Help Park Residents Pay Their Legal Costs

My name is Heather and I am launching this campaign in support of the members of my community.

We are appealing for your support to raise funds to help cover our legal fees as we fight for our right to compensation for the loss of our homes and our future security. Any monies raised above what is required for our legal expenses would be distributed evenly amongst the residents to help with moving expenses. We thank you for your support.

We want to emphasize that we have no desire to have a legal confrontation with the Songhees Nation, but we have no choice. Most of us are elderly and some of us are physically and mentally vulnerable. For most of us, having to leave and to demolish our homes, like what the Songhees Nation demands, means we will lose all of our retirement savings, and go into debt. For some of us, the Songhees Nation’s demand also definitely means homelessness.

We are a community of home owners, the majority of whom are retired and on a fixed income. Some of us still hold mortgages on our homes that we will still be responsible to pay even if the Songhees Nation evicts us. We are not only being told that we are to vacate the park, but that we are responsible for the cost of taking our homes with us when we leave, or alternatively, paying for the cost of demolishing our homes. This unconscionable demand ensures that we lose our homes along with our dignity.

We feel that the Songhees Nation are within their rights to conduct business and profit from the use of their traditional lands. However, we also believe that this should not be to the detriment and at the expense of their neighbours and members of their community. We have lived with them for decades. They have taxed us for all of this time as though we owned the land we have lived on, and now they have turned around to say that our homes are “worthless” and that we actually own nothing, despite decades of acting like that was not the case.

We feel that, to the Songhees Nation, we are simply names and dollar amounts on pad rent cheques and tax assessment rolls.

The Songhees Nation is ignoring members of our community who planned carefully to be able to live on their pensions, having spent all their savings or worked hard for years so that they would have their homes paid for at retirement time.

They are being insensitive to their fellow community members. For example, they have never spoken with our neighbour who has Alzheimer’s disease, but who knows her way expertly around her home, a place that holds her memories like a roadmap of the life she built in this community with her late husband. In another case, one of our elderly neighbours has frequent pain that means some days she cannot get out of bed. She has no family to take her in if she loses her home.

We are grateful for any help you can provide. We also hope that our struggle will prevent this from happening to other communities in the future.