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Good morning, Wendy Cox in Vancouver today.

If much of Canada outside Vancouver has heard of Hogan’s Alley, they may know it because it’s where Jimi Hendrix’s grandmother once lived. The rock legend used to visit from time to time. Or they may think of Hogan’s Alley as a particular hole on a couple of world-famous golf courses.

But the rich history of the lost Vancouver neighbourhood has taken on new prominence these past weeks as protests against egregious and deadly police use-of-force in the wake of the death of George Floyd have focused attention on what it means to be Black in Vancouver. After years and years of efforts to redress the obliteration of the cultural corridor that was Hogan’s Alley, now may be the time that all levels of government are moved to act.

Bertha Clark grew up in the neighbourhood. She remembers her first day of Grade 3, in 1965, when she deliberately avoided a crowd of white classmates just outside her school property. She had just moved from San Francisco with her family and, on Day 2, she decided avoidance wasn’t her thing: She walked past the group. Racist slurs rained down on her and one boy punched her.

“I had to throw my books to the ground, he had to throw his books to the ground, and we had to fight – [but] I got the best of that young boy,” she said during a phone interview from her home on B.C.‘s Sunshine Coast.

As Mike Hager, Ian Bailey and Xiao Xu write today, more dust-ups followed and she quickly learned swear words in Italian and the Cantonese dialect of Taishanese from shopkeepers openly hostile to the presence of a Black girl like her. But the four-block stretch Ms. Clark and Vancouver’s Black population called home for seven decades offered respite from the racism that could feel inescapable.

The neighborhood peaked in the 1940s, with a Black population of at least 800 residents, descendants of Black immigrants from California who had originally settled in Victoria and on Salt Spring Island. There were also Black homesteaders from Oklahoma and Black railway porters who worked for Great Northern Railway. But by the time Ms. Clark began her walk to school, the neighbourhood was heading into decline.

For decades, Vancouver City Hall spent little to no money on the area’s sidewalks or infrastructure, and its industrial zoning made it nearly impossible for its homeowners to get mortgages or home improvement loans. By the 1960s, many neighbourhood amenities were gone. The city was not picking up garbage or looking after the streets, and some of the buildings were left to decay. Local newspapers derided Hogan’s Alley and its neighbouring area, labelling them the slums of Vancouver and rundown.

This made it a prime candidate for the “urban renewal” promoted by freeway fanatics in cities across North America. By the 1960s, the car was king and viaducts were supposed to be the introduction of Vancouver into the modern era of the fast commute away from a city’s inner core. Vancouver, famously, would eventually reject the kinds of freeways that had sliced through Seattle and Toronto. But not before the Georgia viaduct, announced in 1967 and completed in 1972, bulldozed over Hogan’s Alley.

Oludolapo Makinde, a graduate student at University of British Columbia’s law school, said the displacement of Black families, businesses and community is still being felt today.

“People who come to Vancouver, Black people who come to Vancouver, cannot identify themselves within the community because the Black community was dispersed way back,” she said in an interview, noting that about 1 per cent of the Vancouver population is Black.

Now, activists and city councilors are hoping a vision for a revitalized Hogan’s Alley, with housing, a cultural centre, a central plaza and opportunities for businesses such as West Indian and African shops, will be finally realized.

Kennedy Stewart, mayor since the end of 2018, said he is looking to finally resolve the area’s future and the controversy, with continuing talks planned with the Hogan’s Alley Society, a community group, and the prospect of funding from the federal Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. and the province to build a community centre.

Stephanie Allen co-founded the Hogan’s Alley Society three years ago to push the city to hand over the land to a community trust, which could pave the way for a mixed-use development centred around creating space for Black people and businesses. Two years ago, the non-profit sent a draft motion of understanding to city hall, a crucial next step for the project that could allow Ms. Allen and others to secure funding from CMHC and begin the complex task of planning the development.

They still haven’t heard back from the city.

More recently, the city said it was working with the society to finalize a meeting and agenda with staff, but the COVID-19 pandemic got in the way.

This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief James Keller. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here. This is a new project and we’ll be experimenting as we go, so let us know what you think.

Around the West

CHIEF ALLAN ADAMS: Prosecutors dropped charges against Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, who was tackled by an RCMP officer during an encounter that began with a police stop over expired licence plates. Mr. Adam was charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. His lawyer says the decision to drop the charges, which came after the release of police dashcam video, proves the Chief did nothing wrong and that the charges were related to his race. Mr. Adam’s lawyer also revealed that the officer who tackled Mr. Adam is facing charges related to an off-duty incident from last August. The RCMP says it’s looking into why those charges were not made public at the time.

POLICE STREET CHECKS: Vancouver’s mayor is pushing to end street checks as part of a larger movement across North America to reform policing. Street checks are the police practice of stopping people randomly to either look for signs of criminal activity, such as hidden guns, or to check on their welfare.

HAIL STORM: The Alberta government announced financial aid this week for Calgary residents whose homes were damaged by a destructive hail storm this month. The storm shredded siding on thousands of houses, hammered cars, smashed windows, and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Kelly Cryderman looked at how people living in the worst-hit neighbourhoods are coping with the damage as they figure out if the provincial help will cover expenses that insurance won’t.

COVID-19: New data out of B.C. shows First Nations communities have been able to keep COVID-19 cases low, with just 87 cases reported by the First Nations Health Authority.

B.C. BUDGETS: British Columbia’s NDP government says it is abandoning its balanced budget law because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The current law requiring balanced budgets was passed in 2001, but the previous BC Liberal government also voted to run deficits despite its own law.

AIMCO: Alberta’s government-owned investment fund parted company this week with executives responsible for a $2.1-billion loss on trades linked to market volatility.

PRIVACY BREACH: The privacy commissioners in Ontario and British Columbia have slammed LifeLabs, Canada’s largest laboratory-testing company, for violating the privacy of up to 15 million Canadians. The commissioners say the company failed to safeguard patient data and that those failings resulted in a major cyber attack late last year. The company says it has taken steps to improve its security and is committed to being open and transparent. However, the privacy commissioners say the company is blocking the release of their report into the breach.

KENNEY SPEECHWRITER: Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is rejecting calls to fire his speechwriter after a blog post surfaced in which he called Canada’s history of residential schools a “bogus genocide.” Mr. Kenney says he disagrees with the views expressed by Paul Bunner but he’s not saying whether he intends to do anything in light of those comments. Mr. Bunner earns a salary about $150,000 a year.

NHL: Vancouver is out of the running in the race to become a hub city for NHL playoff games, leaving Edmonton and Toronto as the remaining Canadian cities.

Opinion

Marilyn Slett, Judith Sayers, and Chief Joe Alphonse on protecting Indigenous communities from COVID-19: “Since the pandemic began, Indigenous leaders have exhorted government officials in vain to give us more information and resources to protect our communities. To date, our requests have been ignored.”

Andrew Coyne on Alberta’s separatists and a referendum on equalization: “If there is a quality that Alberta’s nationalists share with their Quebec brethren – aside from the whiny self-absorption – it is hubris, to the point of delusion. The other provinces, most of them recipients of equalization, are not going to agree to redraw the program to Alberta’s designs just because Albertans voted they must, nor would the federal government, whose constitutional jurisdiction it is, do so in the face of such widespread opposition.”

Adrienne Tanner on drinking in Vancouver parks: “The Park Board was already considering allowing alcohol consumption on beaches. The COVID-19 pandemic has simply accelerated the conversation. Let’s seize this moment and relax the rules – our city will be a better place for it.”

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