In Ontario, there has been a court case surrounding encampments and the charter of human rights / freedom of movement which effectively stopped the removal of tents across the lower province especially.
Yesterday, a dozen people had a hearing in Hamilton as they jumped on this and sued the city for half a million dollars because they were evicted from city parks.
Of the three stories featured one man decided to leave his apartment without following LTB procedures, witnessed a violent attack at a shelter and decided shelters were unsafe but then ended up shot in the shoulder sleeping outside anyways.
The second is a woman who was removed from social programming for failure to abide by curfew, follow mental health care or deal with her drug addiction who was assaulted while sleeping on a bench.
The third is a man who has been homeless for ten years and lived in a popular city park next to a school and playground who was evicted and seemingly blames his amputation of his leg on being forced to leave from sleeping on a vent at city hall.
The basis of the lawsuit is they believe it is inhumane to be evicted when there are no available options for them.
Yet, two of them admit they had shelter space they were either removed from or chose not to use while the third has been homeless since 2015 - as if he did not have any chances to find available space in ten years.
Basically, a city has been held hostage by people blaming their entire situation from the bottom up on Canada and the government. To them, they have free will but no personal responsibility to actively pursue the available options - of which they readily admit are available. Sure, there are mentally ill people in the shelters - but so are they. They are the contributing factor as well to the mentally ill at the shelters and may be a villain in someone else's story. They are not suing because of the conditions of the shelter or their actual lived experiences inside of the shelter. They are suing for basically the right to forgo the available options if they want to because muh free will.
Effectively, for the woman especially in this story, she's saying I have a right to be a drug addict, to never seek treatment for my addiction, to be a burden on the existing system by endangering others around me and the government needs to give me the legal right to do this while they supply my habit, provide safe supplies and allow me free shelter on the few days I can pretend to be sober because it's too cold to sleep in a tent AND have an ample system of free food and community medical care. This is the definition of free will to these people. And then asking for half a million dollars because this right has been infringed on.
I can only hope the judge does not make the same mistake the one in Kitchener did that set off this domino effect of homeless "free will" as it will clearly set a legal precedent going forward and if these are the stories they are presenting as evidence - fuck em. The best precedent it could set is exposing how there is, in fact, available space but that those complaining the most about the space are likely people who are socially and mentally unfit to use them. Even if alternative spaces were provided, they simply would not and could not use them anyways. Imagine suing a city because you're mentally ill and that's their fault.
Like, it's inhumane to give them a facility to support mental illness via asylums, it's inhumane not to allow them to do drugs because of their mental illness, it's inhumane to remove them from parks and malls and libraries because of the disturbance and harm their mental illness causes, it's inhumane to fine them, it's inhumane to jail them, it's inhumane to have any expectation of social morality, empathy, self awareness of these people.
(eta: sry, phonefag & the thumbnails aren't agreeing with me today)
