The Backpack Project Hosts a Press Conference to Denounce Human Rights Violations by City of Victoria

About forty supporters gathered at a press conference by the Victoria city hall, called by Niki Ottosen of the Backpack Project, to discuss the aftermath of a recently dismissed complaint of hers before the Civil Resolution Tribunal, ruling she did not have standing to sue on behalf of the homeless people whose confiscated donations had been illegally seized and either disposed of or returned purposefully damaged.

While this could be considered a rookie mistake, it also underlines the barriers to getting the justice system to intervene, since the people who do have standing to sue are effectively shut out of the system, unable to file a complaint or prove their case without the help of advocates, if at all.

Niki went on to describe a deeply hostile and contemptuous system of extortion by the city, targeting the homeless population for the express purpose of confiscating their belongings and selling them at public auctions. This system of state-sponsored robbery by police and bylaw officials closely parallels that of civil forfeiture, which itself has been widely denounced as state-sponsored robbery.

And extortion isn’t the worst part of it. These belongings are instrumental to the homeless’ survival. When bylaw officers confiscate everything a person owns, down to their identification and medication, and city workers dispose of them or begrudgingly return them in terminal condition, their owners are effectively left stranded and unable to navigate the system.

Furthermore, it means charitable donations massively going down the drain. Niki’s complaint stated that some of the confiscated goods were brand new, in their original packaging, which is difficult to justify as necessary to remove an encampment and more easily describable as plunder.

The Civil Resolution Tribunal, in its decision, ordered Niki to pay 25 dollars to the City of Victoria in a symbolic legal fee award, far less than the 5000 dollars it actually spent. Spiteful, she paid them in rolls of nickels, right after the press conference.

More came forward to express their frustration and sorrow toward a racist and shameless system fleecing the homeless and criminalising their social condition. As usual, this pattern of predation disproportionally targets already vulnerable segments of the population such as indigenous people.

The crowd clamoured for more housing and less racketeering from our elected officials at the city of Victoria. If the city will not back down under the pressure of such a small crowd, will it once it finds itself on the wrong end of a class-action lawsuit? I have insider information one is coming and that evidence is being gathered for this purpose.