Category Archives: Social Justice

6 reasons why displacing the homeless must stop, regardless of COVID-19

A homeless woman is seen at a tent encampment in Toronto on July 10, 2020.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

Stepan Wood, University of British Columbia

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted calls to suspend evictions of homeless encampments. Victoria, Edmonton, Toronto and other cities did so.

But many were soon back at it. Forcible decampment of homeless people continued, albeit with greater emphasis on securing housing, but with knowledge that some residents would be left unhoused.

Suspending homeless camp evictions during the pandemic is a start, but it is not enough. The problem is failed housing policies, not COVID-19. A central pillar of those policies is continual, forcible displacement of homeless people from places where they engage in essential life-sustaining activities.

Canadian courts have condoned this cycle of continual displacement. Homeless individuals have a right to camp temporarily in certain public places when housing is unavailable, but governments may restrict them to a few limited areas, force them out every morning and prohibit camping everywhere else.

Nowhere to shelter legally

The upshot? Almost nowhere in Canada can homeless people legally erect even the most rudimentary shelter.

When they do, governments’ standard response is to order them to leave and, usually sooner than later, get injunctions forcing them out. Homeless campers rarely win such cases and often lose when authorities document health and safety hazards and interference with housed neighbours’ esthetics and recreation.

People at a homeless tent encampment in Vancouver with mountains in the background. — People are seen at a homeless camp in the Port of Vancouver where approximately 150 people were living shortly after a court-ordered deadline to leave the property in June 2020. They’d already been evicted from the city’s Oppenheimer Park.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

What’s wrong with this strategy of forcible decampment?

For a start, it exacerbates the risks of COVID-19. Homeless people are highly vulnerable to COVID-19. Homeless camps are often crowded and unsanitary. Things worsened as COVID-19 caused encampments to grow.

But eviction is not a solution. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and later its B.C. counterpart, warned that clearing encampments can disperse homeless people throughout the community and sever connections with service providers, increasing the potential for COVID-19 spread.

By contrast, leaving camps in place eases testing, monitoring, contact tracing and service delivery. So both agencies urged governments to allow homeless encampments to stay during the pandemic if individual housing was not immediately available, and to co-operate with relevant agencies to establish hygiene and physical distancing in camps.

Volunteers chat with a homeless man on a street in Calgary. — Volunteers distribute aid to a homeless man in Calgary in May 2020.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

Six more reasons to stop homeless evictions

But here are six reasons why forcible decampment is bad policy even without COVID-19:

It ignores the benefits of encampments. The risks are familiar: overdose, crime, fires, discarded needles, garbage, etc.
But homeless camps also provide benefits like stability, safety, autonomy, community, overdose prevention, access to services and storage for belongings. With supports like water, toilets, naloxone kits, waste collection and fire equipment, camps can deliver these benefits while moderating the problems.
It ignores the harms of continual displacement. Homeless people who are constantly displaced lose connections with family, friends and services. Their mental and physical health suffers. Their overdose risk increases. They have less control over their lives and possessions. They are pushed into “a relentless series of daily moves” among streets, parks and underpasses where they are often alone and unsafe.
It inevitably leaves some people unsheltered. Shelter spaces are often practically inaccessible due to restrictions on partners, pets, guests, belongings or substance use. Mental health challenges and experiences of violence or abuse are barriers for some people.

Fear of COVID-19 — understandable given outbreaks in shelters — compounds these obstacles. In short, even when governments make efforts to offer housing, some homeless people simply cannot accept it and authorities know that significant numbers will be left with nowhere to go.
It traumatizes homeless campers. Seventy per cent of homeless people report past trauma or abuse.

In an eviction, tents and belongings are destroyed. People may have to leave with what they can carry. Police sometimes fence campers into progressively shrinking areas, reproducing legacies of dispossession and incarceration, especially for Indigenous people.
It perpetuates a revolving door of eviction. The lack of legal protections enjoyed by renters combine with “one warning” rules and mental health challenges to mean that many people placed in housing are soon evicted again. At least one person was evicted from COVID-19 emergency housing only to die on the streets of Toronto.
It can create an arbitrary housing lottery. When some encampments are selected for high-profile housing blitzes while others are evicted without any plan for where residents go next, homeless people compete to establish tent cities as a path to housing. Lucky residents of the chosen camps receive arbitrary priority over others who have been unable even to get on waiting lists.

Vancouver’s missed opportunity

These problems were illustrated by the province’s clearance of Vancouver’s Oppenheimer Park during COVID-19. Around 90 per cent of the park’s residents accepted housing, but significant numbers were left unsheltered.

A police officer wearing a face mask and gloves stands beside a fence with the belongings of homeless people behind it in Vancouver. — A police officer stands outside a fenced-off homeless camp at Oppenheimer Park after a noon deadline for the park to be vacated in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver in May 2020.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

Authorities knew this would happen. With no-camping bylaws in city parks, the campers had few options. Just as public health agencies warned, they dispersed throughout the community.

Some moved to an unused, unfenced parking lot owned by the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, a federal government agency.

This was a move from the frying pan into the fire.

This camp had modest problems compared to Oppenheimer Park. It was on unenclosed public land the government had no immediate use for, away from homes and businesses yet easily accessible by service providers. If any camp deserved to stay in place during COVID-19, it was this one.

‘Pesky trespassers’

Instead of heeding public health advice and co-operating to make the camp reasonably safe during the pandemic, the Port Authority immediately applied for an eviction injunction.

The court agreed, setting a precedent that lowers the bar for evicting homeless encampments from public land. The court held that this unfenced, unused government land was private property and the Port Authority could evict homeless people as pesky trespassers.

The Port Authority made no pretense of trying to secure housing for the residents, who dispersed throughout the community again. Some moved to nearby Strathcona Park, where a new tent city grew quickly.

Unfortunately, on July 14, Vancouver missed an opportunity to reconsider the policy of forcible decampment. The Park Board approved new bylaws that allow overnight shelter in parks but require homeless campers to clear out at 7 a.m. every morning. These new bylaws perpetuate the policy of continual displacement.

Instead, what governments — Vancouver included — should do is authorize and support stable day and nighttime encampments while the housing crisis persists. The COVID-19 pandemic may still prove to be a catalyst for this reconsideration.

Stepan Wood, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Law, Society & Sustainability, University of British Columbia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

‘The World Has Lost a Legend’: Civil Rights Hero John Lewis Dies at 80

Leave a reply

Profiling Citizens in Alberta Needs To Stop

Leave a reply

Lethbridge-West MLA Shannon Phillips was under surveillance by Sgt. Jason Carrier and Const. Keon Woronuk. This is BIG news! UCP Justice Minister Doug Schweitzer says it was an “unauthorized surveillance” and he’s outraged about it. On Twitter he says, “The Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT) has been ordered to conduct a comprehensive review of the professional standards investigation to determine if there are grounds for a criminal investigation. “

We are all shocked by this type of behaviour from the two officers. It’s hard to believe they would engage in this type of activity, even if they had a lame excuse for it. Another name for this type of surveillance is profiling. The definition on hand suggests it means:

Profiling:
1. recording a person’s behaviour and analyzing psychological characteristics in order to predict or assess their ability in a certain sphere or to identify a particular group of people

Dr. Lynn Jones, from Halifax, Nova Scotia, is a life-long civil and human rights activist, educator, community and labour activist and speaker. She is also listed as one of the top one-hundred accomplished black women in Canada. She was racially profiled on September 2019, approached and questioned by police while watching the deer on the side of the road near her home.

She later wrote a letter about the incident to Bill Mills, Mayor of the Town of Truro. You can read the letter here. In it she says, “Please add me to the list of African Nova Scotians who are constantly being racially profiled in this province for no valid reason and while you’re at it, give your constituents in Truro and your Town police a lesson in white privilege, anti Black racism and the history of the founding people of our province and Truro. “

The police promised they would do better, but the officer wasn’t demoted. After all she was black and not a white former MLA.

It seems there are numerous examples we could list that show black and indigenous people having their privacy violated by “unauthorized surveillance” by police forces, with members who see themselves more as vigilante militants. Alberta has its fair share of them as well, and not just two Keystone cops from Lethbridge.

One of the items in the recently released “Blue Panel Report” created for the UCP government, is to create a police force to replace the RCMP. One can’t help but wonder if they’ll be any better trained, and if their duties to the government could be extended to incorporate mandates specific to Alberta.

Charter schools: What you need to know about their anticipated growth in Alberta

Leave a reply

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney

Michael Mindzak, Brock University

In Alberta, the once-radical idea of charter schools, placed largely on the back burner for the past two decades, has been brought back to the fore under Premier Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party (UCP). The party’s Choice in Education Act will come into force Sept. 1, after the government passed it June 24.

Under the new act, individuals will be able to bypass the local school board and apply directly to the provincial government to seek to establish a charter school. This follows a move last fall by the newly elected UCP to remove the cap (previously 15) on the number of charter schools in the province.

In Alberta, there are now 13 charter school authorities operating more than 20 schools or campuses — for instance, the province lists seven Calgary schools run by the Foundations for the Future Charter Academy.

These recent developments provide the opportunity to better understand what charter schools are, how they’ve been taken up by advocates of educational reform and how their re-emergence and promotion under the UCP reflects the influence of neoconservative and neoliberal ideologies in education.

Roots of charter schools

Charter schools emerged largely from the Chicago School of Economics, inspired by the ideas of prominent thinkers like Milton Friedman. Friedman argued state “monopoly” over public education was problematic, and thus education should be instead subject to consumer choices and the dynamics of the free market.

While differing based on country and context, charter schools can be understood as a hybrid type of school — both public and private. Individuals or groups may seek to establish a school under a particular educational philosophy or approach. This charter then guides the administration and organization of the school.

To date, Alberta’s charter schools include a schools for children who are “academically gifted,” an Indigenous school and a school for children learning English.

As public institutions, however, charter schools must still abide by the policies, rules and regulations set out by the government. In this way, these schools can be seen as offering students and parents choice different from the local public school.

With funding is typically determined on a per-pupil basis, if parents decide not to choose a particular charter school, it may then close. Charter schools are also subject to competitive market pressures and often have to raise capital funding for expenses such as the school building or transportation themselves. That means charter schools may turn to fundraising from community-based or corporate sources. In the U.S., for instance, some charter schools can be run as for-profit entities.

Entry into Alberta

Charter schools, once hailed as a solution to the numerous apparent failures of the public education system, arrived in Alberta with the first school opening in 1994, just two years after the first charter school opened in the United States.

Up until recently, discussion around their future or promise in Alberta has been somewhat ambiguous. But since the UCP was elected last year, the provincial government has sought to revive charter schools as part of broader educational and public sector reforms.

‘School choice’

As the UCP government’s throne speech outlined, the party stresses expanding school choice. For instance, new legislation makes it easier for parents to home-school since they will no longer need Alberta school board supervision to do so.

Last fall, the UCP also removed the word “public” from Alberta’s public schools boards, a move that can be critically viewed as an attempt to obfuscate the demarcation between public and private schools.

Kenney, himself a product of elite private schooling, appears focused on the expansion of more privatized forms of education.

Charter advocates contend that as schools of choice, they offer students more specialized and meaningful educational experiences.

Critics often respond that choice is already available in public school systems and that charters don’t demonstrate any significant improvements in performance, and may in fact further segregate students, leading to greater educational inequalities.

Educational labour unions remain unsupportive as well, as charters often seek to hire non-unionized teachers.

Nevertheless, the evidence remains mixed as to whether charters provide any significant improvements to student achievement. The research and policy landscape is often contentious and heavily influenced by competing interest groups.

Privatization

In Canada, charter schools only exist in Alberta — a province with a history of school choice policies. As I discussed in my research into the development of Alberta’s charter schools, their existence can be largely attributed to political ideas rather than educational developments in the province.

Charter schools were first introduced in Alberta under former premier Ralph Klein’s Progressive Conservative Party in 1994. Here, Klein in front of a campaign poster in February 2001.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

In 1994, when charters were first introduced in Alberta, it was under a provincial government focused largely on values of individualism, consumerism, privatization, commercialization and deficit reduction. Charter schools emerged as they fit in under this particular political and economic ideology.

Today we see many of the same values once again on the rise in Alberta at the same time as charters and “school choice” ideas are being amplified.

Neoconservative and neoliberal advocates of educational reform in particular continue to push them forward — as witnessed in the United States under President Donald Trump and U.S. Education Secretary Betsy Devos.

Educational reforms and democracy

While educational reforms can and must occur in response to a changing world, public schools are meant to be resistant to political changes because they represent our core democratic values and are meant to develop to serve the needs of a diverse society.

Perhaps most importantly then, the debate over charter schools points to the fundamental political nature of public education.

Recent pre-pandemic educational reforms proposed in Ontario for mandatory online courses were seen by many educators, parents and students not as learning improvements, but rather as reforms motivated by a Conservative government with similar neoliberal politics, ideas and value systems.

Ontario also touted its “enhanced” (mandatory) online learning as offering “more choice.” Those advocating school vouchers and the expansion of charter schools in Ontario have used the same rhetoric.

Education as industry?

With Alberta’s charter schools set now to expand, as I asserted in 2015, it is worth noting that to date, the rest of Canada has continued to largely — though not entirely — resist calls for “school choice” that imply forms of privatization.

Nevertheless, across Canada, chronic public underfunding of education has forced school boards to seek tuition revenue and promote for-profit curriculums.

The presence of privatization looms large and when education is defined as an industry, there will always be those who seek to profit from it.

As Canadians, the rejection of charter schools demonstrates our collective commitment to the some of the most important core principles of public education, including access, quality and equity. The idea of charter schools allows us to think deeply about our core values surrounding public education and the many promises which it’s asked to uphold.

Michael Mindzak, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education, Brock University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.