TENT CITY CRASHED BY VICTORIA POLICE

Today Victoria City Police stormed the tent city that was established in Beacon Hill Park after the court ruling stated that homeless people must be allowed to provide themselves with some forms of shelter if there is no other shelter provided in the city. Most people camping in the city park, including David Arthur Johnston , were hauled away in paddy wagons today. They will not be released unless they sign a statement that they will not return to the park. The point of the Tent City was to raise awareness that homeless people need shelter. The city has made statements that people will still be allowed to sleep in the park at night, in compliance with the court judgement, but not during the day.

The BC Supreme Court ruled that the homeless must be allowed to shelter under tarps or cardboard in the event that there is nowhere for them to sleep. The fact remains that there are more that 1600 homeless on the streets of Victoria and only 350 bed during the coldest nights of the year when the 'emergency weather protocol' goes into effect by opening a few more floor spaces for people to sleep on. Victoria Mayor has alluded that the reason there are so many homeless in Victoria is because of the weather. However, a survey conducted last winter during the homeless count concluded that 87% of the people living on the streets of Victoria are local or from other parts of BC.

Rich Coleman, BC Minister for Housing, stated to the media that the homeless should not be allowed to take over the parks, where families go, with their drugs etc... Coleman claims that if you aren't sleeping in a shelter provided then police should take you to one. However, he does not explain what his BC Liberal Government is willing to do to help house more than 5000 homeless people in British Columbia. With only 350 beds available in Victoria for over 1600 homeless people there is a real demand for housing and shelters. Premier Gordon Campbell's government continues to cut social housing and other programs that can help poverty and other related social challenges.

Here's a newpaper article just to show how the mainstream looks at this issue.

Times Colonist
Thursday, October 16, 2008

Tackle real issues of homelessness

There is nothing complicated in the court ruling on the right of homeless people to seek shelter in parks and public spaces. Stripped to its essence, the B.C. Supreme Court ruling is based on four facts.

First, there are more than 1,200 homeless people -- including some 75 children -- in the city.

Second, there are some 140 permanent shelter beds and 220 temporary beds for extreme cold weather. People have no choice but to sleep outdoors, the court concluded.

Third, a law that allowed them to sleep outside in public places, but barred them from erecting a tent or tarp or crawling into a cardboard box, resulted in suffering and death from hypothermia and illness.

And fourth, the Canadian Constitution does not allow laws that needlessly put peoples' lives at risk or inflict unnecessary pain and suffering.

Those are facts.

It is also a fact that if hundreds of people begin camping in parks, especially in tent cities in visible areas, there will be problems -- waste, disorder, crime, interference with the rights of other parks users as well as health and policing issues.

Rather than spending three years in legal wrangling to reach this inevitable and unhappy conclusion, the city, provincial and federal governments should have been fixing the real problems.

The court judgment notes the causes of the exploding homeless population, including botched programs that pushed people with mental illness and developmental disabilities on to the streets, the federal government's abandonment of social housing and welfare changes over the past 15 years.

There is no one solution for homelessness. Some of those on the streets -- a small number -- need only a push and some guidance to get them into jobs and housing.

But the Mayors' Task Force Report on Homelessness, completed one year ago, found at least 40 per cent of the region's homeless were mentally ill. More than half were struggling with drug and alcohol addictions.

Some people were dealing with both issues, but in all about two-thirds of the homeless population -- almost 800 people -- faced the kind of barriers that mean it's not a matter of simply telling them to shape up or try harder.

Which should not be surprising. It is a horrible life, in most ways, to be sleeping in a doorway or shelter, with everything you own in a garbage bag, on nights like these.

Some individuals choose to be homeless. But the evidence, Justice Carol Ross found, showed they were a minority. There is a "substantial and growing population" in Victoria who have no alternative to homelessness, she found.

It is important to note that the ruling did not mandate tent cities or park occupations. The court dealt with the question of temporary shelters to protect sleeping people from the elements. The city "cannot manage its own property in a manner that interferes with their ability to keep themselves safe and warm."

But it would be sad and wasteful if the focus turned to legal appeals or expensive efforts to craft and enforce new bylaws to evade the core finding of this judgment. If the creativity and effort the city and province had devoted to fighting this case had been committed instead to dealing with the real problem, we would be much farther ahead today.

The solutions are known: More treatment, more social and supported housing, temporary shelters to deal with the interim problems, more outreach to connect people with services, increased policing and a community court to force people to choose between change in their lives and traditional criminal justice.

The will and the money have been lacking, and the results are evident all around us.

© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2008