Parks without encampments turns homelessness into a visibility problem while Bill 6 gives police new powers over poverty and public drug use.
Alongside the Safer Municipalities Act — the Ontario Ford government’s Bill 6 encampment law — the Ontario government ran a newspaper advertisement under its “Protect Ontario” campaign. The ad is simple enough to do its work quickly. A woman in a high-visibility safety vest holds a walkie-talkie and a clipboard. The slogan, in yellow block type: “A safer Ontario means parks without encampments.” A URL at the bottom directs readers to ontario.ca/SaferOntario. It is labelled “Paid for by the Government of Ontario.”
The message is not subtle. Safety is represented by enforcement. Public order is represented by surveillance. The problem is represented by the encampment, not by the conditions that forced people into tents in the first place.
The poster does not say a safer Ontario means everyone housed. It does not say a safer Ontario means shelter spaces people can actually use, rent people can afford, mental-health care people can access, or harm-reduction supports that keep people alive. It says a safer Ontario means parks without encampments.
Ontario is not promising fewer people sleeping outside. It is promising fewer poor people visible in public parks. It is not treating encampments as evidence of a housing crisis. It is treating encampments as public disorder.
The slogan removes the people
“Parks without encampments” sounds clean because it removes the human subject from the sentence. There are no tenants priced out of rent, workers whose wages cannot keep up with housing costs, disabled people abandoned by income-support systems, or people leaving prisons, hospitals, foster care, and violent homes.
There are no people banned from shelters. No people using drugs in public because they have no private space. No Indigenous people displaced through the long afterlife of colonial policy. No one with a name, a history, a family, a body, or a right to survive.
There are only encampments.
It does not have to lie in an obvious way. It only has to narrow the frame until the preferred solution appears natural. Where the problem is homelessness, the solution must be housing. Where the problem is “encampments,” the solution can become removal.
The province has not defined the crisis as people being unhoused. It has defined the crisis as housed people having to see unhoused people.
The phrase also pretends parks are neutral public spaces being returned to everyone. Unhoused people are also the public. They are not outside society. They are residents of Ontario who have been pushed into the open because the province has failed to guarantee housing, care, and basic security.
The real message is harsher: public space belongs to the public, except for the part of the public whose poverty makes everyone else uncomfortable.
Bill 6 is the law behind it
The Safer Municipalities Act — Ontario’s Bill 6 — enacted the Restricting Public Consumption of Illegal Substances Act and amended the Trespass to Property Act. The law defines a “dwelling” to include a temporary structure such as a tent used as a dwelling. The state recognizes the tent just enough to police it, but not enough to protect the person living inside it.
The new framework prohibits consumption of illegal substances in public places. It allows officers to direct people to stop consuming illegal substances or leave an area, demand identifying information, seize substances in plain view, and arrest without warrant in some circumstances.
The penalty structure is severe. Bill 6 makes a person convicted under the Act liable to a fine of up to $10,000, imprisonment for up to six months, or both. The same bill also adds aggravating factors to trespass sentencing, including prior notice to leave and the likelihood of future trespass.
The poster’s enforcement imagery is therefore not decorative. It normalizes a policy structure where homelessness, public drug use, and poverty are managed through police discretion, trespass law, fines, arrest, and jail exposure.
Police tools replace housing
CMHA Ontario summarized the bill’s effect directly: police can direct people in public spaces, including encampments, to stop using illegal substances or leave. If they do not comply, law enforcement can issue a fine or arrest them.
CMHA also warned that convictions can affect future housing access because Ontario’s Human Rights Code does not protect people from housing discrimination based on “record of offences.” The enforcement cycle is built into the policy. People are unhoused. They live outside. They are policed because they live outside. A record can then make housing harder to get. Each step makes the next more likely.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association reached the same terrain from a rights angle. After Bill 6 passed, the CCLA said the law further criminalizes vulnerable people by allowing police to remove individuals from encampment dwellings on suspicion that they consumed an illegal substance and arrest those who do not comply.
Ontario’s public-safety language makes that power sound neutral, but it is not. It lands hardest on people whose entire survival has already been forced into public view.
Order is not safety
The poster’s central word is “safer,” but it never answers the obvious question: safer for whom? For a housed park user, safety might mean not seeing tents, drug use, crisis, garbage, conflict, or visible poverty. For someone living in an encampment, safety may mean staying near other people, outreach workers, food distribution, transit, washrooms, harm-reduction supplies, and a familiar community.
The Federal Housing Advocate called for governments to immediately end forced evictions of encampments, particularly on public lands. The Advocate’s review says forced evictions destabilize people, remove them from support systems, and cause them to lose tools and equipment needed to survive.
Order is what a park looks like after the tents are gone. Safety is whether the people who lived in those tents are housed, alive, warm, fed, supported, and free from violence.
A park can look clean after a sweep while the people removed from it are pushed into ravines, underpasses, industrial areas, transit stations, stairwells, or more isolated locations where they lose access to the services and people who were keeping them alive. A sweep can make a park empty, but it cannot create a shelter bed, make an inaccessible shelter usable, or convert a temporary placement into housing.
The question after every encampment clearing is where people went. If the answer is somewhere less visible, nothing was solved. The crisis was only moved out of frame.
The Charter problem remains
Ontario’s campaign presents encampment removal as common sense. The courts have shown it is not simple.
In the Waterloo Region encampment case, an Ontario Superior Court judge found that removing encampment residents when there were not adequate shelter spaces violated section 7 Charter rights to life, liberty, and security of the person. The City of Toronto report on that decision summarized its implications for Toronto.
The Waterloo decision did not treat shelter as a raw bed count. The court recognized that available spaces must be truly accessible, including for people whose disabilities, family status, substance-use realities, gendered safety needs, or past experiences make some shelters unusable.
The legal terrain is contested. In Hamilton, the city announced that the Ontario Superior Court had upheld its approach to encampment bylaw enforcement in Heegsma et al. v. City of Hamilton. The court dismissed the challenge to the city’s enforcement of parks bylaws between August 2021 and August 2023, though the decision on appeal remains under reserve at the Court of Appeal for Ontario.
Mixed outcomes do not rescue Ontario’s slogan. They make it more cynical. Courts are asking difficult questions about life, liberty, security, accessibility, equality, public space, shelter capacity, and survival. The province is answering with a poster.
The legal reality asks whether there are enough shelter spaces, whether they are safe, whether couples can stay together, whether people can keep pets, whether people with disabilities can use them, and whether residents are being moved into housing or merely pushed from one outdoor location to another.
Waterloo sharpened the issue
The Waterloo fight did not end in 2023. In May 2026, Justice Gibson’s ruling described chronically homeless residents at the 100 Victoria Street encampment who lacked accessible indoor shelter and faced eviction under regional bylaws.
The decision recorded that by October 2024, Waterloo Region counted 2,371 people experiencing homelessness — up from 1,085 in 2021 — with 78 percent classified as chronically homeless. The Region’s shelter capacity covered a fraction of that total; Gibson J. found it insufficient to house those the bylaw would displace. In a province-wide projection cited in the ruling, Ontario’s homeless population is on track to more than double by 2035.
That evidence cuts through Ontario’s ad language. The problem is not that people have chosen parks over housing. The problem is that the available system cannot shelter the people Ontario wants removed from public view.
Gibson J. also made a finding that no court had made before: homelessness is an analogous ground under section 15 of the Charter. People experiencing homelessness are entitled to equality rights protections. Ontario’s response to this ruling was, in the premier’s words, “the most ridiculous ruling” he had seen.
Shelter is not housing
Governments often defend encampment removals by pointing to shelter beds. That move only works if shelter is treated as a universal solution. It is not.
A shelter space may be unavailable in practice even when it exists on paper. It may be unsafe because of violence, theft, surveillance, curfews, trauma, gendered risks, lack of privacy, accessibility barriers, sobriety rules, pet restrictions, distance from services, separation from a partner, or previous institutional harm.
An available bed is not automatically an adequate alternative. A shelter space someone cannot safely or realistically use is not housing. It is a bureaucratic excuse for displacement.
Ontario already applies legality unevenly to shelter. In West Nipissing, John Ridge built a 250-square-foot shed home on land he owned after a fire destroyed the previous house. The structure gave him heat, water, electricity, and a place to live, but municipal rules treated the shelter as a problem because it did not fit the approved dwelling framework.
The threatened tiny home eviction exposed the same logic from another angle. The state can move quickly against improvised shelter that does not conform, while telling people in encampments that their survival structures must disappear because they are unauthorized.
Ontario lowers the standard of solution until almost anything counts. A mat on a floor becomes shelter. A bed across town becomes access. A temporary placement becomes housing. A person’s refusal becomes non-compliance. Then non-compliance becomes the justification for force.
The housing crisis is the cause
Encampments do not cause the housing crisis. They reveal it.
AMO’s Bill 6 submission recorded that more than 80,000 Ontarians were known to be homeless in 2024, a number that had grown by more than 25 percent since 2022. The organization warned that homelessness is now visible across urban, rural, and northern communities.
Those numbers destroy the idea that encampments are mainly a disorder problem caused by individuals taking over parks. Ontario is facing a mass housing failure. The visible tent is only the final stage of a longer process: rent inflation, low wages, inadequate social assistance, weak tenant protections, shortage of deeply affordable housing, insufficient supportive housing, gaps in care, and a shelter system that cannot absorb the crisis.
Even AMO, which represents municipalities under intense pressure from residents, businesses, courts, and local enforcement demands, did not describe enforcement as a solution to homelessness. It called for investments in transitional, supportive, and community housing, mental-health and addictions supports, income security, and homelessness prevention.
The province’s ad suggests the problem is the presence of tents in parks. Municipal governments themselves are saying the problem is the absence of housing and support at the scale required.
Public drug use is the wedge
The drug-use component of the policy is politically strategic. It fuses encampments, overdose, public disorder, crime, addiction, and fear.
There are real problems in and around encampments. People overdose. Fires happen. Violence happens. Exploitation happens. Neighbours may feel unsafe. Families may avoid certain areas. None of that should be dismissed.
Criminalization does not solve those problems. A housed person has a private sphere where crisis can remain hidden. An unhoused person’s crisis happens in public, and then the state punishes them for the visibility of it.
The same policy pattern has already pushed overdose risk into public institutions. Ontario’s library overdose crisis followed a provincial shift away from harm-reduction infrastructure and toward enforcement, leaving libraries, drop-ins, streets, and other public spaces to absorb the consequences.
People with housing have private space. People without housing are exposed to public enforcement because every part of their survival is public.
The policy divide is clear. One model says public drug use is disorder, so remove it. The other says people are dying in a toxic drug crisis, so keep them alive, connect them to care, provide housing, reduce isolation, and stop using police as the front door to health care.
Ontario chose the first model while dressing it in the language of protection.
Indigenous displacement is central
The campaign’s language of public space is not neutral. In a settler-colonial society, public space has always been organized through exclusion: who belongs, who loiters, who trespasses, who is surveilled, who is removed, and who gets to call the police when someone else’s existence becomes inconvenient.
This matters especially for Indigenous people. Indigenous homelessness cannot be reduced to individual poverty. It is connected to land theft, reserve underfunding, child removal, prisons, residential schools, urban displacement, racism in housing markets, and ongoing colonial governance.
Yellowhead Institute argued that Bill 6 continues colonial traditions of displacement and criminalization of Indigenous people in cities. It warned that the law targets people who use drugs who have nowhere to go but outside, while Indigenous people face heightened risks from homelessness, overdose, and police violence.
There is a brutal colonial irony in the state removing Indigenous people from public land in the name of protecting public space.
The poster cannot show that contradiction. It has to erase it. It presents enforcement as neutral, clean, and civic. It cannot admit that the state has long treated Indigenous presence as a problem to be managed, moved, confined, regulated, assimilated, or disappeared.
The province downloads the crisis
Municipalities are on the front line of encampments, but they do not control the deepest causes. They do not control provincial income supports, the full health-care system, the scale of supportive housing investment, landlord-tenant law, the broader housing market, or the historic policy decisions that made homelessness explode.
The Federal Housing Advocate notes that municipalities need resources and powers to respond to encampments while upholding human rights. AMO made the fiscal point directly: municipalities are carrying housing and homelessness costs from the property tax base while calling for much larger provincial and federal investment.
The governance trick is visible. The province gives municipalities tools, but the tools are largely coercive. Cities get the tents, complaints, lawsuits, policing costs, bylaw conflicts, shelter pressures, and local outrage. Encampment residents get displaced. The province gets the branding.
Ontario has downloaded the crisis, centralized the slogan, and called enforcement a solution.
Bill 10 spreads the logic
The broader “Protect Ontario” project does not stop at encampments. Ontario’s Bill 10, the Protect Ontario Through Safer Streets and Stronger Communities Act, 2025, enacted the Measures Respecting Premises with Illegal Drug Activity Act.
The Act prohibits landlords from knowingly permitting premises to be used in relation to prescribed drug-production or trafficking offences, and creates enforcement provisions and cost-recovery mechanisms. The government frames it as improving tools available to police to fight crime and curb illicit drug activity.
With ONPHA raising concerns that Bill 10 and proposed regulations could place new responsibilities on housing providers, the enforcement logic spreads through the housing system itself: encampments are framed as unsafe, public drug use becomes a policing target, housing providers get pulled into drug-enforcement responsibilities, and tenants with addiction histories or criminal records become harder to house — leaving more people outside, whose presence outside is then used to justify more enforcement.
The state claims to be solving disorder while creating the conditions that produce it.
Criminalization hides the bill
Enforcement is sold as common sense — housing sounds expensive, sweeps sound decisive, police action sounds immediate, fines sound like accountability, and jail sounds like consequence.
Criminalization is not cheap — it only scatters the cost across police budgets, courts, jails, emergency rooms, ambulance calls, shelter churn, outreach duplication, and the replacement of lost ID, medication, documents, phones, tents, and survival supplies.
Housing looks expensive because the cost is visible upfront. Criminalization looks cheaper because the costs are spread across police budgets, hospitals, shelters, courts, jails, municipalities, charities, and human lives.
Ontario’s approach funds the machinery that moves people around instead of the infrastructure that would let people stay housed.
The poster teaches cruelty
The most dangerous thing about the poster is not simply that it is misleading. It teaches people how to feel.
It tells housed residents that their discomfort is public safety, that the person with the radio is a protector, that the tent is a threat, and that the disappearance of the tent is the restoration of community.
The poster’s real audience is not the person in the encampment. It is the person walking past it.
That person is being recruited into enforcement common sense. They are being told that calling for removal is not punitive but responsible, that the absence of visible poverty is the presence of safety, and that if the park looks normal again, the crisis has been addressed.
Toronto’s World Cup security shows the same public-order logic in event form. Unhoused people around Union Station are treated as a problem of image, movement, and visitor experience before the tournament even begins.
The province does not have to say it is criminalizing poverty. It only has to say it is protecting parks. The person being harmed is removed from the image before the policy removes them from the park.
Actual safety looks different
The organizations that submitted on Bill 6 all named housing as the response, not enforcement. CMHA Ontario called for investment in supportive housing, mental-health services, and harm-reduction infrastructure. The Federal Housing Advocate asked governments to immediately end forced evictions and instead fund housing that is genuinely accessible — gender-responsive, disability-accessible, pet-inclusive, and couple-friendly. AMO, which represents the municipalities absorbing the crisis on the ground, did not describe enforcement as a solution; it called for investments in transitional, supportive, and community housing, income security, and prevention.
Ontario’s campaign inverts that order: it begins with the park user who wants the tent gone, not the person who needs housing.
The park is not the question
Public parks should be accessible to everyone — to families, seniors, workers, and people out for a walk. The question is whether making them accessible to those residents requires making them inaccessible to the residents who have no other place to be.
The conflict Ontario’s poster cannot acknowledge is between visual order and actual safety. A swept park does not mean housed people. A clearance that moves people into ravines, industrial areas, or transit stations does not resolve a crisis — it relocates it. People displaced from an encampment do not stop existing. They stop being visible.
AMO’s “Municipalities Under Pressure” report put a specific price on the housing alternative: a $2 billion investment to stabilize and transition 8,400 people out of encampments. Ontario’s answer to the same crisis — the one Justice Gibson called “a fact on the ground” that is “not going away in the proximate future” — was a $10,000 fine and six months in jail for using drugs outside.
Spark Solidarity 