The city's response to a tent encampment outside City Hall? Fence off the park
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Another day, another landmark of urban decline. Early this morning CBC News brings word that
the public park space immediately in front of Regina’s city hall will remain fenced off indefinitely.
The ghost of this bourgeois public amenity remains, perhaps as a monument to the formerly existing civilization of Western Canada, but it can’t be used for meals and summer relaxation in the way it was intended — not even, at this point, by the drug addicts who colonized it in June as a place to live rent-free. If junkies can’t use the space, it seems, nobody can.
As a reminder of what everyone seems to have forgotten, urban parks for the use of families of all social classes were once considered a great progressive achievement of North American cities. Very suddenly they have become a theatre of class war and anarchist street action.
The park at Regina’s city hall grew to enormous size, with 80-plus tents, very quickly in the face of inaction by a city council with a strong leftist increment. The option of simply forbidding initial occupation of public land in Canadian cities seems to have gone by the wayside in general: no elected politician or police official can know what social parameters will be invoked by judges to thwart or enjoin on-the-spot bylaw enforcement of the kind on which public parks are inherently predicated.
The mayor, naturally unhappy with the drama on her doorstep, called and then cancelled a special meeting of city council to address the issue. She and her colleagues are still bickering over exactly what happened, but it does look like a failed attempt to
catch some of the bleeding-heart councillors off guard during the summer.
Alas, the residents of the camp, true to universal form, began having tent fires — leading the city’s fire chief to invoke emergency powers under the Fire Safety Act to order a police clear-out of the colony.
Mass occupations of public property certainly shouldn’t be allowed to fester to the point at which a “wall of police” has to fight through a pack of aging hippies and self-designated social workers to re-establish public property as property. The essence of property is that it can be regulated, can be reserved for some particular uses, can even have a giant ugly fence constructed around it.
Whatever your belief about the ultimate causes of the homelessness crisis, it shouldn’t be treated by judges or anyone else as some universal moral acid that dissolves public property, but here we are.
The usual suspects have come forward to say that it is unacceptable to take back parks for truly common use until governments fix all of the “underlying” social problems. And of course it’s not nice for the outdoorsy poor, who
almost unanimously refused shelter support before fires decided the fate of the City Hall tent camp, to have to recommence the classic vagrancy cycle of ceaseless dazed wandering. Perhaps ceaseless dazed wandering looked nicer in the brochure.
But look where these increasingly scripted arms races that build up around mass vagrant tent camps are leading us. Zombie nomads
teetering on the edge of death descend on some patch of green; socially conscious caterers cluster around them to make sure everyone’s getting sandwiches and wet wipes and medications and clean needles; the property-owning and -renting neighbours hunker down, hoping the theft, affrays and filth won’t get too horrible; and when things get bad enough there’s a purgative riot with a handful of unreassuring arrests.
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