Victoria's plan to better enforce daytime sheltering rule will fail, advocates say

Outreach workers say the City of Victoria shouldn’t bother developing a plan to better enforce its bylaw against daytime sheltering. They say enforcing the rule won’t work because there’s nowhere for people to go.

“The resources simply aren’t in place, so it’s not a realistic goal at this point,” Fred Cameron, a senior manager at SOLID Outreach Society, told CTV News.

On Thursday, council unanimously passed a motion to prevent people from putting up tents in parks and on sidewalks during daytime hours, which is already prohibited. Bylaw officers enforce the rule most mornings along Pandora Avenue, but tents pop back up shortly after they leave.

“How do we go about making sure that we just uphold the laws of the city?” Coun. Stephen Hammond said.

City staff have been tasked with figuring out how to do that and how much it will cost.

Hammond brought the motion forward after a paramedic was kicked in the face by someone they were treating on Pandora Avenue last week. In response to the assault, paramedics and firefighters are not attending calls in the area without a police escort.

“What resources do we need more of in order to prevent the camping that is going on, which is completely and totally illegal?” Hammond said.

As CTV News previously reported, the city is already spending roughly $1 million a year on encampment enforcement.

The concentration of unhoused people on Pandora Avenue in downtown Victoria is thanks to policy failures, said Martin Girard, a member of Neighbourhood Solidarity with Unhoused Neighbours.

“The city has made it happen by displacing the homeless until they have virtually nowhere else to go,” Girard said. “We need to give these people reasonable alternatives and they do not exist at this point by design.”

Victoria Mayor Marianne Alto said providing long-term housing is not the city’s job.

“There’s a whole bunch of people who need immediate, desperate help,” she said. “We’ve been waiting a long time for the people who have the authority and the resources to do the job.”

The province set aside $1.5 billion in budget 2023 to help people access housing and supports.

“(The provincial and federal governments) are making a little progress here and there. It’s not fast enough; it’s not enough and so we’re going to step in,” Alto said.

The city would be better off opening temporary shelter and storage space while it waits for more long-term housing to open, advocates said.

“If there were storage facilities in place, for example, that would free people up to leave for hours at a time and come back without losing everything they own,” Cameron said.

“We’re going to need people in the community to have a little bit of patience, but we need higher levels of government to help us out.”