Hamilton city councillors debated a suggestion of sanctioned encampments on Wednesday. The sanctioned areas would allow unhoused people to camp there.
City councillors say they want to ensure respect for the human rights of people who are forced to live in these tent camps. Some of them said that’s not what they see in the proposal that was put forward by city staff for these sanctioned camps.
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Ward 2 councillor Cameron Kroetsch says the stress on human rights didn’t make it into the city’s proposal, “the direction here was impeccably clear but then the result is something different and now we’re back to a kind of square one-ish place, in my heart anyways that’s what I feel.”
The city staff presented a proposal to allow homeless people to camp in sanctioned encampments that would follow a series of rules. If the rules aren’t followed the city would then engage in escalated enforcement which may include working with Hamilton police.
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Under the sanctioned encampment rules, there would be a limit of five tents together in any one group. Each group of tents would have to be 50 metres from any other group of tents. The maximum space for a tent would be three metres by three metres and there is a long list of prohibited places for tents. Those places included near or against a highway, sidewalk, entrance or exit to a fire route, against or under or be attached and tied to any permanent structure, near any community garden or any garden shed or greenhouse, on a pathway sidewalk, parking lot or under bridges. And the list goes on.
Ward 3 councillor Nrinder Nann says, “Fundamentally at the end of the day what I know is that folks that are living unhoused don’t want to be forced to move from here to there to there to there at a repeated process nor do they want to be losing their belongings.”
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Social worker Gessie Stearns says, “Where are the human needs in this? If this is meant to be a human rights approach, or a human rights-based approach to encampment, where are the humans?”
The councillors voted not to proceed with the sanctioned encampment plan. Instead, they directed the staff to see what the Hamilton public thinks next month and report back by August. If the proposal is eventually adopted, the city staff say Hamilton could see groups of five tents popping up in parks all over the city, each of them 50 metres from the other.
