Activists Rally to Set Up Homeless Encampment at Centennial Square

Sixty advocates for unhoused residents of Victoria rallied at Centennial Square yesterday for the purpose of setting up a homeless encampment right by City Hall—even though it had brazenly been advertised for the courthouse grounds instead.

This was the first action I led under the banner of the newly founded Victoria Liberation Front, whose mission is to resist the city council’s illegal agenda against marginalised and disenfranchised residents of this city, such as homeless people and drug users, with the Vancouver DTES community’s activist network as a model.

I went with the flow for the event and allowed anyone to grab the mic to share their stories. For an hour we heard advocates, front line workers, and people with lived experience of homelessness depict the heart-wrenching aftermath of bylaw sweeps across town, officers leaving people with nowhere to go and no belongings of their own save the clothing on their backs. Naturally the grim news of nine unhoused residents of the notorious 900-block of Pandora Avenue within seven days were in everyone’s mind, and many speakers’ mouths.

The rally doubled as a legal update to a community which had been left in the dark pertaining to litigation against the city. I made an address which read along these lines:

I would like to begin by acknowledging this event takes places on land stolen over a century ago from the Lekwungen people by an overseas monarch. To this day, this country keeps pledging loyalty to an overseas monarch, and the colonial project is ongoing. Forced displacement keeps affecting the indigenous population of these lands, disproportionately represented among the unhoused community, which is most relevant to the reason we are gathered here today.

My name is Martin Girard. I speak today for the Victoria Liberation Front, which I founded as a collective of marginalised and disenfranchised people, such as homeless people and drug users, oppressed by this city council’s illegal agenda, with the mission to fight back until victory. Resistance is possible. The Downtown Eastside community in Vancouver, rallied around the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, has proven this much time and again, by breaking the law until it became the law. We are not powerless, we are disorganised. If we stand together and fight back, we can win.

Today I also speak as a legal advocate involved in legal recourse against the City of Victoria pertaining to its mistreatment of homeless people, and this rally also serves as a legal update. You may have heard whispers that unhoused complainants and advocates had mustered to fight back on the legal front. I can attest this is true.

For starters, we advocates have reached out to the BC Civil Liberties Association and the Pivot Legal Society, which wrote a letter to the Victoria city council advising it of legal jeopardy under Article 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and threatening legal action.

I also helped two unhoused residents of this city each file a complaint at the BC Human Rights Tribunal against the City of Victoria, both of which have been accepted on the fast track. I’m currently working hard at bringing its legal counsel to the bargaining table.

I’ve also mustered a legal team to file a petition for judicial review, currently before the BC Supreme Court, of the latest amendment to the Parks Regulation Bylaw, which forbids overnight sheltering in Irving Park and Vic West Park, on the grounds that it does violate Article 7 of the Charter. Or in vernacular: WE ARE FIGHTING THESE MOTHERFUCKERS IN COURT!

In addition, we now have a hot line with the BC Civil Liberties Association, and two seats at a table with lawyers discussing national encampment litigation strategy. We are no longer voiceless and helpless. We finally have a network of allies to push back.

Allow me to say it again: We are not powerless, we are disorganised. Resistance is possible. Three years ago, I myself was still homeless. Three years forth, even the most humble among homeless people can stand where I am now, if they learn to advocate for themselves and each other. We have to stand together and tell this council, with one voice, to either respect existence or expect resistance.

This event follows a whole week of intensive advertising in which I screamed as loudly as possible that I would lead the unhoused community to set up camp at the Victoria courthouse, whose grounds are the only Crown Land suitable for this purpose downtown. This of course left many questioning my sanity, as such a bold attempt would obviously be thwarted, and indeed the courthouse grounds were fenced off—just as I wanted. Because the real target for the tent city was actually Centennial Square, right by City Hall, both the best spot in town for this purpose and the last spot council members want to see an encampment.

Of course the mind games work both ways. The police foiled my attempt at coordinating with the Palestine rally by changing its itinerary and schedule at the last moment such that our group wasn’t ready at all when they arrived and passed us by, and that was a real downer because I had planned for the reinforcements when I was ready to announce we would be pitching our tents by City Hall.

But our worst predicament was the lack of camper turnout among the unhoused community, which was truly disappointing. Only a few homeless people had come to pitch their tents alongside mine, despite a full week of reaching out to them night and day trying to secure commitments. It has been suggested they would not show up in large numbers because they were afraid of retaliation, which emphasises our acute need for community organising; in a community of veteran activism such as in downtown Vancouver, I am confident the turnout would have been way higher.

I was going to give up, but some in attendance were so enthralled by my plan that they wanted to try it out even without sufficient numbers, even if we only held for one night, and implored me to buy them an hour to muster a small group with tents. So I put it to the crowd and told them exactly what I had planned to keep the sweep team away, had I succeeded in mustering thirty campers. It went along those lines:

I never intended for us to march to the courthouse to begin with, because that’s exactly what the council wants. Instead, we rallied at Centennial Square because the tent city was to be right here, at Centennial Square, right by City Hall! This is the last place where the council wants us to set up camp.

I can see what you’re thinking. This is bonkers. We’re surrounded by cops after all. Well, the officer in charge of keeping the peace at this protest is Paul Brailey of Saanich PD; he cares nothing about Victoria’s sheltering bylaws and has no mandate to enforce them. So nobody is going to stop us from setting up camp today.

What about tomorrow then? VicPD might come back in force, right? Well, here’s a legal advocate’s take on this. If the cops follow the playbook then, they will claim that you’re in an “arrestable situation” because you’re in “legal jeopardy” under some criminal charge or another; it doesn’t matter which, because it’ll come down to a violation of the Parks Regulation Bylaw prohibiting sheltering at Centennial Square. But remember there’s a petition before the BC Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of the bylaw, and it is certain to succeed. So you’re not in legal jeopardy, they are!

Even then, let’s say they were to do something incredibly stupid and arrest everyone. Every low income defendant is automatically entitled to legal assistance, so you’d automatically get a lawyer. The first thing your lawyer would do is challenge the arrest by raising a constitutional argument, and ask for a deferral of the criminal proceedings until the judicial review is complete, after which all criminal charges would be automatically dismissed. No prosecutor out there would touch a case this toxic with a ten-foot pole, and the cops know it, so let them bluff.

But then cops get away with civil rights violations all the time, don’t they? Well, the rules are changing. The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled in the Joseph Power case this year that one can sue the government for financial damages when laws are clearly unconstitutional, such as in this case. So anyone who got wrongfully arrested by VicPD would get to sue the City of Victoria, and if there are many plaintiffs, it better brace itself for millions of dollars in damages—to say nothing of the legal fees.

Well, so what? Cops don’t care because it’s the public dime, right? Not so fast. The city is about to lower VicPD’s budget for next year by two million dollars rather than raise taxes. Where do you think the council will find the money for the damages if the cops screw up? They’ll slash VicPD’s budget even further, and that means massive layoffs.

About an hour later, not only did we have half a dozen committed campers, but every cop left, leaving the green completely undefended. So we pitched our tents as planned and spent the night there while calling out for even more campers to join us overnight, aiming to reach critical mass by morning. The size of the encampment doubled to eight tents and a dozen campers by 6AM, which isn’t bad in the circumstances, but we needed triple that to stand our ground.

I did my best in a capacity of legal advocate to fend off the sweep team, and while it did make an impression on the officers, it predictably wasn’t enough to have them back down. The VicPD officer I spoke to in particular seemed oblivious to the legal actions against the City of Victoria pertaining to its rabid enforcement of the unconstitutional Parks Regulation Bylaw, and behind the curve about the prospects of the city being sued for financial damages, which naturally would be recouped by slashing VicPD and Bylaw Services’ budgets. This may dampen their enthusiasm at work from this point forth, as the prospect of financial accountability looms.

I conclude by thanking everyone who showed up yesterday, and look forward to discussing future evil plots to the many who expressed interest in joining the Victoria Liberation Front. My address in particular struck a chord with an outraged but dejected attendance that had stopped believing in resistance, let alone victory. As you can see, resistance is possible, and if we start believing in it again, so is victory.