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Supreme Court
Fighting for the right to sleep
David Arthur Johnston’s experiments with truth arrive at the Supreme Court
By Tavis W Dodds
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The nation is finally about to learn the result of a Supreme Court constitutional challenge against Victoria’s anti-camping bylaw, scheduled to commence September 4, 2007, after more than a year’s wait. The stance of Victoria, and many other cities (Vancouver among them) is that everything within the city limits is private property and sleeping in public-access green space is officially illegal.
Supporters of the challenge argue that while police move sleepers along, no other options are made available for homeless victims of BC’s current housing crisis. Victoria has responded with the creation of more homeless shelters that are impossible to sleep in.
Whose public space?
This hearing will certainly be of interest to those concerned about poverty, civil liberties, and spiritual freedoms, but, if history is any indication, we may not be able to depend on Canada’s media to provide coverage. Papers like The Victoria Times Colonist and The Vancouver Sun and Province have buried the story. The Globe and Mail, before it was consumed by the CHUM/CTV media machine, ran a cartoon with the caption, “Should sleeping in public places be illegal?” above the image of police breaking down the doors to a Senate full of sleeping politicians.
Even this brief coverage all but ignores the man who has been a driving force behind the Right to Sleep movement in Victoria, David Arthur Johnston, a homeless man who has refused to move on when the police order him to do so and, as a result, spent several hundred days fasting in prison. “If the constitutional challenge is successful then it means that municipalities across Canada will be able to be challenged on their own anti-camping/anti-poverty legislations,” says Johnston, “but regardless of what the court decides in September, there will be action in September.”
After the BC Liberals took power, Johnston was arrested at the February 2002 “Camp Campbell” occupation of the legislature grounds. A group of mostly homeless people had lived peacefully for weeks on the legislature lawn. After the arrests, the attorneys general on both federal and provincial levels admitted they had no evidence of crime to silence the legitimate concerns of the campers. That concern—if we are not allowed to be homeless here, where do we go?—goes unanswered to this day.
The general procedure when dealing with the homeless is to move them along when they become too visible, too numerous, too comfortable; just move along. David Johnston refused to move. He spent hundreds of days in jail for being homeless and defying orders preventing him from sleeping in parks. Police drove him out of town repeatedly, often leaving him out in the rain in winter. The Provincial Capital Commission hired security guards expressly for the purpose of torturing Johnston. Then, after admitting that this plan “fizzled out” and the security guards were more frustrated than Johnston, the cost of the security was given as evidence of Johnston’s guilt. Accusations were made about Johnston’s mental health, and when his mother and next of kin flew out from Black Falls, Alberta, to lend her support to Johnston and his cause, she felt the crown insinuated that she had mental health issues too because she supported her son’s campaign for the rights of the poor. Johnston fasted over a month in jail and was prepared to die, but nearly forty days into a seven-month sentence he was released, promising not to go back to St Ann’s until after the Charter Challenge.
Johnston refuses to touch money on principle, a spiritual principle well grounded in history, but there are thousands more people without shelter in BC, struggling to find a little place to sleep, a twelve-square-foot space in a part of the world where real estate sells for thousands per square foot. To have no fixed address is not a crime in Canada, but it is treated as a crime, and the homeless automatically bear the guilt of a social offence in which they are more victims than perpetrators. People suddenly without homes find rights they had taken for granted denied to them. Our state tortures Canadians every day, and the “Journal of the Occupation of St Ann’s Academy” by David Johnston documents such torture of a homeless individual. The torture of Johnston is not out of the ordinary in the homeless community; it has become increasingly commonplace in the industrialized world, especially in the urban centres across Western Canada.
In the weeks before the challenge, Victoria has made moves to have the injunction against camping replaced in order to keep the Charter Challenge from being heard. The side against the poor needs no help; multitudes of institutions work to protect their own interests and exploit profits from poverty. But who speaks for the homeless if they are not allowed to speak for themselves? It’s obvious after experiencing homelessness first-hand that none of the voices paid to speak about the issue of homelessness have any idea what it’s like to be of a criminalized class.
The nation of the under-housed has been waiting years for this nine-day hearing to discuss the protection of the rights of homeless people in Canada, and, like Camp Campbell, Victoria has no authority to silence our call for free human rights. But they are going to try to do it anyway. Support your local tent city.
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