Police and city workers conducted another unhoused encampment eviction on May 11, forcing people to leave their campsites near 96 Street and 105A Avenue in Edmonton (Photo: The Progress Report/Twitter).

The reality about human rights is that while they may be enshrined in international and federal laws, they are negotiated and often ignored every day in our streets and communities, usually with no consequence. When it comes to encampment response in Edmonton, the so-called right to housing is no exception.

Guest post author Bradley Lafortune, executive director of Public Interest Alberta (Photo: Brad Lafortune).

On Wednesday, May 11, Edmonton City Council supported an expanded encampment response strategy to respond to – that is, to dismantle and displace – encampments this summer. 

This response from City Council fails to address the basic question: Where are the people displaced from these encampments meant to go?

There is simply not enough supportive housing available to meet the needs of homeless Edmontonians. And while homelessness in Edmonton has more than doubled since the pandemic, fewer bridge housing options are available. Due to provincial funding cuts, the city is slated to lose a shocking 44 per cent of emergency shelter beds by June – meaning that even that last resort is slipping away. 

Edmonton’s Homelessness and Encampment Response Strategy council report itself says that the city’s strategy does not work, and yet little is being done to address this crisis in a humane way that puts the needs, well-being and human rights of the Edmontonians suffering from homelessness first.

The grim picture is this: the crisis of homelessness is getting larger as the solutions for people stuck in cycles of extreme poverty disappear, leaving them with no options. Let’s not forget that people experiencing homelessness are our neighbours, friends, and loved ones — and that many more are one job loss or injury away from homelessness.

Leilani Farha, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing (Photo: Simon Fraser University).

We see heart-breaking first-hand reports of the violence and indignity of encampment displacement, the catastrophe of insufficient housing and the gaping holes in supports that fail people for years. This is an abject failure of all orders of government to live up to their obligations and responsibilities.

Once again it needs to be said: housing is a human right. For all humans. Full stop. 

Housing is essential to survival, just like food and water. 

This human right was enshrined in Canadian law through the National Housing Strategy Act on June 21, 2019, bringing Canada in line with international standards, at least on paper. This basic human right means that all people living in Canada have the right to live in security, peace and dignity. It means the government is responsible to all to ensure that obligation is met within the shortest possible time frame. It also means that we must give vulnerable groups the highest priority to meet at least the basic standards of housing according to Canadian and international standards.

Sounds great in theory, but does this translate into real help for the most vulnerable in our city? Are we really doing everything we can to ensure homeless Edmontonians aren’t suffering in our river valley or on the streets? Are we prioritizing prevention through public health expenditures and public services rather than the $385 million in spending on Edmonton Police and other flawed enforcement tools? 

No, we aren’t. Not even close. Decades of underfunding for public supportive housing from the provincial and federal governments have left cities in the lurch for adequately dealing with this crisis. 

However, the city is not helpless. Cities can make decisions that, while insufficient to address root causes, will not make things worse. 

To be clear, the council-endorsed encampment strategy will undoubtedly make things worse. Displacement of encampments is not the answer.

We need to come back to first principles, according to a human rights approach to housing. People living here on this land should be able to expect the most secure, peaceful and dignified option available. From our municipal leaders, we need creativity, willingness to engage directly with those impacted, and the courage to try new solutions to this rapidly escalating crisis in the face of callous disregard from the province.

And we need transparency and accountability from all levels of government for specific, measurable and time-bound goals to eradicate homelessness and ensure all people live in dignity. 

As Leilani Farha, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing, told attendees of a recent symposium hosted by Public Interest Alberta and the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness: “An encampment is a rights claim. It is a claim to housing … because there are simply no other options.” We must respect this rights claim and we must strive for urgent adequate housing options at the same time.

In the absence of other options this summer, Alberta’s municipalities and its provincial government have an obligation to respect the human rights of our homeless neighbours. 

Anything less is inhumane. 

Call and write your city councillor today to demand that they turn over every rock and reprioritize their spending to create bold solutions to this crisis that put human beings first. Advocate to the provincial and federal governments that they need to invest in high-quality, affordable housing stock so we can address this issue at the root. We can’t afford to wait any longer.

Bradley Lafortune is Executive Director of Public Interest Alberta, a non-profit, non-partisan, province-wide organization focused on education and advocacy on public interest issues and understanding the importance of public spaces, services and institutions in Albertans’ lives.

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12 Comments

  1. It’s typical for one level of government to off-load onto another level of government their responsibilities, but without the additional funding. Passing the problem is no more than kicking the can down the road, in the hope that something happens that will make the problem go away.

    It appears that the city’s unofficial homelessness relief strategy is to use the public transit system as shelters for the homeless, without the harm-prevention measures, of course. Dropping the homeless, with their many illnesses, into infrastructure that was intended to provide an attractive transportation option to personal automobiles not is an extreme breach of the public trust, it’s also an easy plan for trouble. As seen in the violent confrontations in recent weeks, one wonders if the City will only act once someone is killed. If it’s a homeless person, who cares? But if it’s a student or someone merely travelling to their workplace, the outcry against the City’s inaction will be deafening.

    One thing that I have noted when discussions come up about the state of the public transit (among many other things) is that certain council members, either, don’t even want to address the situation, let alone actually bother to response to complaints from the public. This unwillingness of council to even acknowledge that there is a problem sits on the at line between the comical and the pathetic.

    I am reminded of an embarrassing outburst from former Mayor Iverson on a local call-in show, where a caller was inquiring about the High Level bridge, after the completion of an infrastructure project, becoming increasing unusable for pedestrians and cyclists. Iverson let out a deep sigh and expressed how tired he was of being chastised for the City’s bad decisions. The caller then responded, in effect, by asking Iverson why he was still mayor if he couldn’t handle the work? The caller was cut off. Later, Iverson took to social media to apologize for his bad behaviour.

    I suspect that the new council may already be annoyed with the business of running the city, judging by their inability to make a decision and do the best thing.

  2. The math isn’t that hard. There needs to be enough housing for every person living rough, period. If supportive housing spaces are vacant, send caseworkers in to encampments to work with residents to direct them into those spaces. If there are no vacancies, build more.

    As for traditional mass-bedding shelters, one of the issues is that many unhoused people don’t want to enter them for a wide variety of reasons. We need to build more actual housing, where individuals can have a space to call their own, where they can have their stuff that they used to carry on their backs, where they can live their lives as they see fit.

  3. My wife and I donated all of our camping gear and blankets last year to one of the camps. The cops shut it down two days later and threw out all our donations. We hate cops now. “Just following orders”. Evil bastards.

    Anyway, you all voted for Sohi. Standing ovation for progressives. You did this.

    1. To be fair, I am not aware of the existence of a candidate who would or could have ended homelessness.

  4. Why do we have homelessness? Because it’s really hard to make people pay rents/mortgages if they can’t be evicted. Essentially, the idea is that the sound the homeless make rattling their cages as they publicly suffer keeps the rest of us in line.

    Food for thought: “Real estate” is 13% of Canada’s GPD. Canada is one of the richest nations in history – does it actually cost 13% of our annual wealth to maintain existing shelters and erect a few new ones, or is this about getting an “acceptable return on investment” for the extremely wealthy tax dodging money launderers impoverishing the rest of us by controlling the supply of housing in order to artificially reduce the supply, thereby increasing the cost?

    You may resent the amount of taxpayers dollars required to take care of people who will not or cannot work, and that’s fair enough. Worth considering that it costs ~116,000/year to incarcerate a male (for a woman that can rise to 175,000!), which is MUCH less than social assistance costs. If you’re worried about the taxpayer, the rational choice is to oppose homelessness. Also, someone on social assistance can, theoretically, still contribute to their community – even if they’re not working, they may pay rent, buy groceries, raise kids, volunteer, be someone’s friend, etc. Someone in prison is not able to contribute anything to society, and recidivism is a big, complicated and expensive problem. Street people don’t call prison “Con College” for nothing.

    Moral arguments against homelessness can be made, and they’re pretty obvious and are clearly correct under every ethical system ever devised except the variants of Moral Egoism such as Objectivism. Economic arguments against homelessness are just as much of a slam dunk. The only people who benefit from homelessness are the oligarchs who cause it.

  5. One thing that could help a great deal would be making tiny homes legal. That simple change is well past due. Another thing that could help would be removing the various barriers that have been erected in order to coerce people out of living in RVs (I would favour a special license required for RVs covering things like picking up after yourself and where it is and isn’t okay to part as well as a tax on RVs licenses to pay for the various social costs like increased need for litter cleanup and more parking spots with electrical/sewage hookups).

    This would give workers the ability to easily move to wherever in Canada the jobs are, which, in theory would benefit everyone in Canada… except those heavily invested in the real estate market, as this would decrease demand for traditional housing, thereby decreasing the price, thereby costing the renting class some money.

  6. Obviously, because the UCP insisted on cutting the affordable housing budget in half, the growth of homelessness over the last three years has been terrible. The debate on whether the cities, confronted with the results of such cuts, should or should not allow encampments results from the grotesque lack of compassion of a corporate-controlled government that cut corporate taxes by 2 billion dollars a year, finding “savings” on the backs of the most needy. I agree with those who think it is a violation of human rights to prevent the encampments from being set up. But we are useful idiots if we focus on how the municipalities are responding to the provincial government’s decision to do nothing to house the homeless rather than on the treachery of the sociopathic UCP government.

  7. There are no doubt many reasons for homelessness, prominent among them the fact we no longer recognize and support the value of a “family wage” as unions once did. The impunity exercised against the homeless is simply a reflection of the impunity exercised by the oil industry in every country it operates in. You urbans have to remember that whatever your government does in the hinterlands, including dispossessing people, will sooner or later be done to you in your cities. Those homeless camps are your future. You voted Con and now you and your children are getting what you asked for.

    1. I think another reason we accept it is that Neoliberalism has persuaded us that society is made up of individuals, not families. If we saw the family as the basic building block of society, the way that most human societies have throughout history, the existence of homeless individuals would be a cause for concern, because each one would be a missing part of a family. Now that we see society as composed of individuals, each of whom is responsible only to themselves, those individuals are seen as fungible and it doesn’t really matter what happens to any of them because none of them matter to anyone besides themselves.

      Please note “valuing family” is not a cure-all. For instance, if we valued family over individuals, we would likely have different attitudes about abortion, sexual freedom, divorce, gender roles and individual liberty. I’m not saying, “If we return to God everything will be better,” I’m saying, “the solutions to the problems of the past lead inexorably to the problems of the present, and understanding this process can help us minimize the problems we cause for the future as we grapple with the problems of the present.”

      1. Neil: I was thinking of Sam Gompers (born 1850) who founded the American Federation of Labor. His policy was known as “the family wage” which is much different than “valuing the family.” In other words, he argued a worker should be paid enough to feed a family and put a roof over their heads. Without that basic human dignity there can be no society and no peace. “More!” was shorthand for Gompers’ philosophy. He worked in an age of oligarchs as do we. The changes since then have just been cosmetic. The structure has not changed at all.
        Being human, there were some internal contradictions in his views.

        https://www.thoughtco.com/samuel-gompers-biography-4175004

        BTW: The old Alberta Social Credit hijacked the idea of the family wage and perverted it into their ideal of a 1950s family as the basic building block of society. Families come in all shapes and sizes beyond that suburban stereotype.

  8. Thanks for that, I didn’t know about Sam Gompers. I very much agree that the Robber Barons of the late 1800s and early 1900s are identical to the Oligarchs of today. I read his wikipedia page and found a thought provoking idea, here’s the copy/paste:

    ‘He [Sam Gompers] warned delegates to the 1900 annual convention that when men became enthusiastic about socialism, “they usually lost interest in their union”.[18]’

    This actually makes a lot of sense to me. Unions not only do not oppose capitalism, they actually prop it up by softening some of its more abusive qualities and making it more palatable to the exploited worker, who will never acquire control of the means of production through their union, but at least get slightly more table scraps from the oligarchs who do. Socialists oppose capitalism itself. It’s the difference between ‘Socialist’ and ‘Social Democrat.’ Just a thought I thought was interesting, I don’t really have a point.

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