By: Sofia Chassomeris, News Writer
On September 24, Vancouver Park Board officials cut open a new mother’s tent and disposed of her belongings at CRAB Park. The mother gave birth to her baby 30 hours before the incident and was speaking to outreach workers when the incident occurred.
“They took a knife to the tent and then let the garbage people take it. I heard my air mattress popping in the truck,” said the woman. “It’s demonic.” The mother and her child are now staying with friends and family.
The tent city has been a community for many people without housing for the past three years despite the Park Board’s efforts to remove it. CRAB Park advocate Fiona York told CBC that “usually an encampment is swept or evicted within a year or less,” but this tent city is an exception due to a court ruling in 2022 that declared “there weren’t enough indoor spaces for those people to go to.” In 2023, the “Vancouver Police Department spent $409,536 to deploy dozens of officers over eight days” to do a street sweep at East Hastings.
In an interview with The Peak, York said the camp at CRAB Park “has an infrastructure, culture, and governance guided by residents themselves” with support from volunteers, community organizations, and many individual donors. As of late September, seven tents in the CRAB Park Designated Area remain. There were originally 16 in this area.
York also told Vancouver is Awesome that the use of force by park rangers is a regular occurrence that is part of a larger, “slow-moving decampment of the site.” A similar case occurred in June, making it the second time this year that a new mother’s tent and belongings were taken from her. The first incident was carried out while “the new mother was still in the hospital after delivering her baby.
“Seizing tents and belongings directly after a birth is reminiscent of racist, colonial practices of removing children from families, and forced evictions,” stated advocates in a recent press release. These actions echo the Sixties Scoop, which was “the mass removal of [Indigenous] children from their families into the child welfare system, in most cases without the consent of their families” through the 1960s.
York explained that “Vancouver is unique, as no other city in Canada has a separate Park Board and city officials.” On-duty park rangers have “all the power and authority of a police constable” but are “not subject to the Police Act,” which allows for complaints to be made about abuse or misconduct from officers.
In the press release, advocates also noted that there has been a “major escalation” of the Park Board’s control over CRAB Park. For instance, “notices” were issued to residents concerning “rat attractants” inside the tents. The advocates stated that this “violates even the very low bar of the Park Board’s own bylaws that say the rangers cannot enter or open tents without at least 24 hours written notice.” York said the notices are “so-called ‘notices of violations’ of the park bylaws” — bylaws “changed in April 2024” that are “now far more restrictive.”
In the interview, York emphasized the “importance of lived experience” in informing decisions surrounding the camp. The bylaws previously mentioned were used as an example: “All of these were developed without input by those most affected.”
Earlier this year, CBC News reported on “the endurance of [the] community” against the city’s efforts to evict residents from the park. In December 2023, the residents filed a human rights complaint against the City of Vancouver and Park Board, claiming the city was discriminating against them for “failing to provide proper sanitation, electricity, protection from extreme heat, and good-faith consultation.” The date of the hearing has not yet been confirmed.
The Peak reached out to the City of Vancouver for a statement but did not receive a response by the publication deadline.
