Federal housing advocate calls for human rights-based approach to encampments

Canada’s housing advocate says unhoused people have a fundamental right to live in encampments, and that right is violated when authorities tear them down.

Marie-Josee Houle released a report on housing encampments Tuesday, calling their spread a national human rights crisis that demands immediate action and coordination between cities, provinces and the federal government.

Her report is a call for all levels of government to take responsibility for the deep systemic failures that violate people’s right to housing, which Canada officially recognized in 2019.

Ryan Sudds, an organizer with Stop the Sweeps in Vancouver, says it’s “vindicating” to see Houle release this report.

“We’ve been calling for a human rights-based approach to encampments for a long time, among many, many other groups,” Sudds said.

CityNews spoke to a resident of the Oppenheimer Park who says removing encampments makes his life difficult.

“All I’m trying to do is live and survive, in turmoil,” he said. “It is a violation of human rights, it is violation of charter rights, it puts people at risk, and it violates their dignity.”

Sudds says he’s not optimistic many of the recommendations Houle presents in her report will be implemented, since they’ve been on the table for awhile already in B.C.

“We haven’t seen any significant indication that they do want to take a human rights approach, despite a lot of language that they are, but they’re not,” he said.

During the winter, in particular, Sudds says he’s seen the City of Vancouver and provincial government use compassionate language when speaking about encampments, but that language hasn’t translated into action.

“Over the winter, what we saw was, not only a lack of regard for people’s health and safety, but a step further, something meaner than that,” he said.

“I would say what we’ve seen is bullying, and the opposite of a human rights approach.”

Houle says cities have an obligation to make encampments as safe as possible by providing electricity, heat, clean water and sanitation services.

But the province’s Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon says in the long-term, encampments aren’t the direction the province wants to head in. He says right now, services like bathrooms and food delivery are available at some, but ideally, the goal is to be moving people into shelters.

“We want to make sure people are protected,” Kahlon said. “But in the long term, we’ve been clear that encampments are not safe for the people living in them and they’re not safe for the community at large.”

He also argues that shelters are necessary, to assess people’s needs before moving them from encampments into more permanent housing.

“We know from many of our support providers, when we don’t have a line of sight of people’s unique needs and challenges and we place them into housing, it adds a lot more stress and pressure onto the system,” Kahlon said.

B.C. Premier David Eby also adds that he thinks encampments are not the answer.

“I profoundly disagree with any suggestion that encampments are acceptable, decent, reasonable places because I have seen the violence, the fires, the brutality that can arise in that kind of environment,” he said.

Meanwhile, Sudds says shelter spaces in Vancouver are only acting as an excuse for eviction, and not actually meeting people’s needs.

“The really scary thing about the shelter system right now is, one, it’s not adequate for a lot of people and two, it’s existence is used to justify evictions,” Sudds said.

Houle points to cities such as Halifax or Edmonton as examples of places where evictions of encampments, are violating residents’ human rights and endangering their lives.

She is calling on the federal government to establish a national encampments response plan by Aug. 31 that would fulfil the report’s calls to action.

Sudds says if the government is going to take action on this, he thinks the first step is to “engage directly with residents in encampments, unhoused residents about the future that they want to see.”

“That’s the first step that should have been happening a long time ago and it’s about time that it starts happening today,” Sudds said.

Ideally, Sudds says he’d like to see the City of Vancouver, province and the feds adopt Houle’s recommendations formally.

“Adopting something like this might provide some standard for how they’re going to interact with unhoused people, because right now it’s brutal.”

-With files from Srushti Gangdev and Cecilia Hua