Community Legal Clinic of York Region executive director Jeff Schlemmer is working on the front lines of the legal battle on homelessness and encampments.
Working with colleagues, Schlemmer has been taking on fights across the province, from Barrie to Timmins, where there's controversy over homeless camp evictions.
Schlemmer said it's a vitally important battle, particularly given recent homelessness trends.
“I’ve been doing poverty law for 34 years and I think what’s happening with the huge increase in the number of homeless Ontarians is the biggest threat to my client community of low-income Ontarians that will happen in my legal career,” Schlemmer said.
The Community Aid Clinic of York Region is joining others across the province in advocating for those in encampments — and calling on the province to step up with funding new solutions.
The clinics released an analysis Nov. 17 estimating that the province could save $300 million per year housing homeless in tiny cabins versus group shelter beds.
The clinics argue this is a way municipalities can better meet legal obligations to only evict encampments if they can provide people fully accessible housing.
Significantly more housing from the province is needed, Schlemmer said, other than a few dozen units of social housing every once in a while.
“Those are all just kind of drops in the pan, of course, in relation to the size of the problem and the fact that it (homelessness) continues to grow at 200 per cent per year with no end in sight,” he said.
“Homelessness is with us to stay in large numbers," Schlemmer added. "Where are they going to live? Emergency shelters, the de facto plan, the frustration of the government is some of them don’t want to live in emergency shelters. That’s why they’re in encampments.”
The legal aid clinic argues that many encampment residents would find tiny cabins more appealing than shelter spaces, and they can be built in a matter of months versus years for apartments.
The argument comes with encampments on the rise. In York Region, staff said social staff visits are up more than 46 per cent over last year.
In other communities, rising encampments have led to tension. Schlemmer spoke out as Barrie began pressuring to evict encampment residents in that community, as well as in Timmins.
Schlemmer said an important aspect of their work is government lobbying.
“We recognize legal issues for people often involve doing a lot more than representing them at a hearing. It involves a lot of lobbying the government to change bad policies, public education,” he said. “Homelessness is my particular issue right now. I think it’s the biggest threat to our client community.”
These efforts have been successful, Schlemmer said. Cases from other legal aid clinics in Waterloo and Kingston have created a precedent in recent years where municipalities are not able to evict encampments dwellers without providing appropriate housing for the homeless.
“We’ve been remarkably successful, as I say, although many Ontario municipalities, all municipalities, are under intense pressure to remove people from parks and public areas, none of them are doing it. That is because our Waterloo clinic and Kingston clinic winning their cases and us disseminating those cases to all municipalities in Ontario and saying, 'This is the law. Don’t break it, or we might sue you.’”
Schlemmer said York Region has not been much of an issue on this front, as it is addressing encampments humanely and with compassion so that the clinic sees no legal issues here.
Beyond that, Schlemmer said the Community Legal Clinic of York Region is the largest in the province due to the area’s growing population, with 27 employees versus seven for each clinic on average.
“We’re able to help local clinics where problems like that come up, and I’m thrilled to have a job where I can do that because it’s so outrageous that we’re letting this happen,” Schlemmer said.
Ontario’s Big City Mayors, including Barrie's Mayor Alex Nuttall, have called on the province to take a new approach and provide funding to address homelessness and mental health across the province.
But another group of mayors is calling on Premier Doug Ford to evoke the notwithstanding clause in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms so they can evict encampments without the legal requirement to provide housing.
Ford defended the possibility of these evictions last week, The Trillium reported.
"We are going to make sure we find proper shelter for these people," the premier said at a news conference. "We're funding homeless like this government, this province has never seen before."
But courts are focused too much on the rights of encampment dwellers versus property owners, Ford added.
Still, Schlemmer said he believes there is some appetite in the provincial government for building more tiny homes — it is just a matter of convincing the premier and having the province do a real, substantive analysis on this issue.
“I think we (Canadians) believe every Canadian citizen should at least have some kind of roof over their head,” he said.
