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The Downtown Eastside faces a complete lack of advanced voting stations, making voting and being represented even more challenging. “I have to wonder if this is intentional given that people here are the most impacted and hurt by the city’s policies on housing, poverty, immigrant, policing, gentrification and transit,” says Pedersen.

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Part of the history of the last five centuries on these territories is the story of Europeans displacing Indigenous peoples for economic gain. It is this history that Glen Coulthard, in his new book, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, calls the “violent transformation of noncapitalist forms of life into capitalist ones.” This form of primitive accumulation, through violent dispossession, has since given way to quieter, less visible, structures of constant displacement. In the pointed words of Patrick Wolfe, cited by Coulthard, “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.”