Montreal’s Filipino community in mourning after Vancouver attack

Filipino Montrealers were in mourning Sunday after at least 11 people were killed in Vancouver when an SUV plowed into a crowd at a Filipino festival the night before.

City councillor Stephanie Valenzuela says the Filipino community across Canada is “just heartbroken” by the tragedy.

“Honestly, the last 12 hours have been a roller-coaster of emotions,” the Filipino Canadian said. “I have family that live in Vancouver. I have relatives that were present at the festival. And of course, I have friends, I know people that live there that are deeply impacted by what took place. So it’s just been such a shock.

“It’s been such a stressful moment because we are obviously sending all our love and prayers to the victims, but we’re also really concerned with all those that are in a critical state that are still in the hospital and that we’re waiting and praying for, you know, good news on their end.”

Valenzuela is the Ensemble Montréal councillor for the Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough, Darlington district.

“We have one of the strongest Filipino populations in the province of Quebec,” Valenzuela said. “We are 45,000 in Quebec. But of course in Vancouver, the Filipino community, the Filipino diaspora represents I think the third-largest ethnic community in terms of demographics. So it’s a very strong, resilient community.

“The Lapu-Lapu Festival was supposed to be a festival of resilience and celebration and sharing our culture and our food, our history with our fellow Canadians, our neighbours. And it was the second edition. So I know that the local community was really excited and thrilled to share this moment with our fellow Canadians and it’s just so heartbreaking that this is how it ended yesterday.”

John Eric Feliciano, the co-creator of “Filipinos of Montreal,” says the deadly attack is affecting the community “on many different levels.”

“As a Filipino first and foremost, for something like that to happen, it’s horrible,” he said. “Secondly, because we organize events specifically for the Filipino community, in a lot of ways we think about it. We’re relating because it could have been one of our events, so to speak, that we hold here in Montreal.

“We just want to extend support to our community over there. We always try to connect with different Filipinos from different organizations across Canada. We’re just trying to send out a lot of love.”