With šxwmə0kwəy’ Əmasəm, moral preening overrides safety

• National Post
• 20 Jun 2025
• JAMIE SARKONAK Comment

The City of Vancouver describes its new name for Trutch Street, “šxwmə0kwəyəmasəm ’

Street,” as a gift, but it’s more like a curse.

On Tuesday, city council unanimously voted for the change, condemning 100 or so residents to a lifetime of addressarial grief. Joining them in suffering will be countless drivers who make their way down the route, delivering, visiting and otherwise trying to get from A to B.

The new name means “Musqueamview” in Musqueam, but the city itself admits that nobody is likely to be able to read it in its letter-salad form: “With no fluent speakers left, this street name is a landmark moment for hən’q’əmin’əm’ revitalization,” notes a web page about the change. (That word beginning in “h” refers to the Musqueam’s traditional language.) It will replace the name of Joseph Trutch (1826-1904), B.C.’S first lieutenant-governor who, among other things, reduced the sizes of Indigenous reserves and denied the existence of some earlier treaties.

That remark by the city contained an important admission: the purpose of changing the name of pronounceable Trutch Street into something indecipherable at 40 km/h is political. The goal is to involve the local population in a moral exercise at the cost of their comfort and safety. Indeed, not even the Musqueam (who insisted on this visual obstacle course, according to Deputy City Manager Armin Amrolia) are going to be capable of reading it. Beyond signalling solidarity against colonialism, impeding the passage of Vancouverites and offending the local Squamish Nation, it’s a functionally useless sign.

Emergency services have already expressed their concerns that the new name will get in the way of saving lives, largely because 911 callers might not be able to pronounce the name. Most people haven’t learned linguistics to the point where they can pronounce Indigenous mainstays like the theta symbol, the tiny W, the 7 and the triangle. “Help, I’m at Sixwomkeymasem Street” is the most we can reasonably expect from people.

To address these concerns, the city has suggested a second set of unofficial signs that read “Musqueamview St.” (though it’s unclear whether that solution has been finalized). Emergency mapping systems will use the unofficial English name, but it won’t appear in the bylaw, which will use the official name instead. Licenses will have to be redone, as will insurance and registration slips. Then, there are land titles, bank addresses, credit cards, etc.

Anyone sending or receiving mail by Canada Post is asked to write both official and unofficial street names if possible, but to use English if only one line is available (work is being done to accept these new letters, but “most non-english lettering is not currently recognized” our letter service told me in an email this week). Other internal and external address and map systems — such as transit or B.C.’S insurance corporation — might be unable to digest these characters.

“To move forward, the project team recommended that these systems use the name ‘šxwmə0k

St” wherever possible, and those that cannot will use the name “Musqueamview St” with a footnote wherever possible stating “Musqueamview St is a translated name available for use while colonial systems work to accept multilingual characters,’” reads the direction from city staff.

The Canada Revenue Agency, meanwhile, can only accept Latin characters, numerals and basic punctuation. “In this case, since Canada Post will be supplying the English version of the street name, that is the format that will appear in CRA records,” said media officer Khameron Sikoulavong in an email Tuesday. This won’t have any impact on tax filing, he assures me, but I’d still feel queasy not using my legal address if I were a resident.

It’s no small matter to expand the letters that a system can use: even for this newspaper, our designer advises me, this article will be a headache to print due to the digital acrobatics involved.

EASY COMMUNICATION IS NO LONGER THE PRIORITY.

Perhaps Vancouver believes it can force decolonization on others by using this script of what is functionally a dead language. But that hope would be far-fetched: most entities that need to keep legal addresses on file won’t get the memo that there are about 100 potential new system-incompatible entries, and many won’t have the capacity to incorporate upside-down Es into their vocabulary.

On the readers’ side, all sorts of barriers keep these words from being useful in wayfinding: drivers with minor reading disabilities, eyesight problems and second-language capabilities in English can get around fine with numbers and words like “Forest Way” — but with a jumble of letters with foreign marks upwards of 20 letters long? I think not. Indigenous words aren’t out of the question, either; indeed, it’s a tradition we should keep. Many excellent Canadian place names came to us this way, such as “Canada,” “Kitsilano,” “Ottawa,” “Toronto,” “Winnipeg” and “Saskatchewan.” These, however, have been appropriately anglicized, which no longer satisfies the new generation of decolonial busybodies.

It’s clear that easy communication is no longer the priority. This street in Vancouver is being transformed into a “learning opportunity” to force upon commuters, similar to a Grade 1 classroom with labelled staplers and doors, as part of a wider trend. Toronto decided to rename its Woodsy Park to “Ethennonnhawahstihnen’ Park” in 2019, resulting in a very awkwardly named library branch. Edmonton in 2020 switched its wards over from numbers to Indigenous words like “Ipiihkoohkanipiaohtsi,” which I imagine very few residents can spell or pronounce without seeing the word in front of them. Vancouver has elementary schools named “Xpey’ ” and “wək’ əan’ əstə syaqwəm,” a guaranteed recipe for confusion.

So, now that our wayfinding system has been hijacked by ideologues who see getting around as a secondary, perhaps tertiary purpose, we must look to provincial ministers to help, because only they have the power to do what’s right.

Municipalities are not entities that are set out in the Canadian Constitution; they only exist because provincial legislatures say so. And by the same power, provincial legislatures can limit what these cities can do. The same goes for school boards.

If names are getting out of hand, provincial ministers can limit the changing of historic names; they can put character limits on new street, neighbourhood and school titles to keep them to a reader-friendly length; and they can ban the use of special, non-english and non-french characters to keep a city’s addresses readable by humans and databases alike.

More than a cultural issue, it’s an accessibility issue. Canada has official languages to prevent its people from suffering Tower-of-babel incidents. If city officials have forgotten all this, it’s time for the provinces to put them in their place.