Front Burner - The battle over Vancouver’s legal tent camp

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

Tent encampments have been around in Canada for a long time. But since the pandemic, the number of camps have grown drastically as Canadians struggle with soaring housing prices and homeless shelters often operating at full capacity.Meanwhile, cities have gotten more aggressive in removing these camps — claiming they’re lawless, unhealthy environments. So how did the city of Vancouver end up with a fully legal tent community in CRAB Park? Sarah Berman, an investigative journalist based in Vancouver, explains what the story of CRAB Park reveals about Canada’s war over encampments and the effects of cutting off these makeshift communities.Help us make Front Burner even better by filling out this audience survey.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. So there have been tent encampments in Canada for a long time now. But since the pandemic, it has been a lot different. In those first couple years, housing prices soared while social distancing cut down capacity at shelters.

Hundreds of thousands of people went without a place to stay at some point, mostly because they didn't have enough income. And as the tent camps became a fixture in major cities' parks, so did the city's aggressive removal tactics. Residents of a tent city in Vancouver's downtown east side have been put on notice. Toronto today chose brute force in taking down another homeless encampment. It says camping in parks is unhealthy, unsafe and illegal. In Vancouver, one encampment was significantly different. The city's only fully legal tent community in a place called Crab Park, a green space next to a container port. Sarah Berman is

an investigative journalist based in Vancouver, and she just co-wrote a piece in Maclean's detailing what the story of Crab Park reveals about Canada's war over encampments. To quote from the piece, while no one believes tent villages are a good thing, the debate is still raging over whether they've become a necessary one. Sarah, hi. Thanks so much for coming on to the show today. It's really great to have you.

Hi, Jamie. Thanks for having me. So I want to start, as you do in your piece, which is really great. It's an excellent piece of journalism. Thank you. With a man named Dave Bradbury, who lived at Crabb Park and whose story, I think, tells us a lot about the needs that are driving these encampments. And as you and your co-author, Jesse Winter, developed this relationship with Dave, what did he tell you about the circumstances that left him without a home? he tell you about the circumstances that left him without a home? Yeah, so Dave was hard to miss in the Crabbe encampment. He was always in the kitchen tent right at the front entrance. So he was this bubbly personality, loved talking about his kitchen tent. But once we got to know him a little better, he did sort of tell us about his background. He was very proud. You know, he didn't consider himself

someone who usually struggled with homelessness. I've never been homeless before. I raised a family on my own, three girls, since they were young. My mother passed away, and I raised three girls. He's a construction worker. He works in trades. He was in Kitimat at the time that the pandemic hit. He was living with his partner at that time. You know, my partner, wife at that time, she worked, and COVID hit, and it just, all of a sudden, it just seemed like the world stopped.

It changed all in a moment. Like, it was just, it was the most unreal thing I've ever had to live through. They both lost work when everything shut down and they came to Vancouver in search of work, in search of opportunity, which actually turned out to be a lot harder for both of them. She worked in social work. Neither of them could find an affordable place to stay. They were living out of a vehicle and then a tent. And then unfortunately, Catherine, his wife, relapsed and overdosed.

That's awful. Yeah, that really left him broken. So this was 2021. And that put him in a place where he was just he called it unglued, he could not feed himself, he could not take care of his own life. And so he was living in a shelter, I would say for about seven months. those conditions were really terrible. Sleeping alongside folks with really tough, you know, intersecting issues of mental health and addiction. And, you know, there's lice, there's pests, there's rats, there's just a lot of chaos in these kinds of situations. And so he connected with someone named Fiona York. She's a support worker. She essentially invited him over to try sheltering in a park. It wasn't legal at the time, but there

was, you know, a small community, a couple dozen people. I would say he opened up when he got there. Like folks, when he first arrived, he was a little bit closed off. He was guarded. But his personality started to open up and he started to sort of have the fog lift. Part of it was the freedom, the fresh air, the community. There's a lot of sort of mutual aid and solidarity going on. And he wanted to give back. He wanted to do something for the

other folks there. And so that's how he became the central figure as the cook, the camp cook at the kitchen tent of Crab Park. Right. So just to underline the point that you're making there, he found a very different experience at Crab Park than he did when he was living in a shelter. And I say this because one of the first criticisms of encampments is often that people there should be in shelters instead of outside in public spaces, right? Right. I mean, Dave doesn't romanticize Crab Park. He does say it is hard. It is the least bad of many bad options. But yes, for some people, shelters just do not work for them. Folks with partners, folks with pets, folks with, you know, sometimes disabilities can't access those spaces. Some of them, you know, have had violent experiences in a shelter or SRO. You know, the SRO system is maybe the tier above that. That's your single room occupancy hotel. So this is, you know, just a room with a shared bathroom, but in buildings that are very dilapidated.

You know, folks are in tent cities often because they're choosing a least bad option because they can't go back to an SRO or a shelter. Let's talk a little bit about the context that this camp sprung up in, right? So the beginning of the pandemic caused many more Canadians to go without shelter, 88% more by one measure that you cited. Even now, there's some 200 camps in Toronto. But also during the time that we've seen them really proliferate, we have started to see a backlash to the spread of them, right? And what kind of headlines were we seeing that brought a lot of negative attention to the tent cities? So there's been a long history of tent cities in Vancouver, and always there's been somewhat of a backlash about needles, about noise, about disorder. But I would say in 2020 or so, it reached a different level of backlash. In part,

that was because at the time, you know, the encampments in Vancouver at Oppenheimer and then Strathcona Park. There were a series of violent incidents. One woman was held in a tent at gunpoint and tortured. She arrived at hospital with all of her fingers broken and cigarette burns on her body. And that really cut through, you know, the COVID news cycle of April 2020. There was a lot of anxiety and a lot of, you know, the COVID news cycle of April 2020, there was a lot of anxiety and a lot of, you know, assumptions about what homeless people bring to a community. Obviously, there was some concern around the violence against folks living in a tent city. And then there was some anxiety around, I don't want, you know, bad things to happen to me in my community. And the downtown Eastside is sort of up against a very affluent area. And so anytime you have this affluent and very not affluent

areas butting up against each other, you're bound to have that kind of backlash. I remember one event, that home invasion, right, in 2021 that involved someone who was camping at Strathcona, right? Yes, yes. You had this man, Sandy, who had claimed to be the mayor of Oppenheimer and was living in Strathcona, and he was involved in this awful home invasion and eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Those type of headlines, people remember them. And so when they see folks suffering in desperation, their immediate thought might be to go to that headline. Yeah. With all this polarization over the camps, how did we see most major cities breaking up or blocking them?

I would say trying to get rid of them swiftly seemed to be a strategy in a lot of communities, a lot of communities that had never had tent cities before, right? So there was one stat I looked up, a survey of 72 communities all across Canada, and 68 of them had tent cities. This was in 2020. And so we had Winnipeg, for example, putting these high-pitched sound emitters under bridges to prevent encampments from taking hold there. You certainly had places like Edmonton doing swift sweeps. Any camp bigger than six people was deemed high risk and cleared.

seemed high risk and cleared. Police were on scene as city workers in protective gear sifted through what was left behind, hauling it away in a garbage truck. You definitely had Toronto in 2021 doing some pretty high profile clearances. Police officers formed a line as they slowly worked their way through one of two encampments on the north and south sides of Toronto's Trinity Bellwoods Park. Some were pepper sprayed. Three were arrested. By three o'clock, there was one encampment left. But you did also have experiments with managed encampments.

Smithers, actually, was one of these places that tried to set up, you know, just a six-person picnic table, a community for the folks who were outside in very cold weather. But then you had neighborhood backlash. So it was just this cycle going around and around. There was just a lot of clashes all across the country. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some

startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. So here's where Crab Park comes back in, right? So after the encampment formed in the park in 2021, Vancouver's park board quickly posted eviction notices. But this newly licensed corporate lawyer named Julia Riddle happened to see them. And what core argument against the encampments did Julia take issue with?

And what did they end up doing? So the eviction notices that were posted by the park board included this line about there is other shelter, that we 2008 case in Victoria that found essentially that if there's not enough shelter, it goes against the constitution in Canada to clear that encampment if they have nowhere else to go. So with a couple of colleagues actually out of UBC, Julia starts this judicial review campaign. And basically they scour, you know, the shelter system, they try to find out what's available. They see that there is not even close to enough shelter in Vancouver to house everyone in Crab Park, the shelter spaces that are available. There's a lot of accessibility issues, potentially high barrier spaces. Right. And so they put together this case.

The courts actually decide that this park board eviction isn't based on fact and it isn't fair. They didn't actually go to the folks affected and ask them for input. And just you mentioned the folks affected. Before we go on, I know one resident of the encampment was a key part of that case, Carrie Bamberger, right? And just tell me a little bit about her. Carrie is a wonderful person who feels a lot of responsibility for everyone in Crab Park and everyone who lives a similar situation in an encampment. Really, We just basically give them a spot, find a spot where they can camp, and hook them up as best as we can with whatever supplies we have, like tents, sleeping bags, mats, cots, tarps, food, water.

She had been homeless for a lot of her life on and off. She had a partner, Clint, who she had lived with in an SRO, but she was threatened and attacked by someone, a woman on her floor in that SRO. And so specifically that SRO became unlivable for her in 2021. And so she came to Crowd Park, again, sort of as a least bad option. You have, you know, safety in numbers. She was, you know, one of many folks who submitted for the court case. But actually, Carrie, by the time that the court date arrived, she was suffering from, you know, health issues related to living outside. And so she actually couldn't even be there to see it happen because she was in the hospital. I never actually personally made it into the courtroom. I was actually in the hospital in a coma.

Oh, no. Yeah. It's a really weird thing. I never thought I'd win in court against a small arm of the government from a hospital bed. Oh, jeez. So, you know, like he mentioned, the B.C. Supreme Court judge basically said this eviction process was unfair because it didn't consult

with the people impacted. People impacted like Carrie and like Dave Bradbury, the man that you were talking about at the beginning of this conversation, right? And so just tell me what the park board decided to do with Crab Park that was unique, that was different than what was happening at other encampments. I mean, they were very strongly encouraged by this judge to rethink everything, in particular because the judge noted that if you clear one place, this is just going to pop up somewhere else. So you can't just push it to somewhere else. And so what they decided to do is designate an actual daytime sheltering area in the park. So a small portion of the park just over by the

water would be essentially an outdoor shelter, a first legal outdoor shelter in Vancouver. Right. Live there 24-7. While this is happening at Crabbe Park, Vancouver itself continues to crack down on other encampments, right? So current Mayor Ken Simm actually came into office in part on a safer streets message. But I'm wondering about the legal effect of the Crab Park decision across the country, right? Has it influenced what courts are doing elsewhere in Canada? I look at it as a bit more of a grander scale.

So over the last, say, 15, 20 years, a lot of decisions in a lot of different places have started to turn. Most of the time over the last 20 years, police are given court orders to clear encampments. And I would say still that's the majority of the cases do go that direction. But during the pandemic and during this time of very heightened poverty and lack of shelter, judges have been less willing to give those court orders to do those clearings. So Waterloo, for example, they had this transit hub parking lot where folks were camping and they went to a judge and asked for this court order to clear the encampment. A group of activists actually tried to

fight that decision and won, essentially won the right to let those folks stay there and actually stop this transit expansion that the city was planning at the site. But not every case has gone that direction. So you also have, for example, Edmonton, where you had a similar case, again, argued on a constitutional basis. If people don't have anywhere else to go, they're at risk of essentially dying, either in the elements or from overdose or what have you. And that case actually failed. So the judge actually dismissed that case, in part because the activist group didn't have standing to represent the encampment residents. So it's still a mixed bag. It's not 100 percent turned in one direction or the other. But if you look at it on a grander scale, you can see a trend for sure. a trend for sure. And while this legal fight has been playing out, do you have a sense of which direction public opinion has headed in on the issue of tent encampments? It's very divided. I would say there's still very much a lot of anxiety around encampments, in part because cities are

still learning how to manage them, how to potentially serve those very vulnerable communities in a way that makes sense, in a way that's orderly and clean for everyone. You know, like folks that live in these camps, they also want a clean, orderly, safe place to live. And so when these places get chaotic, when there is influence of potentially criminal elements, everyone is protected better if there's better management. It's just that cities don't want to be the one holding the reins on these kinds of projects. I would say, though, that there's more than ever solidarity, you know, like neighbors helping neighbors. During the pandemic, a lot of activism cropped up around these, not just in Vancouver, but in a lot of these places. Mutual aid societies bringing meals, bringing donations, sleeping bags, tents, you know, whatever folks need, legal advice. It's hard to say, but definitely these camps are more supported than ever in terms of real material support.

And that's really great to see, I think. I just recently saw some polling on this. And people are, as you said, very divided on whether municipal government should immediately dismantle any of the encampments or tent cities in their city. Forty-six% supported that. And then, of course, you know, as you mentioned, there is also support. 42% opposed it. You know, let's end this conversation back at Crab Park. What has become of it as this debate kind of rages on, as the camp has aged?

What has the city done with it? Vancouver was under a lot of pressure, you know, to find an even better solution, right? Like the sheltering area over the winter especially had grown a bit disordered. You know, there were a lot of bike parts everywhere. There was a lot to clean up. Essentially what they did was they moved everybody up the hill. They could still stay in tents, but they had to move out of the sheltering area for about a week and a half while they bulldozed the entire encampment, put down a bed of gravel,

and set it up more like a campground with space between tents, standard issue tents with canopies, and then more strongly enforced rules around what you can bring in there. So there was no propane, for example, for cooking allowed, no mattresses, those were deemed, you know, for cooking allowed, no mattresses, those were deemed, you know, a fire hazard. And there were just some other bylaws implemented to make it clear that you can't build a structure. So plywood and insulation and anything that might be considered the makings of a tiny home. It's explicitly banned now. Oh, and as well, they've limited the number of intended users. So if you aren't known to the park rangers as being a long-term resident of this camp, they will not let you into the camp and it's pretty strictly enforced. So there's now only 13 people there.

Carrie is one of them still, but a lot of folks have moved on. Now, essentially, it is run more like a shelter. The rules of the shelter is like, you know, you can only have two big bags of stuff. The things that made people choose the outdoors are no longer necessarily there for them. So it's an interesting shift, an interesting change. It certainly looks more orderly. It looks more like a campground. But that low barrier aspect has been lost. And of course, people losing everything in the process of the cleanup was a pretty big upheaval. You're a park ranger! You're not in charge of people where they live! You're not in charge of people where they live. And Sarah, before we go, you mentioned Carrie and how she's still a resident at Crab Park. What about Dave?

Yeah, so Dave in April, just, you know, as this cleanup was taking hold, was approached by BC Housing. And he and his partner actually got a place in the Savoy. So an SRO, but aimed more at a senior clientele. So potentially a little less chaos in the building. And so that was something that he really wanted to pursue. And it was sort of bittersweet because now he has all this responsibility at the kitchen tent. He really wanted and hoped that that could continue.

But it's so great to see folks on their journey, you know, getting wins in their life. We've known these folks for just so long, for months and months, and in some cases years. So to see folks, you know, finally accessing something that works for them. That's just really heartening to see. All right, Sarah Berman, thank you so much for this. Thanks, Jamie. All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening.

Talk to you tomorrow.