Fatal Funnel: The Vancouver Police Failure That Left 11 Dead at a Filipino Street Festival

Executive Summary

On April 26, 2025, a black Audi SUV was deliberately driven into a dense crowd gathered for the Lapu Lapu Day street festival in Vancouver, British Columbia. The attack left 11 people dead and over 20 injured, many critically. The scene was one of absolute devastation—children screaming, bodies in the street, and a community torn apart in seconds. The suspect, reportedly a 30-year-old man “known to police” for mental health interactions, was restrained by bystanders and taken into custody. Authorities announced within hours that they were not treating the incident as terrorism.

The victims and their families have our deepest grief, solidarity, and yes—our thoughts and prayers. But we must be clear: the phrase “thoughts and prayers” has also become a tool of institutional deflection—a well-rehearsed reflex that absorbs public rage and lets law enforcement and political leadership off the hook before accountability can take root. That cannot happen here.

This wasn’t just a tragedy. This was a catastrophic security failure by the Vancouver Police Department and the City of Vancouver. The intersection at Fraser Street and East 41st Avenue was a narrow, high-density, urban fatal funnel—an obvious risk zone during any public gathering. Yet there were no vehicle checkpoints, no bollards, no police cruisers deployed as barricades, and minimal visible police presence.

The RCMP has issued formal federal guidance on hostile vehicle mitigation (HVM) since 2021, warning municipalities to deploy physical barriers at public events. The Lapu Lapu Day festival received no such protection—despite global precedent (Nice, Berlin, Toronto, London) and despite the fact that vehicle-ramming has become a standard tactic in both terrorism and hate crimes.

Authorities have already declared the incident “not terrorism,” citing mental illness—a pattern that reveals a systemic double standard in how Canada labels and processes attacks against racialized communities. Had the same act occurred at Canada Day or the Sun Run—events with large white-majority turnouts and elite optics—it’s likely the response would have included tactical units, immediate terrorism investigations, and elevated national security coverage. Here, the Filipino community is offered grief without justice.

This brief lays out why this event was not just tragic but legally and politically negligent, why the VPD’s failure was foreseeable and actionable, and why the language of terrorism matters. It also details the institutional pathways that allowed this to happen and proposes immediate recommendations—including the firing of responsible police leadership, a public inquiry, and the retroactive classification of this attack as terrorism under Section 83.01 of the Criminal Code.

No one should die celebrating their culture in Canada. The Filipino community deserves more than sympathy. It deserves accountability.

N.B. Prime Rogue Inc maintains a strict non-censorship policy to ensure that its intelligence and commentary remain unfiltered in the pursuit of accuracy and truth. However, given the deeply disturbing imagery associated with this attack, its ongoing and unresolved nature, and the likelihood that members of Vancouver’s Filipino community may engage with this article—particularly in response to outreach or comment requests—we are redacting all OSINT visual material from the scene to minimize the risk of secondary trauma.

Updates

Update 1 - April 27, 2025 - 18:00 PST

Response from Councillor Brian Montague (City of Vancouver)

On April 27, 2025, at 11:33 AM PT, Prime Rogue Inc. sent a formal Request for Comment (RFC) to Vancouver City Councillor Brian Montague, a former member of the Vancouver Police Department, regarding systemic failures in public safety planning for the April 26 Lapu Lapu Day street festival.

Our RFC included the following questions:

1. Based on your knowledge of VPD procedures, how would you characterize the decision to deploy only wooden barricades at a permitted street festival in a high-density corridor?
2. Do you believe the VPD command structure failed in its duty of care by not implementing hostile vehicle mitigation, particularly in light of RCMP guidance issued in 2020?
3. Would the same security posture have been deemed acceptable for a Canada Day event or white-majority civic celebration?
4. Do you believe the racial identity of the attendees played a role in the event being deprioritized from a safety perspective?
5. Will you support a public inquiry into the VPD’s event planning procedures, and disciplinary action where warranted?
6. As a councillor and former officer, do you believe Chief Constable Adam Palmer should be held accountable for this systemic failure?

Councillor Montague responded on April 27 at 8:33 PM PT with the following:

From: Montague, Brian [email protected]
To: Prime Rogue Inc - Communications Department [email protected]
Date: April 27, 2025, 8:33 PM PT
Subject: RE: Request for Comment – Public Safety Failure and VPD Oversight at Lapu Lapu Day Mass Casualty Event
Hi Margot [Prime Rogue Inc Director of Communications],
I am fascinated by your approach. I find your "report" flawed to say the least, speculative, and inaccurate, being held out as some sort of legitimate research paper while evidence is still being gathered by police and the identity of the accused has yet to be publicly provided. Your questions should be fact-finding, not bias and unbalanced. The accusations of racial discrimination are unwarranted with no evidence to back them up. I also find your threat for me to respond to your email and questions quite unprofessional, as I see no journalistic merit in doing so, I will not.
Regards,
Brian
Councillor Brian Montague
City of Vancouver
453 W. 12th Ave, Vancouver, B.C., Canada V5L 4Y8
[email protected]
Assistant
Wanda Bradbury
[email protected]
604.871.6711

Timeline Clarification & Editorial Restraint

Editorial note: At the time Councillor Montague responded to our request for comment (April 27, 18:33 PM PT), the identity of the suspect—Kai-Ji Adam Lo—had already been publicly confirmed by multiple media outlets. Prime Rogue Inc. had received confirmation of the suspect’s full legal name from three independent sources earlier that day, but withheld it out of caution and deference to verification standards, and to avoid interfering with ongoing notifications and investigations.

Councillor Montague’s assertion that the suspect’s identity was unknown at the time of our inquiry is therefore inaccurate.

Editorial Response

We are disappointed by Councillor Montague’s failure to engage with any of the substantive questions raised in our request, particularly those related to:

• The absence of RCMP-recommended hostile vehicle mitigation
• The apparent lack of hard perimeter protection at a city-permitted, high-density public event
• And the role that racialized prioritization in public safety planning may have played in this outcome

Rather than addressing legitimate inquiries into VPD protocols, risk modeling, or event command planning, Councillor Montague’s response dismissed both the facts under review and the grieving community’s right to demand answers.

It is our view that public officials have a duty of transparency and accountability, especially in the aftermath of an 11-person fatality event. Deflecting from those questions—while grieving families await answers—is a profound disservice to the people of Vancouver.

More Updates to Come

I. The Scene of the Crime: A Preventable Mass Casualty Event

On the evening of April 26, 2025, East 41st Avenue and Fraser Street in Vancouver transformed from a site of cultural celebration into a killing ground. The intersection, a typical urban choke point in East Vancouver, was host to the Lapu Lapu Day Festival, a well-attended event celebrating Filipino culture and history. Despite the predictable density of pedestrian traffic, there were no significant physical security measures in place to prevent vehicle access.

Photos and video footage confirm that the road was closed to traffic, but only in the most nominal sense. Wooden barricades were used to block off vehicle lanes, without the presence of police cruisers, concrete blocks, or even parked heavy vehicles to absorb or deflect force. The layout created a textbook fatal funnel—tight, densely packed, and with no viable egress once a vehicle entered at speed. Victims had nowhere to run.

At approximately 8:14 PM, a black Audi SUV accelerated through the intersection and into the crowd. According to early witness statements, the vehicle did not swerve or brake. It traveled in a deliberate straight-line trajectory, consistent with intent to harm rather than loss of control. Victims were hit indiscriminately. Some were dragged. Others were thrown. The driver was subdued not by police, but by civilians.

Within an hour of the incident, official sources had already begun softening public expectations, stating that the suspect was "known to police" and had a "history of mental illness." More critically, the Vancouver Police Department made no public admission of failure regarding the lack of protective infrastructure. There were no apologies, no explanations about planning protocols, and no commitment to reevaluate future event security.

This wasn’t a spontaneous gathering. The festival was permitted and publicly listed, involving road closures, tents, musical acts, and food stalls. The City of Vancouver was fully aware of it. Vancouver Police signed off on it. Someone made the decision—or failed to make the decision—to deploy no hostile vehicle mitigation at all.

For comparison, just hours later on April 27, the Vancouver Sun Run attracted tens of thousands of participants. Social media images and eyewitness accounts reveal similarly minimal security measures: lightweight barricades and traffic cones, but again no bollards, no static cruisers, and no visible threat containment strategy. That makes the issue not isolated to Lapu Lapu Day, but structural: VPD is failing to treat high-density public events as potential targets, despite all global evidence to the contrary.

We cannot excuse this as an oversight. In an era of heightened global awareness about vehicle-based attacks, especially following major incidents in Nice (2016), Berlin (2016), Toronto (2018), and London, Ontario (2021), every major city in the Western world has been warned: public gatherings in open streets require vehicle denial measures. That includes concrete, crash-rated barriers, or at minimum, positioned police vehicles. What was deployed in Vancouver? Wooden fences and prayer.

The scene of the crime tells a story. Not just about violence, but about institutional negligence—about who gets protected and who gets left vulnerable. The city knew the layout. They knew the volume. They had the ability and the obligation to install basic mitigation. And they failed.

The aftermath wasn’t chaos because an attacker emerged from nowhere. The aftermath was chaos because Vancouver Police and municipal planners did not take their responsibility seriously. Eleven people are dead because those responsible for public safety created a perfect kill box—and walked away.

II. Known Risks, Ignored Warnings: The Federal Playbook They Refused to Open

By 2025, the risk of vehicle-ramming attacks is neither novel nor unforeseeable. These attacks are a known quantity in the threat matrix—frequently deployed by ideological extremists, lone actors, and psychologically unstable individuals alike. The tactic is cheap, high-impact, easy to carry out, and hard to detect in advance. Which is why most Western security agencies, including Canada's own federal authorities, have spent the past decade shouting from the rooftops: protect your festivals. Deploy barriers. Treat every street gathering as a potential target.

And yet on April 26, 2025, the Vancouver Police Department acted as if none of that guidance existed.

The RCMP’s 2021 Blast Mitigation Guidance

In 2021, the RCMP published its “Blast Mitigation Considerations Guide”, which includes explicit recommendations for hostile vehicle mitigation (HVM) in crowd-dense public events. The document—available to all levels of government—outlines the need for:

• Crash-rated bollards
• Police cruisers or heavy vehicles as static physical barriers
• Enforced setbacks from traffic lanes
• Permanent or temporary fencing
• Crowd control plans that assume vehicle attack as a baseline risk

These aren’t vague suggestions. They’re part of a federal standard shared with municipalities across the country. The rationale behind the guidance is simple: you cannot stop every lone actor, but you can create friction, delay, and survivability through physical infrastructure.

The Playbook Has Been Written—In Blood

You don’t need a classified intelligence briefing to know how vehicle attacks unfold. In the past decade:

• Nice, France (2016): 86 killed by a cargo truck at a Bastille Day celebration.
• Berlin, Germany (2016): 12 killed at a Christmas market by a hijacked truck.
• Toronto, Canada (2018): 11 dead on Yonge Street—Minassian used a rented van.
• London, Ontario (2021): A Muslim family was intentionally run down while walking.

Each of these cases shifted the security paradigm. Each was followed by government warnings about using fixed physical measures to protect vulnerable urban events.

And Canada knew this. Not only through the RCMP, but through Public Safety Canada, which regularly coordinates event security frameworks. The Canadian Safety and Security Program (CSSP) has also published research and funded projects focused on urban risk mitigation and public safety infrastructure.

So what happened in Vancouver?

No Evidence VPD Requested Coordination

At time of writing, there is no evidence that the Vancouver Police Department requested federal or provincial support for security planning at the Lapu Lapu Day festival. There is also no evidence that they implemented any of the RCMP's vehicle mitigation protocols, despite having access to the guidance for five years.

Worse still, this wasn’t an isolated or last-minute event. It was a permitted street festival, announced in advance, involving formal road closures. The layout of East 41st and Fraser—a tight corridor, hemmed in by structures and stalls—created a textbook high-risk funnel. It didn’t take a PhD in counterterrorism to know that a vehicle attack would have catastrophic results.

And still: no cruisers. No barriers. Just wooden fencing and municipal neglect.

Was This Willful Negligence?

The available evidence points to one of two conclusions:

1. VPD command staff never read the federal guidance and have failed to integrate national security frameworks into their operational planning.
2. They knew—and chose not to act.

Either is damning. But the second is worse. Because it implies that VPD made a deliberate decision not to treat the Filipino cultural gathering as a high-risk target—not because there was intelligence to suggest safety, but because of institutional laziness or implicit bias in how threat profiles are assigned to racialized events.

Compare this to how Canadian police respond to:

• National Remembrance Day ceremonies
• Large sporting events
• White-majority marathons or charity races

At those events, physical mitigation is standard. Vehicle entry points are blocked. Tactical police are often on standby. Vancouver Sun Run, which took place the very next day, had some barricades and traffic cones—but still no proper vehicle denial infrastructure. This is a broader failure of civic risk management—but in the case of Lapu Lapu Day, it became fatal.

When Warnings Are Ignored, It’s Not an Accident

The RCMP did its job. Public Safety Canada did its job. CSSP did its job. The knowledge was there. The policy was there. The history was there. And still—no barriers.

That is no longer a bureaucratic failure. It’s a moral one.

III. The Terrorism Workaround: Language, Labels, and Bureaucratic Evasion

In the hours after the Fraser Street massacre, Vancouver authorities moved with striking speed—not to secure the site or deliver a full accounting, but to begin managing the narrative. The attacker, a man reportedly in his early 30s and “known to police” for mental health interactions, was immediately described as acting alone, with no terror motivation. Within an hour, the term “terrorism” was ruled out entirely.

It was a familiar script—one Canadians have seen before. When the attacker is not coded as foreign, not Muslim, and not ideologically explicit, institutions deploy a soft deflection: mental illness. It’s a way to humanize the perpetrator while depoliticizing the violence. In this case, the attacker is reportedly East Asian—not white, but still close enough to the dominant cultural framework of Vancouver to benefit from the system’s tendency to protect insiders and downplay liability.

What the Law Actually Says

Under Section 83.01 of the Criminal Code of Canada, an act qualifies as terrorism when it is:

• Committed in whole or in part for a political, religious, or ideological purpose, and
• Intended to intimidate the public or compel a government, and
• Causes serious harm or death.

The legal definition is clear. But application of the label is highly selective—shaped by public optics, media narratives, and institutional bias. The term “terrorism” doesn’t just trigger legal mechanisms; it triggers political scrutiny, budgetary pressure, and institutional accountability.

That’s why it’s often avoided—and why it matters who gets the benefit of that avoidance.

Mental Illness as Bureaucratic Firewall

Across North America, there’s a pattern:

• If the attacker is visibly Muslim or racialized in a way that triggers state anxiety, terrorism is declared first, and evidence is gathered later.
• If the attacker is white—or, as in this case, local, familiar, and not visibly marginalized—mental illness becomes the lead narrative, often within hours.

This isn't a question of bad intent by individual officers. It’s about a system that has been conditioned to apply the language of terror only when it is politically convenient, and to remove that label when the optics suggest risk to institutional stability.

Let’s examine the track record:

• Alek Minassian (Toronto van attacker, 2018) was originally framed around mental illness—until his incel ideology forced prosecutors to reconsider.
• Nathaniel Veltman (London, ON, 2021), who killed a Muslim family, was charged with terrorism under the same law now being avoided in Vancouver.
• Alexandre Bissonnette (Quebec mosque shooter, 2017) killed six men during prayer—but was charged only with first-degree murder. Terrorism was never formally applied.

This Was Terrorism—By Impact If Not Intent

Even if we assume no ideological manifesto and no stated goal, this attack still:

• Targeted a racialized community gathering in public space,
• Created mass casualties in a high-density urban intersection, and
• Left an entire ethnic community traumatized, afraid, and mourning.

That’s what terrorism does. Whether driven by hatred, delusion, or calculation, it sends a message through violence: You are not safe. Not here. Not in your own city.

The Filipino community in Vancouver isn’t parsing legal definitions today. They’re holding funerals. And what they know in their bones is that this wasn’t random. It was targeted chaos, and it was avoidable.

Why Authorities Run From the “T-Word”

There’s a reason police and politicians avoid the term “terrorism” unless absolutely forced:

1. It creates a political crisis.
   Applying the label demands a federal response, potentially implicating intelligence failures, local negligence, or broader security gaps.
2. It invites litigation.
   Families of victims may sue the city or province for failure to mitigate a known national security risk—especially if RCMP hostile vehicle guidance was ignored.
3. It disrupts public narratives.
   If someone local, familiar, and unthreatening in public perception can be a terrorist, the illusion of safety cracks—and VPD’s planning failure becomes indefensible.

By deploying “mental health” language early, officials short-circuit public outrage and neutralize demands for change.

Institutional Comfort vs. Community Trauma

This isn’t about whiteness—it’s about proximity to institutional comfort.

The attacker was East Asian. So were many of the officers, planners, and administrators. He was from the city. He looked familiar. And in that familiarity, he was not coded as a threat. That familiarity bred complacency.

Meanwhile, the victims were Filipino—part of Vancouver’s largest and most visible Southeast Asian community. But in the eyes of civic institutions, they didn’t trigger the same urgency, the same respect, the same precautions.

This is how structural racism functions. Not through slurs or overt hatred, but through who gets protected and who gets minimized.

Naming Matters

Calling this “not terrorism” is more than a legal dodge. It’s a denial of public truth.
It says to the Filipino community: What happened to you isn’t national. It’s not political. It doesn’t rise to the level of national memory.
It reduces a mass killing to a traffic incident. It launders public safety failure into personal tragedy.

This was terrorism. Maybe not by manifesto—but by impact, fear, and social consequence.
And the refusal to call it that? That’s the second act of violence—committed by the state

IV. Structurally Racist Negligence: Who Gets Protected in Canada?

Let’s stop pretending this was a one-off mistake. What happened on April 26, 2025, wasn’t just a failure of planning or foresight. It was the predictable result of a tiered public safety system in which some communities receive proactive protection—and others are left exposed.

At its core, this was structurally racist negligence: a state of failure where systems designed to protect the public are unevenly applied based on who that “public” is. And in Vancouver—as in so many Canadian cities—that line often splits along racial and cultural boundaries.

Who Are the Filipino Canadians?

Filipino Canadians represent one of the largest immigrant communities in the country—with over 960,000 people nationwide, and more than 38,000 in Vancouver alone. The community is deeply interwoven into Canada’s healthcare, service, and public infrastructure sectors. They are hyper-visible, economically essential, and culturally rich.

Lapu Lapu Day, the event targeted in the April 26 attack, honors a Filipino historical hero who resisted Spanish colonization—a day of pride, music, food, and multi-generational celebration.

So why was it treated like a side event?

Why did no hostile vehicle mitigation get deployed?

Why were wooden barricades considered sufficient?

The answer is simple: The event wasn’t perceived as high-value.

Who Gets the Full Security Treatment?

Let’s contrast Lapu Lapu Day with other events in Vancouver that routinely get:

• Concrete barriers
• Cruisers at key intersections
• Tactical teams on standby
• Sweeping RCMP coordination

These include:

• The Vancouver Pride Parade
• Canada Day
• The Sun Run
• Remembrance Day ceremonies
• Concerts with majority-white audiences

These events trigger automatic planning tiers—not because of intelligence warnings, but because of social and political visibility. These are the “real” civic events. Everyone else? They get whatever’s left.

When planners ask “What’s the threat level?” what they’re really asking is:
“Who’s going to make noise if something goes wrong?”

And in this case, the answer was clearly: not enough people with power.

Structural Racism Is About Who Gets Left Out

This isn’t about an individual officer or a single bad decision. Structural racism operates through omission, through default, through assumptions that never get questioned:

• That a Filipino event won’t be targeted.
• That a racialized community will be quiet.
• That wooden barriers are “good enough” for brown folks.
• That the media cycle will move on.

It’s the same logic that leaves Indigenous reserves underfunded, that lets Black neighborhoods be over-policed and under-protected, and that delays emergency services in immigrant-dense suburbs.

It’s not a conscious decision to harm—it’s a constant decision not to care.

The Data Was Already There

Statistics Canada has documented increases in hate crimes targeting East and Southeast Asians since 2020. While Filipino Canadians are often grouped into broad “Southeast Asian” or “Other visible minority” categories, there is ample evidence that racialized communities are experiencing more violence, more threats, and more vulnerability.

This should have triggered heightened precautions, not relaxed standards.

Moreover, the RCMP’s federal hostile vehicle mitigation guidance was published in 2020, explicitly stating that public street events require hardened infrastructure. If that guidance was ignored, why? If it was unknown, why not?

The answer, again, is priority. Filipino lives simply weren’t given the risk weighting necessary to move that guidance into action.

The Optics of Familiarity

One of the reasons this happened is because no one in charge thought it would. The event didn’t feel threatening. The attacker didn’t feel threatening. The setup didn’t feel urgent. Why? Because everyone was coded as familiar—immigrants who assimilate, a model minority, “peaceful” people.

But familiarity isn’t protection. It’s often how racialized communities get erased.

Filipino Canadians don’t riot. They don’t hold press conferences. They don’t sue governments at the rate others might. And so they’re treated with institutional indifference, not because they’re disliked—but because the system has learned that there are no consequences for neglecting them.

The Consequences of That Neglect

The result? Eleven people are dead. Others are maimed. Families are broken. An entire ethnic community is in mourning. And yet there is no state of emergency. No terrorism designation. No dismissals. Just a few soft-voiced officials offering “thoughts and prayers” while every responsible institution scrambles to avoid the word “accountability.”

This wasn’t just a failure. It was a pattern repeated. It’s what happens when cities treat racialized communities as decorative, not foundational.

It’s what happens when brown bodies in a street festival aren’t seen as citizens to protect, but as crowds to permit.

No More “Tragedy” Talk

This was not a tragedy. It was a predictable outcome of structural decisions. It was policy made visible through violence. It was racism—not of the slur, but of the shrug.

If this had been a white-majority event, someone would’ve ordered bollards.
If this had been a Jewish, Muslim, or LGBTQ+ event, counterterrorism planning would’ve been consulted.
If this had been any event with political heat behind it, you would’ve seen cruisers at every entry point.

But it wasn’t. And that’s the point.

V. Political, Institutional, and Legal Implications

The Vancouver massacre wasn’t just a failure of front-line planning. It was a multi-layered collapse of municipal, provincial, and law enforcement responsibility—with clear chains of command, defined duties of care, and multiple points at which someone could’ve said: we need to protect these people.

No one did.

And now, eleven are dead.

Who Held the Pen?

At the municipal level, the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) is the primary authority responsible for street-level public safety planning. That includes:

• Special Events Section: charged with coordinating with festival organizers and city agencies.
• Emergency Planning & Operations: responsible for risk assessments and deployment strategies.
• Intelligence or Counterterrorism Liaison Units (if consulted): tasked with identifying risks based on known threat patterns (e.g., vehicle attacks, hate-based targeting).

The Chief Constable of the VPD bears ultimate responsibility. But so does the VPD command structure that signed off on this event’s safety plan—or worse, failed to require one.

At the municipal level, Mayor Ken Sim, who also serves on the Vancouver Police Board, cannot wash his hands of this. He is ultimately accountable for civic oversight of policing decisions. His response—a vague expression of sadness and support—falls well short of leadership. No questions asked publicly. No calls for inquiry. No commitment to investigating systemic failure.

Provincial Oversight: The Missing Middle Layer

Public policing in British Columbia is overseen by the Solicitor General and BC’s Ministry of Public Safety. These institutions are responsible for:

• Ensuring proper application of provincial policing standards
• Reviewing municipal compliance with public safety expectations
• Coordinating cross-agency briefings and emergency response readiness

Premier David Eby and Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General Gary Begg both issued formulaic statements following the attack. Neither have announced a formal inquiry, nor even acknowledged the possibility that public institutions may bear some blame.

This is no longer tenable. This wasn’t a rogue actor breaking through elite-level security. This was a festival permitted by the city, left exposed by municipal planners, and attended by thousands of people from a racialized community who were offered no physical protection whatsoever.

Federal Guidance, Local Neglect

At the federal level, Public Safety Canada, the RCMP, and the Canadian Safety and Security Program (CSSP) have all published guidance and strategic frameworks around hostile vehicle mitigation, critical infrastructure protection, and major event coordination.

These documents are not classified. They’re publicly accessible and made available to municipalities and provinces. The RCMP’s 2021 “Blast Mitigation Considerations Guide” explicitly warns against soft closures without hard barriers.

The guidance existed. The VPD and City of Vancouver failed to act on it.

The question now is: will anyone be held accountable for ignoring it?

Legal Consequences?

Families of the victims may pursue civil litigation on grounds of:

• Negligence in public safety planning
• Failure to implement best practices
• Breach of duty of care by municipal officials and police command

And if terrorism is ever retroactively applied, the potential for federal liability expands.

What’s clear is this: no one in authority should be allowed to say “we couldn’t have known.”

They could have. They should have. They didn’t.

VI. Recommendations and Demands: What Justice Actually Looks Like

Eleven people are dead. Not from a natural disaster, nor a freak accident. They were killed because a city—with all its resources, police, permits, and planning infrastructure—chose to treat a racialized community event as an afterthought.

No more vague condolences. No more thoughts and prayers.

This was a systemic failure. And systems must be overhauled when they kill.

Below are six immediate demands—policy changes, personnel consequences, and public actions that must occur if this city, this province, and this country intend to treat Filipino lives as equal to their white, wealthy, and politically visible counterparts.

1. Immediate Termination or Suspension of Responsible VPD Leadership

This is not a “lessons learned” situation. It is a fireable offense.

• The Chief Constable of Vancouver Police must resign or be removed.
• All commanders and section heads who reviewed or approved the public safety plan for the Lapu Lapu Day event must be:
  • Immediately suspended, pending investigation
  • Reviewed for gross negligence
  • Evaluated for failure to follow national guidance

VPD failed in their core function: protecting the public. When that failure leads to mass death, people do not get to keep their jobs.

2. A Full Public Inquiry with Subpoena Power

This cannot be buried in an internal police report or a private city review.

A formal public inquiry must be launched by the Province of British Columbia with:

• Subpoena authority for city officials, police planners, and provincial oversight bodies
• Full review of why RCMP hostile vehicle guidance was ignored
• Disclosure of all internal communications between:
  • VPD Special Events Section
  • City of Vancouver’s permitting and public safety departments
  • Provincial liaison officers

This inquiry must also evaluate systemic bias in how different communities receive security infrastructure and police attention during permitted events.

3. Retroactive Review for Terrorism Classification

Section 83.01 of the Criminal Code allows for a broader understanding of terrorism based on:

• Public intimidation
• Ideological or social targeting
• Mass casualty impact

Regardless of the attacker’s race, religion, or mental state, the effect of this attack was functionally terroristic. A retroactive review must be conducted to determine whether the Filipino community was targeted based on racialized identity, and whether this act fits within Canada’s existing terrorism framework.

If it does, it must be labeled as such—publicly, in writing, and in the record.

4. Mandatory Hostile Vehicle Mitigation (HVM) for All Public Street Events

No city should be allowed to pretend this is new.

Effective immediately, the Province of British Columbia must issue a directive requiring that:

• Any event involving street closures and 100+ attendees must implement crash-rated barriers, positioned cruisers, or hardened vehicle denial points
• All event plans be submitted for risk-weighted review, including hate crime threats, racial targeting potential, and local crowd density
• Any deviation from these protocols must be approved at the ministerial level, with full documentation

In parallel, the federal government must tie future public safety funding to municipal compliance with HVM minimum standards.

5. Dedicated Safety Funding for BIPOC Cultural Events

Structural racism isn’t just about malice—it’s about who has resources and who doesn’t.

The City of Vancouver, and the Province of BC, must establish a dedicated annual fund to:

• Provide security infrastructure grants for racialized cultural events
• Offer technical assistance, police liaison coordination, and infrastructure support
• Ensure that Filipino, Indigenous, South Asian, East Asian, Black, Arab, and other racialized communities can protect their own without relying on bureaucratic scraps

No more two-tiered security. If your kids can run in the Sun Run, then our elders can dance without fear at a street festival.

6. Public Apology and Reparative Commitments

Words matter—but only if they come with consequences.

The Mayor of Vancouver, the Chief Constable, the Premier of BC, and the Solicitor General must issue a joint public apology acknowledging:

• That security planning for Lapu Lapu Day was inadequate
• That the Filipino community was failed
• That steps are being taken to ensure this never happens again

In addition:

• A compensation fund must be established for victims and families
• Mental health support, legal aid, and long-term recovery assistance must be offered
• The City must memorialize the victims publicly—not through generic statements, but through permanent civic recognition and dedicated public space

This Is the Minimum

We are done with inquiries that end in recommendations no one implements.
We are done with condolences that cost nothing.
We are done with communities being called essential but treated as expendable.

These are the minimum acceptable actions.
Anything less is complicity.

While the Filipino community of Vancouver—and of Canada more broadly—must ultimately define what justice looks like in this moment, the following demands represent the bare minimum institutional response required to protect all Canadians from the structural failures that enabled this massacre. These are not special accommodations. They are the baseline of democratic accountability in a pluralist society.

Final Note: When Institutions Refuse to Learn

What happened on April 26 wasn’t unthinkable. It was warned. It was predictable. And it was engineered through neglect.

This was not the result of one broken man—it was the result of an entire civic system that didn’t see a Filipino street festival as worthy of the same protection given to a marathon, a parade, or a political rally. It was death by omission. Racialized negligence executed in policy and sealed in wood barricades.

Now, eleven people are gone.

And still—no one has been fired. No inquiry has been launched. No apology has been issued. Instead, we are offered candlelight and clichés. Thoughts and prayers as bureaucratic sedatives.

But grief is not justice. And mourning is not reform.

If this country—if this city—wants to prove that racialized communities are not expendable, it must act with urgency, with transparency, and with force. Anything less is a statement that Filipino lives were not worth defending—and still aren’t.

The attack may have lasted seconds. The failure that made it possible lasted years. The question now is whether the response will come in weeks, or not at all.

Because if Canada cannot protect its citizens after they've been killed—then we are not living in a safe country. We are living in a country that only protects those it cannot afford to lose.