A recent post of ours proclaimed: No Shoes, No Shirt, No Home? Still Room For You In West Coast Cities. Our focus was upon the Ninth Judicial Circuit of the United States Courts. That legal body has stubbornly blocked US local, regional and state governments on the west coast all the way from Alaska to California. It has done so by preventing legislative bodies from playing fast and loose with definitions related to homelessness.
In particular, the Ninth Judicial Circuit protects the unhoused who do not have access to alternative shelter. Claims of the existence of alternative shelter are continuously made by exasperated governments. Without compelling evidence that such shelter exists, the ninth circuit regularly refuses to allow the clearance of tent encampments or other forms of shelter on public land.
On the Canadian west coast, can local and regional governments in British Columbia succeed where American governments have failed? Will governments in future invent spurious and untenable reasons to evict unhoused people from public spaces? Legislation to take such action is currently being debated in British Columbia’s provincial legislature.
The prognosis is not good. The government aims to dissolve into insubstantial fog the human rights of those in British Columbia who are homeless. The proposed legislation provides no meaningful definitions of shelter and support that might provide alternatives for the unhoused to find shelter elsewhere if/when they are evicted.
Read more in THE CONVERSATION: British Columbia’s proposed bill on ‘alternative shelter’ risks doing serious harm to unhoused people
