On November 8th, just two days before the Toronto municipal election, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) will attempt to open a squat in Toronto’s downtown east end. To be successful against what is likely to be a large police mobilization, OCAP will need hundreds of people to join them at All Saints Church at noon, where they’ll sit down for a community meal before marching to the undisclosed site. If they’re successful in getting into the building, OCAP will demand that it be turned over to the squatters permanently and that the City restore heat, electricity and water to the building. Then they will set about opening the building to homeless people in the neighbourhood and begin fixing it up and making it liveable before winter arrives.

The OCAP squat is the latest of several political squats taken by anti-poverty activists over the past year in cities across Canada, including Toronto, Ottawa, Peterborough, Montreal and Vancouver. What separates these squats from the many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of homeless people squatting in abandoned buildings across Canada every night is their politicized nature. These squats are defiantly announced to the public, the media and city officials and their demands often go well beyond the right to squat. OCAP, for example, is demanding social housing, the protection of existing low income housing stock, a freeze on new condominium construction until adequate affordable housing is created, and the inspection of existing rental housing to ensure adequate repairs and maintenance are done.

These demands emerge out of the realities facing homeless and poor people. The 1990s have witnessed a massive increase in the gap between Canada’s poorest and wealthiest people as the federal and provincial governments rip apart the country’s social safety net in favour of increased privatization and a flexible, underpaid, overworked workforce with little job security. Since 1995, when the federal government stopped funding social housing altogether, homelessness has increased dramatically. Further provincial downloading, cuts to social assistance, freezes to the minimum wage, and legislation favoring landlords have also contributed to the growing impoverishment of the working class. In Ontario alone, social assistance was cut by 21. per cent in 1995 and has remained frozen since then, the minimum wage hasn’t increased in eight years, rents have skyrocketed, vacancy rates have plummeted, and more than 60,000 tenants are evicted every year.

It is in this political context that squatting has re-emerged. Its success has been mixed at best.

In March 2002, OCAP’s attempt to squat at the abandoned Mission Press Building in Toronto during the Progressive Conservative convention ended in dozens of arrests after hundreds of police in riot gear fired tear gas into the building and forced activists outside. They were more successful later that summer when they took over an abandoned building at 1510 King St. W. during Pope John Paul II’s visit to Toronto in July 2002. With so many tourists in Toronto to see the Pope, the City was forced to negotiate with OCAP and its allies, who had won significant support in the neighbourhood and were fixing up the building. But eventually, this squat was shut down too, under the cover of various fire violations and allegations of drugs and weapons on the property. The City of Toronto then spent more money to hire security guards to stand outside the abandoned building than the projected cost of renovating the building and making it habitable as longterm public housing. This past September, the building was sold to a private developer, ending any attempts to convert it into affordable housing.

Woodwards Squat

In September of 2002, anti-poverty activists and homeless people in Vancouver entered the long-vacant Woodwards Building in the Downtown Eastside and opened a much-publicized squat within the building. The Woodwards Building had been a point of contention within this neighbourhood for nearly a decade, with a broad local community call for this former department store to be converted to social housing. Two different premiers had made public announcements over a five year period of the pending purchase of the building by the province for conversion to affordable housing, but despite the eventual sale of the building by a private landowner to the province in 2001, no progress had been made on its conversion to a social housing. With the election of the rightwing provincial Liberal government, led by Gordon Campbell, the province began seeking to sell the building back to the private sector for development into condominiums and businesses, despite viable plans to convert the building into a housing co-operative or other form of social housing.

Within days of activists and homeless people entering Woodwards, a police raid and mass arrests drove the squatters from the building. Following the release of the detainees, mass meetings were held in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood to discuss further plans and strategies, and homeless people and activists returned to the Woodwards Building in mid-September and set up a highly visible tent encampment along the sidewalks surrounding the building. Community support for the Woodwards tent city was extremely high, largely as the result of mass public meetings in the neighbourhood to discuss housing issues and homelessness in the community and to openly discuss strategies and tactics. Despite further police raids, including a massive police action which saw the tents, sleeping bags and other possessions of Woodwards tent city squatters either thrown into city-owned garbage trucks or confiscated by police, the encampment continued, with broadening community support.

With a municipal election being held in late November of 2002, city politicians and bureaucrats began to take a moderately “hands off” position on the encampment, fearing the breadth of visible support from residents and workers in the surrounding neighbourhood and the impact this would have on an already polarized election campaign. With the election of a new centrist-left city council, led by the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) and Mayor Larry Campbell (an outspoken advocate of harm reduction who worked as chief of BC’s Coroner Service for many years), the hopes of many of the squatters and many community activists were raised considerably. Although the newly elected City Council did make moves to purchase the building from the province, police harassment of the squatter community continued. While homeless Woodwards squatters were provided with rent-geared-to-income housing in a nearby newly-opened “single room occupancy” hotel, plans for development of the Woodwards Building into non-profit public housing have been consistently stalled, with endless “consultations”.

New Squats

In the late spring and summer of 2003, new attempts at squats and tent city encampments were made throughout the country. Squatters in Peterborough faced police harassment and eventual eviction, and despite their continued efforts to present the local city council with viable plans for conversion of their Water Street squat to affordable housing, the building has been deemed by the city to be uninhabitable and designated for demolition in favour of parkland. Activists and homeless people in Montreal attempted to use a community park for a tent city encampment, but were turned back repeatedly by violent police harassment and intimidation.

In early July of this year, housing activists in Vancouver opened the Olympic Tent City, in response to the announcement by the International Olympic Committee of the acceptance of Vancouver’s bid for the 2010 Olympics. Housing activists were extremely concerned about the impacts of such a massive event on poor and homeless people in the city, especially in light of the history of Vancouver’s hosting of the international Expo event in 1986, which resulted in mass evictions of residents of low-rent single-room-occupancy hotels and the conversion of these buildings to tourist hotels, resulting in a massive homelessness crisis in the city.

Despite several attempts to move the new homeless tent city squatters out of the Olympic Tent City, this encampment has continued in some form after a few location moves, and now houses nearly one hundred otherwise-homeless people in an area west of Main Street on the outskirts Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, an area which is quite contentious due to development plans for new condominiums and the eventual development of an “athletes village” for the 2010 Olympics.

Squats and tent city encampments can play a key role in the self-emancipation and empowerment of low-income tenants as well as homeless people. Through structures and organization which homeless squatters themselves decide on (food committees, safety committees, clothing committees, etc.), squatters and tent city campers are able to exercise some measure of self-control over their communities. At the same time, visible and highly politicized squats and tent city encampments raise the issue of the desparate need for affordable housing across the country and raise the visibility of the issue of homelessness in a way that other forms of resistance (such as demonstrations) are unable to. The most successful squats across Canada in recent years have focussed much attention on garnering broad public support from local residents in the surrounding areas, and this support has often held off police attack for prolonged periods of time.

Despite the many challenges of maintaining such a squat or tent city encampment, including police brutality and retaliation, the refusal of most politicians and provincial or city bureacrats to negotiate in good faith with squatters, homeless people have proven time and again that they are able to maintain and administer their own housing in a democratic way. In Toronto, a Tent City which was evicted in late October of 2002 by the property owners (Home Depot) had been in place for nearly five years, with a growing community that was self-organized and self-sustaining. Residents of the Toronto Tent City provided each other with necessary supports, including food and assistance with building shacks and homes, as well as harm reduction services such as needle exchange and condom distribution. Although Toronto’s Tent City eventually received significant community support, including the support of many city agencies and advocacy groups, such as the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee (TDRC), the squatters showed that they had the ability to run and sustain their own community.