Pubdate: Mon, 28 Sep 2009
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2009 The Vancouver Sun
Contact: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/letters.html
Website: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: Harsha Walia
Note: Harsha Walia describes herself as an activist, writer and researcher.

B.C. GOVERNMENT WANTS TO JAIL THE 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 maybe taken to police cells . . . ."

Internal documents obtained and released by the BC 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 power -- including use of force -- to compel homeless
people into shelters, or alternatively jail, following 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 2,500
homeless in the GVRD. 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 as many as
1,200 units of low-income housing to tourist rentals, condominiums,
and other converted properties.

On the other hand, the government and our society are 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.

While the extreme-weather alert will likely not be triggered during
the period of the Games itself, its potential use in the months before
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 such as 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 (more
than 2,000 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.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake