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The BC government has passed the Assistance to Shelter Act, which gives the cops the power to kidnap people off the street — by force, if necessary — and put them in shelters against their will during “extreme weather conditions.” The law is targeted at homeless people, although there’s nothing in the text of the act that says so.

Naturally it’s just a coincidence that the law has been passed three months before the Winter Olympics come to British Columbia. The law has nothing at all to do with the consistent pattern of Olympic host cities clearing their streets of undesirables in the lead-up to the Games:

South Korea’s military dictatorship cleared out 720,000 people for the 1988 Seoul Games. Private security forces roamed the streets at night, using rape, beatings and arson to break community resistance.

But it doesn’t take a one-party state to bring out the jackboots when the Olympics come to town. Atlanta gained notoriety among Olympic watchers when it declared the central business district a “sanitized corridor” and had police pre-print arrest citations, with the words “African-American,” “Male,” and “Homeless” already filled in. In the lead-up to the games the city arrested about 9,000 people, a “crime” that has significant implications because people with criminal records are not eligible for public housing. Some of the homeless were given one-way bus tickets out of town.

(Hmm. One-way bus tickets out of town? Now where have I heard that before?)

The people who rule us claim they have the best interests of the homeless at heart. After all, they say, last winter a homeless woman in Vancouver’s West End accidentally killed herself while trying to stay warm. You have to wonder if these people have ever actually talked to a homeless person before. Most of the ones I’ve talked to avoid shelters because they feel unsafe there. For some strange reason, they don’t like sleeping in overcrowded rooms where a majority of the other people in the room have addiction or mental health problems and might hurt them or steal what few possessions they have. (Incidentally, the new law makes no provisions for ensuring that the people kidnapped by the cops will be allowed to take those possessions with them when they’re forced into shelters against their will.) I know it’s hard for some people to believe that homeless people might have good reasons for the choices they make, but there it is.

Ah, but by being concerned about their own safety, homeless people are putting their own safety at risk, and we can’t allow that! Back in September, a columnist for the Globe and Mail argued that the state has a duty to protect these people from themselves, even if it means violating their rights. Indeed, the secondary headline on that article reads, “Sometimes ensuring citizens are safe means leaving aside their constitutional freedoms.” This is the reasoning behind laws like the Assistance to Shelter Act. But didn’t we just spend the past eight years proving how terribly misguided and dangerous the false dichotomy between safety and security really is? It’s incredible how easy it is these days for Serious People to justify Doing Whatever’s Necessary to Keep People Safe — without the least concern for the rights they violate in the process.

Seriously, do we really need to have the cops pull people off the street and incarcerate them for the crime of being homeless in the middle of winter? Why don’t we just provide decent permanent housing instead?

There’s nothing unattainable about that solution, by the way. BC deals with homelessness through a combination of emergency rooms, cops and judges, and temporary emergency shelters — an unplanned patchwork of half-assed tactics that leaves many homeless people without the support they need (the province’s homeless population has shot up in the past few years). Not only is this approach both ineffective and immoral, it’s also more expensive than the alternative. Last year, researchers at Simon Fraser University found that it would actually be cheaper to provide our homeless population with both housing and support services, in the form of treatment for addiction and mental illness, than it is to continue doing what we’re doing now.

So why does BC’s government want to spend even more money on an approach (I hesitate to call it a “strategy”) that doesn’t work, when an approach that does work would actually be cheaper? And why do they want to compound their sins by giving the cops a mandate to force our most vulnerable citizens into unsafe spaces against their will?

It would be cheaper to provide actual housing and support for BC’s homeless than it is to provide existing non-housing services to the same people:

A new study says providing shelter for the homeless with severe addictions and mental illness throughout British Columbia could save taxpayers millions of dollars.

“Addiction is the most prevalent mental health problem in both the street homeless and at-risk populations, followed by concurrent disorders and, less frequently, mental illness alone,” the Simon Fraser University report says.

The paper — titled Housing and Support for Adults with Severe Addictions and/or Mental Illnesses in British Columbia [warning: 15-page PDF] — says providing non-housing services for such people currently costs the public system more than $55,000 per year per person. It says providing adequate housing and supports could reduce this cost to $37,000 per year….

“The costs of providing supported housing and other health services to this population … is lower than the cost incurred through the use of emergency departments, the corrections system and emergency shelters when they are homeless,” the report says.

(Hat tip: David Eby. If you are at all interested in poverty, homelessness, or the social impact of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver — and if you live here, you ought to be — I strongly recommend reading Eby’s blog. He works with the Pivot Legal Society, a non-profit that provides legal assistance to people in the Downtown Eastside.)

So about an hour ago, I was waiting for a bus on Robson Street in downtown Vancouver, on my way home from dinner with some friends. A cop car drove by, then turned around in the nearest alley and pulled up to the curb maybe ten feet down from the bus stop. There was a homeless guy sitting outside the 7-11 there, quietly asking for change; the cop in the passenger seat rolled down his window and called the homeless guy over.

Being a civil libertarian, I watched the conversation with interest. (I didn’t get too close, though — those guys are dangerous.)

After exchanging a few words, the cops handed the guy a piece of paper and told him to get lost. He grabbed his backpack and stormed off angrily down Granville Street. I caught up to him afterwards and asked him if they had given him a ticket, and indeed they had. BC has a law which, among other things, prohibits panhandlers from asking for change within 5 metres of a bank machine. There was an ATM inside the 7-11, and even though the homeless guy was more than 5 metres away from it, he was close enough for Vancouver’s finest.

The penalty? A $115 fine. Which, if you’re sitting on the street asking for money, is obviously way more than you can afford.

Naturally the cops were grinning at each other as they drove off.