Assistance to Shelter Act will hurt, not help, say advocates and shelter providers
Vancouver, November 5, 2009 - Pivot Legal Society and a coalition of advocacy groups and shelter providers today released a letter to Housing Minister Rich Coleman denouncing the proposed Assistance to Shelter Act, which would allow police to detain homeless people and use force to compel them into shelters.
The groups called on the Minister to retract the proposed legislation and meet with shelter providers to discuss meaningful ways to keep people who are homeless safe this winter.
“This legislation moves us backwards, away from the significant progress we have made in the past 12 months in the Downtown Eastside and elsewhere in B.C.” said Rev. Ric Matthews, Minister at the First United Church, which serves as a refuge for hundreds of individuals every night. “It opens the door for an abuse of human rights and is based on an approach of coercion, an approach that has proved to be unsustainable and destructive. We need resources that allow us to meet people where they are, not to take them to where we are.”
“This legislation represents a return to the vagrancy laws of the 19th century, which saw people criminalized simply for being poor and having nowhere to go,” said Laura Track, housing campaign lawyer with the Pivot Legal Society. “The Minister knows this is an unconstitutional law; this is a cynical strategy by the Liberal government to force poor people off the streets for the Olympics before courts strike the legislation down, which will unfortunately take months if not years.”
“This is not the first time an Olympic host has resorted to using police to force homeless people out of sight,” said Track, “As a city and a province, we should all be truly disappointed to see the Vancouver 2010 Olympics going exactly the same way.”
During the 1996 Olympics, approximately 9000 homeless people in Atlanta were arrested in the months leading up to the Games and shunted up to 300 kilometres out of the city for the two weeks of the event.
“Rather than squander valuable public resources passing and defending laws that violate people’s rights, the Minister should invest in ensuring there are adequate shelter beds available for everyone who needs them,” said Track.
Last year, Vancouver shelters turned people away more than 40,000 times because the shelter was full. The City has approximately 1100 shelter beds to serve a homeless population of over 1500 people. The proposed Act does not address what happens if police cannot find an available shelter space for an individual, nor does it mandate the creation of new shelter spaces.
