Encampment Update

Earlier this year I wrote about a legal case pertaining to homeless encampments.

Justice M.J. Valente of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice had ruled that the Region of Waterloo couldn’t evict people living in tents from a vacant lot the Region owns. https://whenthemayorsmiles.blogspot.com/2023/03/encampment-precedent.html

At the time I understood that the ruling was precedent setting and would impact other municipalities.   It seems I was overly optimistic.

According to the Advocacy Centre for Tenants of Ontario (ACTO) municipalities are responding to the needs of their residents in different ways. 

Some are using enforcement and displacement as a last resort.

And some are taking a different approach. Take Cambridge, for example.

They are “focusing on clearing and forcibly removing residents, resulting in people being displaced with nowhere else to go,” claims ACTO, an Ontario specialty legal clinic.

"Some of these people were evicted three times in a matter of two months,” Ashley Schuitema, staff lawyer at Waterloo Region Community Legal Services (WRCLS) told Cambridge Today’s Joe McGinty.  https://www.cambridgetoday.ca/local-news/legal-action-in-the-cards-after-cambridge-encampment-evictions-7652134

Up North, Sault Ste Marie looked at other City’s bylaws and figured they could amend theirs.  Just in time for winter they decided to protect their parks. The only Council opposition came from Ward 3’s Angela Caputo according to CBC News. 

"I think it's imperative that we shift our attention to creating and advocating for a system to end homelessness rather than enacting laws to try and police our way out of it," said Ms. Caputo. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/social-services-legal-challenge-poverty-issues-1.6952421

Some cities like Kingston are in court where the arguments revolve around how much housing is available.  There is always lots of debate on such numbers. 

Let’s get real here. It is obvious to anyone that rental rates and availability are beyond the means of increasing numbers of people in the province.

Municipalities are spending taxpayers’ dollars on fighting our fellow citizens in courts.  The Hamilton Spectator reported today that lawyers representing Hamilton tried to recover court costs from those without housing who are in an ongoing human rights battle with the city.  Instead, Justice James Ramsay ruled the City should pay costs of $5,000.  

The last word today goes to ACTO:

“The Charter dictates that unless and until encampment residents are provided with truly accessible accommodation, evictions should not occur. Moreover, encampment residents deserve to be consulted and involved when municipalities are attempting to find solutions for them.”

Looking for the Reports

I have just submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the Ontario government.

This is a first for me.

The origin of the legislation that put FOIs in place goes back many years. It was part of the Accord adopted following the 1985 election when the NDP agreed to support David Peterson’s Liberals for two years. 

The Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) legislates access to information held by public institutions in Ontario subject to specific requirements to safeguard the personal information of individuals

Adapting to Climate Change

All governments brag about transparency.   The current Ontario government is no exception.  In fact, Premier Doug Ford, a chronic embellisher, claims there has never been a government as transparent as his. 

So, you could say that my FOI request is a test of that assertion. My interest is getting information on Ontario’s climate change plans.  With the country burning this summer, people losing their homes, firefighters being killed and extreme weather events now common one has to wonder what government has planned to respond to such conditions in the future.  So that is what my FOI request is about.  How does the government plan to adapt to climate change? 

There is a bit of a story to this.

A group I’m involved with took some initiative.  The Ontario Project of SCAN! (Seniors for Climate Action Now) has members knowledgeable about adaptation strategies.  They were aware that the Ford government had done some work on this matter.

In fact, the Ford government has put together major reports on the urgent task of anticipating and reducing the impacts of climate change. In November 2019, the Ontario government appointed an Advisory Panel on Climate Change led by Paul Kovacs, a professor at Western University and an expert in the field of disaster risk reduction.  The creation of this panel was no secret.  It was announced publicly.

It seems most of the reporting was completed nearly two years ago.  But the reports were kept secret until recently.    One of them is now available likely because of public pressure.

This past January, Jennifer Penny, one of our members who previously worked as a climate change adaptation researcher, submitted a FOI request to find out what had happened to this reporting.

“Ontarians want to see these reports! But even more, we want to know what the government is doing to protect us,” says SCAN!’s Jennifer Penney.

She got a response of sorts.

FIPPA: “What is the name of the report?”
Jennifer: “We don’t know.  It is being kept secret.”
FIPPA: “What was the date of the report?”
Jennifer: “Don’t know that either.  It’s a secret.”

This seems to be how the FOI process works - transparent government in action, much like looking for light through a brick wall. 

So, an open letter and petition entitled Release the Report was prepared and circulated. Over a few weeks in the summer more than 1,300 people signed the petition.

Then on a Friday afternoon in late August with no fanfare the Provincial Climate Change Impact Assessment appeared on the Government of Ontario’s website.

Its 530 pages are filled with what the CBC called “grim details about the expected effects of climate change in Ontario.”  We’ll have a soaring number of days with extreme heat, more extreme flooding and more frequent wildfires. The agriculture sector faces risks of declining productivity, Climate risks will be highest for Ontario's most vulnerable populations and this will “continue to amplify existing disparities and inequities."

In some ways the report tells us what we already suspected.  But such suspicions are confirmed by experts.

The report does "the best job that's been done to date describing the impacts of climate change and extreme weather," Blair Feltmate, head of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo told the CBC.

SCAN! had been looking for two reports.  One was released.  Imagine our surprise. Turns out there are actually four reports. Three companion reports, including one on Best Adaptation Practices, are still hidden by the government. 

Those reports are what I’m asking to see in my FOI request. 

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More information on SCAN! can be found at  https://seniorsforclimateactionnow.org/

Listen to the story of the hidden reports on  All in A Day with Alan Neal at https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-92-all-in-a-day/clip/16009552-seniors-climate-action