Human rights group sues City of Edmonton over encampment clearing
CBC
A human rights advocacy group is suing the City of Edmonton, alleging that the city's practice of clearing homeless camps violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The Coalition for Justice and Human Rights filed a statement of claim earlier this week in Edmonton Court of King's Bench.
The coalition seeks legal standing to represent people experiencing homelessness in the city.
Coalition president Sam Mason said the group decided to take action after seeing similar legal challenges succeed in other parts of the country.
Earlier this year, an Ontario court found a municipality violated the Charter when it used bylaws to clear encampments.
"[The city has] not provided adequate shelter spaces for the amount of folks that we have living unsheltered," Mason said in an interview this week.
"And so until they can prove that there's a place for folks to go when they displace them from their encampment, what they're doing is just unnecessary and endangers people's lives."
The city has confirmed to CBC News it is aware of the legal action and preparing to defend its approach.
Among the remedies sought by the coalition is a permanent injunction on displacing encampments from city-owned land when the number of unhoused people in Edmonton exceeds the number of adequate and accessible shelter beds in the city.
A city report from May notes that according to Homeward Trust's By Name List, there were between 2,650 and 2,800 Edmontonians experiencing homelessness last winter.
During that season, there were 1,202 emergency shelter spaces funded by the provincial government — 627 permanent and 575 temporary — and up to 150 funded by the city.
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice earlier this year found the Regional Municipality of Waterloo's use of bylaws to clear encampments violated Section 7 of the Charter — the right to life, liberty and security — without meeting the standards for Charter limitations set out by Section 1.
Chris Wiebe, counsel for the coalition in the Edmonton lawsuit, says previous decisions in Ontario and British Columbia are not binding in Alberta but set a precedent.
"We hope that the Alberta Court of King's Bench will seriously consider and follow the line of authority of those provinces."
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