Advocates Accuse Ford Government of Targeting the Homeless with New Bill

Housing activists and community groups across Ontario are speaking out against the Doug Ford government’s controversial Bill 6, the Safer Municipalities Act, which they say would infringe on the rights of homeless people across the province.

According to a press release from the province, the law would “provide municipalities and police with enhanced tools they need to end encampments and clean up our parks and public spaces.”

Advocates from across Ontario have expressed concern about what these “enhanced tools” are and how the police would use these new powers from the province.

Under the proposed law, if a police officer had reasonable grounds to suspect that a person was consuming an illegal substance in a public place, they could order that person to stop using the substance and/or leave. They could then charge or even arrest the person if they did not comply. The law would specifically define a “public place” as being inclusive of any tents or temporary structures erected there.

Penalties for violations could include fines of up to $10,000 and imprisonment of up to six months.

Diana Chan McNally, a Maytree Fellow and housing advocate in Toronto, points out that a $10,000 fine is much steeper than the maximum penalty for drug possession in federal law.

On May 1, McNally released an open letter to the Ford government signed by dozens of organizations, asking them to rescind Bill 6. Among other criticisms, McNally called the new penalties incredibly harsh.

“We all know that people cannot actually pay these fines,” said McNally. “This is just a ridiculous ask that doesn’t actually solve homelessness, it just punishes people.”

Today, I released a letter, signed by 67 organizations working across Ontario, asking @fordnation to rescind Bill 6. We can’t adopt Trumpian policies to punish encampments; people need proven solutions — especially housing. Read our letter: https://t.co/QabdyOIctz pic.twitter.com/fXayTifTuA

— Diana Chan McNally (@Diana_C_McNally) May 1, 2025

This sentiment is shared by Harini Sivalingam, director of the equality program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Sivalingam. “You’re issuing and then accumulating fines that people who are unhoused will never be able to pay, and then you’re attaching (to) that a jail sentence.”

Sivalingam told PressProgress that even though there are existing mechanisms to charge people for using drugs and for trespassing in public places, the government is expanding law enforcement powers, increasing fines and specifically targeting unhoused people with Bill 6.

“What this bill does is it exacerbates the punishment for repetitive trespassing and for the use of illegal substances in public spaces,” Sivalingam said.

Sivalingam added that by targeting people who are living in public spaces with nowhere else to go, it increases law enforcement surveillance and infringement on their rights simply because they are homeless.

McNally said Bill 6 also marries the ideas that drugs and homelessness are the same issue.

“The majority of people who are homeless don’t actually use drugs, which we never seem to want to talk about,” McNally said.

This isn’t the first time that Ontario has introduced legislation that directly targets the homeless. Sivalingam said the new bill has similar provisions to the controversial Safe Streets Act passed by the Mike Harris government in 1999.

That law directly targeted “aggressive” panhandling and specifically squeegee kids. These were often young people, many of them homeless, who would wash windshields at stoplights for money.

Patrick Parnaby, a sociology professor at the University of Guelph, wrote a journal article in 2003 focusing on squeegee kids and the Safe Streets Act titled “Disaster Through Dirty Windshields.”

“Despite the socio-economic forces that might underlie such encounters (with squeegee kids and panhandlers), the problem was not identified as poverty per se, but the sense of discomfort and fear that the poor generated,” wrote Parnaby.

The article quoted from a Margaret Wente column published in the Globe and Mail three months before the Safe Streets Act was introduced: “Like the mosquitoes and the black flies, they hatch every spring with the onset of warm weather, and swarm the innocent motorists from the suburbs. Are squeegee people harmless pests, or harbingers of urban disorder and decay?”

Parnaby told PressProgress that while the Safe Streets Act successfully eradicated squeegee kids in urban areas through heavily policing the behaviour with fines, it failed to meaningfully address the issue of youth homelessness.

“It didn’t take long… before you really didn’t see them at all,” Parnaby said. “They either moved on to different forms of panhandling or unfortunately they get pushed into sort of the deeper bowels of the city where life is tough.”

Parnaby said he sees similarities between Harris’s Safe Streets Act and Ford’s Safer Municipalities Act, but added that language used in the new bill and in announcements by the Ford government differ from the Safe Streets Act in that their proposed solutions aren’t explicitly focused on notions of crime and disorder.

The bill’s announcement paired the idea that the government would be “protecting parks and public spaces” from encampments with a reminder that they also plan to put $75.5 million into “homelessness prevention” and “alternative accommodation” for people living in encampments.

But Parnaby said that while investing in housing is a good thing, he remained skeptical that the amount would be adequate.

“You can tell me that you’re dropping $75 million, but it’s probably good for me to know that we might need a billion,” Parnaby said.

Last year, Ontario’s Superior Court struck down nearly all of the Safe Streets Act, finding that key portions of it violated the Charter.

And in 2023, 17 people living in an encampment in Waterloo Region successfully challenged a bylaw that made it illegal to erect tents on property owned by the regional government.

“The court said that people’s Charter rights were violated when the municipality was trying to clear people from that encampment,” said Ashley Schuitema, executive director at Waterloo Region Community Legal Services, who represented the encampment residents. “Since that time, that encampment continues to exist.”

But Schuitema said it wasn’t realistic to expect homeless people across the province to be able to retain a lawyer to argue their Charter rights in the face of Bill 6.

A sign displayed on a tent in Toronto’s Alexandra Park

“You probably will see people being detained and arrested and fined and imprisoned for these things if police services and those municipalities are willing to do that,” Schuitema said. “Then each individual person is going to have to argue that it violates their Charter rights and that they have the right to be living and surviving at that particular encampment.”

Schuitema added that access to justice for people living in encampments is a massive problem, and that the issues around their rights being violated by law enforcement and municipalities are compounded by this new legislation.

She noted that in 2022, when the municipality asked police to remove encampment dwellers and enforce local by-laws, the police at the time said they wouldn’t do so unless ordered by a court.

McNally said that as a result of these policies, there’s an unlikely alignment between law enforcement and housing advocates when it comes to policing homelessness.

“In this bizarre world that we’ve built, I agree with them,” McNally said. “It’s costing everybody, and it actually hasn’t put a single person into housing.”

McNally said that in addition to this bill not doing anything to reduce homelessness, it also distracts from the provincial government’s failure to address the housing crisis in Ontario.

In 2022, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives promised to build 1.5 million housing units within a decade. So far, they have failed to reach their annual target every year except 2023. However, they only reached it that year because they added 9,835 new long-term care beds to their count.

“That is a failed government, a failed policy in action,” said McNally.

“Instead of being responsible for that, they’re shifting the blame and eyes from themselves directly onto people who are the most impacted by this housing crisis.”