Jeff Shantz
Surrey City Council is one again wasting public time, money, and energy devising another way to criminalize and punish poor people rather than positively addressing issues of poverty, housing unaffordability, or homelessness in the city. This time Surrey Council plans to introduce a new bylaw to ban people from staying in a camper or RV parked overnight on city streets.
This comes from a city government that over the years has demonized and criminalized homeless people sheltering in tents on 135A Street, “the Strip,” in Whalley, and done the same to poor people living in older trailer parks, especially along King George Boulevard. In those cases, as in the case against campers and RVs the tool has been bylaw enforcement. On the Strip bylaw officers and police took and trashed homeless people’s belongings on a regular basis. In the trailer parks bylaw officers and RCMP officers constructed a moral panic over drug use and sex work to target residents for stigmatization and criminalization. The trailer parks had served as some of the last remaining lower cost housing stock in
Metro Vancouver.
The proposed bylaw, to be considered at the City Council meeting on October 21, 2019, would make it illegal to be found inside a parked camper or RV between 10 PM and 6 AM. Punishments would range from ticketing, really helpful for people who are already lacking funds, to having their vehicle towed—the theft of someone’s home.
The level of cynicism displayed by Council is expressed in hypocritical statements made by councillors to justify this poorbashing attack. Councillor Laurie Guerra has the audacity (and apparent lack of self-awareness) to claim that criminalizing people from sleeping in campers or RVs is about their safety. As if taking their home and putting them on the streets would make people safe somehow.
In Guerra’s words: “We don’t want to see that happening where people are pulled off to the side of the road and sleeping in a vehicle. That’s not safe.”
The authoritarian nature of this bylaw is also explicit. It is designed to make people dependent on, and subject to surveillance by the state. Says Guerra: “I know that staff will ticket or tow only as a last resort. They will do everything that they can to help or assist the occupants of the vehicle with social services.” The authoritarianism is paired with a patronizing paternalism that poses the stick as a carrot. The staff report on the bylaw says that criminalization will “provide greater motivation to the occupants of large vehicles to move to suitable housing.” But people are “servicing” themselves by housing themselves. In housing that those using it have determined is suitable for themselves.
This, as is true of the other cases of targeted poorbashing through bylaws, is largely about satisfying business interests in Surrey. Business Improvement Areas and the Surrey Board of Trade drive much of the repressive policing agenda in Surrey. Guerra admits that this bylaw is driven by complaints by businesses about vehicles being parked on streets. She reports: “The city will often get reports of recreational vehicles parked on streets or in front of businesses, or in front of homes. Often they’re unsightly and cause a lot of garbage and debris.” You know what actually causes a lot of garbage and debris in Surrey—businesses. And they are quite often unsightly.
The bylaw would even take the demands of business further, limiting the daytime hours when people are inside parked campers or RVs when “adjacent to businesses.” We might note that there are no similar targeted bylaws addressing driving overnight or which ban parked vehicles arbitrarily during the day.
This is a straight up assault in the business driven, City managed, class war in Surrey.
