The next round of talks on the proposed United Nations Binding Treaty on transnational corporations and human rights begins on October 26.
It’s unclear what the Canadian government’s position is at this time.
While a defender who PBI accompanies tells us that some corporations and states have been blocking the creation of this Treaty, we have also been told that Canada has largely been absent from the process so far.
La Via Campesina is an international movement bringing together millions of peasants, small and medium size farmers, landless people, rural women and youth, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers from around the world. Built on a strong sense of unity, solidarity between these groups, it defends peasant agriculture for food sovereignty as a way to promote social justice and dignity and strongly opposes corporate driven agriculture that destroys social relations and nature.
Neoliberal globalization has opened the doors for the savage exploitation of the world by the big economic powers. Megaprojects, agribusiness and militarization, among other processes, express a patriarchal, neoliberal and racist system that amounts to an assault on life as such. As a result, peoples’ rights have been systematically violated, the Earth and its resources destroyed, pillaged and contaminated, while corporations continue committing economic and ecological crimes with total impunity. They also throw us into an environmental and climate crisis of unknown proportions, for which they do not take responsibility.
In order to challenge corporate power and the system that protects and benefits it, it is necessary and urgent to give a systematic response. We must unite our experiences, struggles, collectively learn from our victories and our failures, share strategies and analysis in order to curb the impunity of the transnationals. The United Nations Binding Treaty process on transnational corporations and human rights constitutes a space, within the framework of the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, from where we can force corporations to respect human rights, creating a mechanism so that affected states and peoples can sue transnational corporations.
Police in riot gear stand in a line against protesters next to a message spay painted on the Kenosha County Courthouse in August 2020 after the police shooting of unarmed Black man Jacob Blake. — (AP Photo/David Goldman)
How should a society allow for the legitimate use of force by police? Egon Bittner, the esteemed sociologist who specialized in policing, wrote in his book Aspects of Police Work:
“As long as there will be fools who can insist that their comfort and pleasure take precedence over the needs of firemen for space in fighting a fire, and who will not move to make room, so long will there be a need for policemen.”
Bittner argued that police “were created as a mechanism for coping with the so-called dangerous classes.” But the “dangerous classes” are simply people deprived of the privileges and societal benefits enjoyed mostly by rich white men.
Let’s consider five scenarios in which force is not required and where, therefore, police are not required.
Situations in which force is unnecessary
First and foremost, it must be acknowledged that most of everyday life needs no police intervention at all — including protests and demonstrations. That’s because people overwhelmingly police themselves, as individuals, families, road users, workplaces, associations, communities and protesters.
The use of uniformed, armed officers whose modus operandi is to demand obedience to barked orders or to resort to violence is clearly a criminally abusive method of dealing with such situations.
The mother and siblings of D’Andre Campbell, who was fatally shot by police in his home in Brampton, Ont., while in a mental health crisis, are seen in this July 2020 photo. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Carlos Osorio
When it comes to traffic enforcement and accident resolution, police should not be involved. Speeding and other driving violations can now be monitored by technology or via public complaints. Leave accident resolution to insurance agents or other specialized officials. Where criminal driving is involved, unarmed driving violation investigators can be used.
The immediate decriminalization of the possession of narcotics and other drugs (beyond marijuana), as Canadian chiefs of police are recommending, is necessary. Addiction must be regarded as a public health issue to be dealt with by the appropriate specialists. Decriminalizing the entire illicit drug industry and regulating it like any other business would, obviously, remove the need for force by police in what is otherwise a huge area of criminal law enforcement.
Instead, we should create new organizations to handle much of what police do today.
Force doesn’t prevent or solve crimes
The use of force by police neither prevents nor solves crime for the vast majority of criminal offences. In fact, as Bittner wrote in his book:
“When one looks at what policemen actually do, one finds that criminal law enforcement is something that most of them do with the frequency located somewhere between virtually never and very rarely.”
Detective work certainly doesn’t require the use of force. It can continue to be conducted by unarmed, plainclothes specialists trained in talking to witnesses, conducting interrogations, assessing crime scenes and collecting evidence.
We’re therefore left with a problem. In Canada, spending on police in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta is rising at a faster rate than other municipal spending as the national crime rate decreases. And in the largest 150 U.S. cities, police budgets have risen steadily for decades, even as crime decreased and during economic downturns, according to data compiled by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy from U.S. census records.
This suggests, correctly, that policing has little or nothing to do with criminal law enforcement. As crime has gone down, police budgets have gone up. So what’s policing for?
As Bittner argued, it’s about protecting the wealthy from the “dangerous classes.”
Threats to order, property
The “dangerous classes” are those who are seen as a threat to public order and property rights. The job of police has long been to effect control — colonial, racial, class, gender and/or sexual — over citizens. Clearly, it’s time for this to stop.
The solution lies not with enforcing economic and social inequality, but in removing it. Putting our tax money towards this — for example, by building affordable housing — makes far more sense than shoring up a police institution that is too often brutal, colonial, racist, sexist and homophobic.
Police use chemical irritants and crowd control munitions to disperse protesters during a demonstration in Portland, Ore., on Sept. 5, 2020. Hundreds gather regularly for rallies and marches against police violence and racial injustice following the death of a Black man, George Floyd, in police custody in Minneapolis in May. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
While there will always be occasions when legitimate force by police is necessary, they’re relatively few — and police shouldn’t be militarized in weaponry, rank or uniform. Get rid of all three, except for some small arms held in reserve for use only in exceptionally dangerous situations. Other agencies or officials can do much of what police do now.
So let’s defund the police and put the savings into social services. But let’s go further, and disband police forces as they’re currently configured and replace them with local community organizations, some highly trained members of which are empowered to use force as required by fellow citizens and according to circumstance.
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.
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 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 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:
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.
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.
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.
Instead of acting on public health advice, governments across the country have used COVID-19 as an excuse to continue their policies of forcible decampment. British Columbia’s clearance of Oppenheimer, Topaz and Pandora camps is a leading example.
The province justified the evacuations as necessary to prevent, respond to or alleviate the effects of the COVID-19 emergency. But as Pivot Legal Society, a leading advocate for housing rights, pointed out in a letter to the province’s lawyers:
“To date, neither your office, nor any other government entity, has explained how complete decampment and closure of these spaces achieves these ends in the midst of an ongoing housing crisis where many people will remain unsheltered outside and without access to housing.”
According to Pivot, the decampment was carried out in a traumatizing and oppressive manner. It caused some camp residents to flee to unknown locations, breaking connections with service providers. It heightened the risk of overdose by moving people into places where they had to use alone or by separating them from the harm reduction services available in the camps.
La Via Campesina is an international movement bringing together millions of peasants, small and medium size farmers, landless people, rural women and youth, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers from around the world. Built on a strong sense of unity, solidarity between these groups, it defends peasant agriculture for food sovereignty as a way to promote social justice and dignity and strongly opposes corporate driven agriculture that destroys social relations and nature.
