—Dr. Alexandra Flynn, Associate Professor and Director, Housing Research Collaborative; Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC Canada
[Editor’s Note: This is one of our ICONnect columns. For more information on our 2025 columnists, see here.]
Rising homelessness across Canadian communities reveals not only a failure of public policy, but also a constitutional crisis. For people without housing, this right often comes into play when municipalities seek to evict residents of tent encampments from public spaces.
City officials are under pressure to clear encampments seen as unsafe or unsanitary, even as critics argue such sweeps push people deeper into crisis without solving the housing shortage, even though they lack the money or tools to solve homelessness itself. In these moments, courts have become the primary arbiters of what the Constitution requires when shelter is unavailable. At the centre of this debate lies section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees that “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person.”
The foundational case is Victoria (City) v. Adams, which was decided by the British Columbia Court of Appeal, which is second only to the Supreme Court of Canada. The Court held that bylaws prohibiting the erection of overnight temporary shelters in parks violated section 7 if there were not enough accessible shelter beds. The decision recognized a limited right: when shelter is unavailable, unhoused people are permitted to erect temporary shelters at night in public parks. This was not framed as a right to housing (which has never been recognized by the Canadian courts), but as a constitutional floor protecting against exposure to life-threatening conditions. The right was narrow – confined to overnight hours, and contingent on a lack of adequate shelter spaces – but it set a powerful precedent: bylaws cannot simply erase the existence of homelessness.
Since Adams, litigation has proliferated. In British Columbia, courts have continued to apply section 7 to encampments, often in contexts where municipalities seek injunctions to enforce bylaws. In Prince George (City) v. Stewart (2021), the BC Supreme Court refused to dismantle an encampment because no accessible alternatives existed. In Bamberger v. Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation (2022), the same Court struck down eviction orders from CRAB Park, finding that the Park Board had acted unreasonably in asserting that sufficient shelter spaces existed. More recently, in Vandenberg v. Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services (2023 BCSC), the Court emphasized that procedural fairness must be respected before encampment clearings. In particular, residents must have notice and a chance to be heard when decisions affect their Charter-protected interests.
Ontario courts have also grappled with these issues. In Waterloo (Regional Municipality) v. Persons Unknown (2023), the Superior Court refused to authorize an eviction, holding that the region’s bylaws could not be enforced where shelter space was inadequate. Importantly, the Court went further than Adams, recognizing that constitutional protection may not be limited to overnight hours. Similarly, in City of Kingston v. Doe (2023), the Court found that daytime restrictions could still violate section 7 when residents had nowhere else to go. By contrast, in Heegsma v. Hamilton (2024; appeal pending), the Superior Court adopted a narrower view, emphasizing municipal property rights and rejecting claims that enforcement of camping bans during the day infringed section 7. The result is a patchwork of jurisprudence, with courts divided on how far section 7 extends into the daytime.
The law is far from settled. In Roy v. Vancouver, which has not yet been heard by the Court, residents argue that dismantling shelters each morning deprived them not only of safety but also of continuity of services, including access to health care, harm reduction supports, and community networks rooted in place. This argument reflects a growing recognition that shelter is not just about survival at night, but about stability and access to services during the day. Courts are being asked to confront whether section 7 requires more than the bare minimum of protection from exposure.
In response to these rulings, municipalities have not stood still. Across Canada, they have rewritten bylaws to limit where and when encampments can exist. Vancouver’s Parks Control Bylaw, for instance, permits overnight sheltering in parks but requires tents to be dismantled by 8 a.m. and prohibits sheltering near schools, playgrounds, sports fields, beaches, and even under tree canopies. Some go even farther. For example, Hamilton rescinded a protocol earlier this year and now bans encampments everywhere in the city.
The constitutional problem is stark. If section 7 protects life, liberty, and security of the person, then bylaws that render it impossible to exist lawfully in public space effectively strip unhoused people of those rights. The courts have recognized that homelessness is not a matter of choice, but a structural condition tied to poverty, discrimination, and inadequate housing systems. Yet in the face of growing pushback from other city residents, municipalities use bylaws to clear public spaces of encampments, even where the consequence is to leave people with nowhere to go.
The case law is still developing, but one thing is clear: this issue is not leaving the courts anytime soon. With cases like Roy in Vancouver and ongoing appeals in Heegsma, the judiciary will remain at the forefront of defining the constitutional obligations of municipalities in the face of homelessness. The tension is profound: do cities have the power to manage public space in ways that banish the unhoused, or does the Charter impose a deeper obligation to accommodate human need? The answer will shape not only the lives of thousands of unhoused Canadians, but also the meaning of constitutional justice in Canada’s cities.
Suggested citation: Alexandra Flynn, The Constitutional Dimensions of Homeless Encampments in Canada, Sept. 24, 2025, at: https://www.iconnectblog.com/the-constitutional-dimensions-of-homeless-encampments-in-canada/