Canadian homeless encampments have become increasingly visible in recent years, and those residing within them have faced a fair bit of variation in how local governments react to their presence. Today, let’s look at a remarkable legal case that may change the game regarding how homeless encampments are considered under Canadian law and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
This is an interesting case and is sensible. I mean, people have to sleep somewhere.
This is a multi-faceted problem, though. Encampments grow massively in the summer and shrink in the winter. Conversely, the shelters empty out in the summer and fill up in the winter. Why is that? It’s because many homeless people actually do have an indoor place to stay and/or access to a shelter space, but prefer to camp out when the weather is nice. I don’t blame them for that. People are handing out free tents, sleeping bags, and meals where I live. Would you rather sleep on a cot in a big room full of farting, snoring people, or in a nice private tent? However, the ruling doesn’t really apply to people’s preferences. The court ruling is about the struggle for shelter to protect oneself from the elements, not to create a right to camp wherever and whenever they want to because they feel like it.
I’m a big believer in affordable public housing. I think we also need institutions to house people who are not capable or willing to live independently without destroying the home they are given. I’m also in favour of wet shelters for those who are hopelessly addicted to alcohol or drugs. I’m also a believer in shelters to temporarily house people who are transient or waiting to get an affordable home. I’m not a believer in allowing shanty towns to grow unchecked, nor in allowing people to camp wherever and whenever they want to. If there is a shelter bed available, they must use it and too bad about their preferences. No shanty towns. That is just plain unacceptable in a modern developed nation. And, I suspect that 95% of the Canadian population feels the same way.
Fuckers can try. I wasn’t directly involved in this but I grew to know personally David Arthur Johnston over (?) a decade ago who spent years in Victoria viscerally protesting right-to-sleep laws/anti-laws and finally won. Due to his tireless efforts, hunger strikes in jail, and community support he helped pave the way for homless people to pitch and sleep in tents for the night on any public property.
Don’t like seeing poor people on public lands? Okay… be part of the solution.
That was his message. And here we are still working on the questions involved, and solutions. Good. As long as the convo is still active and we haven’t given up.
Fucking good, our “housing policy” is complete Boomer bullshit and needs to be dismantled and rebuilt. Housing needs to be a human right, if you get it for doing bad things, you should get it for being normal or good and incentivize people to at least have or get their shit together in the comfort of their own place.
So much of that self-reinvention can only happen when one can get away from their previous life and social graph
I know the rhetorical point you are making, but prisons are not free housing. In Ontario, they are terrifyingly outdated, under regulated, unsupervised hellholes.
The point I’m making is housing is going to cost us no matter what so it just depends if we want to incentivise crime and desperation or incentivise economic productivity and improved mental health/resillience among the population.
Man, I’m 100% sure that your interpretation was correct but I read it at first as how fuckin’ parasites seem to be able to buy up all kinds of housing but good, or even just normal people, are constantly struggling to even pay rent. We’ve built the rules so that cheating is how to win and it’s fuckin’ bullshit.
Worst part is that technically things are a lot better for everyone when you don’t need to worry about a homeless population. The only people who would lose anything wouldn’t even notice if three quarters of their money disappeared and they can’t handle losing even a handful of dollars to things like the appropriate compensation of their workers or paying their fuckin’ taxes.
There’s more than just that. There is hatred of the poor, which exists in every class. A phenomenon we’re all very familiar with but which does not even have a name. It’s always politically advantageous to attack the poor, and it rarely wins elections to attack poverty.
Wait until the cons get power, tear gas and batons.
I don’t like homeless encampments, tent cities, favelas etc. They are unsafe, unclean and foster destructive behavior.
Let’s destroy them by building safe, permanent homes for people.
It’s so strange to me that “free market capitalism” lovers can’t see that encampments are a market response. There is a large supply of unenclosed space (parks, sidewalks, underpasses) and an unmet demand for shelter. They shouldn’t be surprised when market participants convert the former into the latter.
How effective do they think it will be to police every unenclosed space in the region vs building adequate shelter. Building shelter has all sorts of associated benefits too.
Market lovers don’t love markets. They love power. And if you can’t exercise power over someone as worthless as the homeless, who can you?
It’s one place that the Canadian legal system has gotten one-up on the US system (Johnson v. Grants Pass), between this and the City of Victoria case. Unless cases in other provinces rule differently (i.e. Prairies’ Bench courts say its no problem to evict, Cour Supérieure de Québec okays it as long as displaced residents get 3 packs of smokes and a 2-4 of beer each etc.), I could see that any appeal could eventually see the federal supreme court ruling along the same lines.
It shows that we have a robust set of Rights given to us by the Charter, but it is easier for cities to overlook them if they aren’t asserted.
