whether Sommerville has her and her neighbours’ backs.

“It’s impossible for me to trust a group who says they’re here for us tenants when they’re tied to the people uprooting us in the first place,” she said.

Sommerville said the companies’ ties are not a secret. During meetings with tenants, which are also attended by city staff, the company said it tries to keep focused on the topic at hand, including city policy, tenant assistance and project timelines.

“We do our best to answer folks’ questions,” Thiesen said. “We answer that question regularly when folks ask it. We’re not hiding that.”

Sommerville co-founder Tod currently sits on the city’s renters advisory committee, which, among other things, “advises council on strategic city priorities relating to renters.” He’s not the only committee member involved in property development.

When asked whether his business interest in the city’s tenant policy could represent a potential conflict, Tod pushed back.

“I have long been an advocate for tenant rights, and unapologetically support increas[ing] supply of rental housing,” he said over email.

“I am also uniquely aware of issues that arise throughout the relocation process that others may not be, which means I am uniquely positioned to advocate for the flexibility that is often required in working with tenants with varied barriers to housing.”

At the end of the day, the ultimate goal of Vancouver’s tenant protection rules is to prevent people from falling through the cracks into homelessness.

And that has never happened on Sommerville’s watch, Thiesen said, crediting the company’s success to the “individualized approach that we take.”

Stephens, who has since moved to Toronto, had heard the same thing from Thiesen. It caught her off guard. She didn’t think she was at risk of becoming homeless.

She also never felt as if the company were looking out for her.

“Even after my experience working with them, I’m still sort of unclear what their role is.”

This story originally appeared in The Tyee

The post Vancouver Promised to Protect Broadway Tenants. How’s That Working Out? appeared first on Ben Mussett.