The Canadian flag flying near a tent encampment in Marilyn Bell Park, along Toronto’s waterfront, on Feb 20.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
A dozen Ontario mayors are asking Premier Doug Ford to use the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to give authorities and police more power to break up homeless encampments and force more people into mandatory drug and mental-health treatment.
The demand, made in a letter dated Thursday, was signed by Barrie Mayor Alex Nuttall and Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown, both of whom have championed the idea of mandatory treatment in recent weeks, as well as Mayor Paul Lefebvre of Sudbury and Mayor Drew Dilkens of Windsor. But absent are signatures from the mayors of the province’s largest cities: Toronto, Ottawa and Mississauga.
The move is the latest sign of a push by some local leaders for the expansion of provisions allowing for involuntary treatment and for a concerted crack down on the encampments, which have spread in city parks across the province and around the country. But the letter also lays bare a divide among Ontario mayors, some of whom are reluctant to call for the use of the notwithstanding clause, which can insulate legislation that may violate parts of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms from court challenges.
The mayors say their letter is a response to Mr. Ford’s comments earlier this week, when he told reporters that the province’s mayors need to show “backbone” and send him a written request to use the notwithstanding clause to “make sure that we move the homeless along.”
The letter asks the province to “strengthen the existing system” of mandatory mental-health care and to expand service to treat those with “severe and debilitating addictions.” The mayors also want trespass laws to be rewritten to include jail time for “repetitive trespass,” and to empower police to arrest repeat trespassers.
New legislation should ban open drug use, similar to laws in place on alcohol, the letter says, and a new court diversion system should redirect offenders toward rehabilitation.
The mayors also want Mr. Ford’s government to act as an intervenor in court cases on encampments and to advocate for the position that courts “should not be dictating homelessness policy.” Rulings in Waterloo and Kingston have restricted cities from evicting encampments on constitutional grounds.
The Premier had made his “backbone” comments after the Ontario Big City Mayors (OBCM) group, made up of 29 leaders of cities of more than 100,000 people, stopped short of requesting the use of the notwithstanding clause after a lengthy closed-door meeting last week.
The OBCM did call for a review of laws around mandatory treatment and had also endorsed other requests in Thursday’s letter. Its decision followed the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s condemnation of the potential use of the notwithstanding clause and the mayors’ proposals for involuntary treatment and repetitive trespass laws.
The CCLA said in a release that forcing people into treatment facilities “is akin to arbitrary detention,” and warned that repetitive trespass provisions would “criminalize unhoused people and people living in poverty, who are already among the most vulnerable in society.”
Mayor Rob Burton of Oakville, a prosperous suburb west of Toronto, who signed Thursday’s letter, said some mayors at the OBCM meeting last week were uncomfortable with the use of the notwithstanding clause. He said he felt it was wrong to ask for sweeping legislative changes to deal with the crisis but not to endorse the use of the clause if it was necessary.
Mr. Ford is the first Ontario Premier to invoke the notwithstanding clause. Many legal experts say it was meant to be rarely used, but provincial governments have shown an increasing willingness to deploy it when they expect to clash with courts.
Mr. Ford has either invoked or threatened to use it three times since he took office in 2018, including when a judge initially blocked his move to slash Toronto’s city council in half with an election under way. He also deployed the clause after a ruling struck down his government’s rules aimed at third-party election ads. He backed off a move to use it to deny an education union’s right to strike after an outcry.
Grace Lee, a spokesperson for the Premier, said the government was looking at “every legal tool available to the province to clear encampments and restore safety to public spaces.”
Other mayors who had signed the letter as of Thursday afternoon included those of Brantford, Chatham-Kent, Oshawa, St. Catharines, Cambridge, Pickering and Clarington.