B.C. Government to Jail the Homeless

By Harsha Walia; 09-21-2009 - Community of Interest
http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/communityof...

[Note: For background, please see B.C. Preparing New Law to Apprehend Homeless.]

“The officer takes a person to a shelter. If the person is not accommodated at the shelter, alternative accommodation may be found. As a last resort, and in order for the police to discharge their legal responsibility, the individual may be taken to police cells…”

Internal documents obtained and released by the B.C. Civil Liberties Association reveal that the B.C. government is proposing the benignly-titled Assisting to Shelter Act legislation to be tabled in the fall. Based on the draft documents, the legislation would give law enforcement the powers – including use of force - to compel homeless people into shelters, or alternatively jail, following the declaration of an extreme-weather alert.

As acknowledged in the internal memos themselves, a host of legal issues are triggered by this proposed legislation including: gross Charter violations for forcing people against their will into shelters and whether people can be criminalized for refusing to go to a shelter, how much force can be used by an outreach worker or by law enforcement, and how the policy will be applied in communities that do not have extreme-weather protocols or emergency shelters.

However, much more significant than the legal issues are the glaring moral and ethical questions raised by such legislation that further marginalizes, controls, and criminalizes the poor. As philosopher Anatole France has aptly stated: “The majestic quality of the law forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets and steal bread.”

On the one hand, policies of social cuts and changes to income assistance, support services, childcare services, disability regulations, and employment standards have forced a growing number of people across the province into poverty. There are approximately 2500 homeless in the [Greater Vancouver Regional District]. In B.C. there may be as many as 15,500 adults with severe addictions or mental illness who are homeless, while the Regional Steering Committee on Homelessness estimates 56,215 households are at risk of homelessness. A B.C. Housing report last year found that homeless shelters turned away people more than 40,000 times—with 16,000 women and children turnaways. In the years since the Olympic bid, the Downtown Eastside (DTES) has lost between 1000-1200 units of low-income housing to tourist rentals, condominiums, and other converted properties.

On the other hand, the government and our society is intent on excluding victims of our own political system and our apathy from public view. Part and parcel of the coercive Olympics-manufactured project of displacement, homelessness, and gentrification is the need to ensure social control over public space, particularly during Games. According to a 2007 study “Fair Play for Housing Rights” by the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions which focuses on researching Olympic host cities: “The desire to show off a city and make it an attractive tourist destination is often accompanied by a process of sanitation - clean-ups of public areas facilitated by criminalization of homelessness”.

In Barcelona, the city council produced a plan to “clean the streets of beggars, prostitutes, street sellers and swindlers” and “annoying passers-by” in the year prior to the 1992 Olympic Games. Some 400 poor and homeless people were subjected to “control and supervision orders”. In Atlanta, the 1996 Games allowed for the passing of Quality of Life Ordinances, which much like Vancouver ex-Mayor Sam Sullivan’s Project Civil City, criminalized people who slept on the streets. Police in Atlanta were given pre-printed arrest citations bearing the words African-American, Male, Homeless and they just had to fill in the name, the charge, and the date.

Is there reason to believe that B.C. and Canada are any more civilized than other settler states and that this new draft legislation is simply a coincidence in the lead up to the Games?

While the extreme-weather alert will likely not be triggered during the time period of the Games itself, its potential use in the months prior will serve the purpose of pushing more homeless people out of sight of the Downtown core to more isolated areas with decreased support services. Coupled with recent policies like Project Civil City which includes bylaws that prohibit sitting or lying down on city sidewalks, aggressive ticketing for bylaw infractions such as jaywalking, spitting, and vending which are selectively enforced in the DTES (over 2000 tickets in 2008 alone), increased police and private security presence in the DTES, and banning of dumpsters in the downtown area that makes it hard for binners to make a living, the DTES is subjected to a consistent environment of harassment, intimidation, surveillance, and violence.

Or instead, let us once again blindly believe the perverse logic of the government: that all this is actually to ‘help’ the poor – ticketing the poor and preventing binning keeps them safe and forcing the homeless into shelters and jails protects them.

Indeed, with such friends in government the homeless need no enemies.