The Supreme Court just rewrote homelessness law

The decision came down on a Friday in May. By Monday it had vanished from the front pages. That's exactly how the most consequential rulings work in this country.

What changed

In R. v. City of Kingston, a 5-4 majority held that municipal by-laws prohibiting overnight camping in public parks do not constitute cruel and unusual treatment under Section 12 of the Charter — provided the city can demonstrate adequate shelter capacity.

The word "adequate" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Justice Karakatsanis, dissenting

The dissent is where the country's conscience lives, when it lives anywhere.

"To require a homeless person to prove the absence of a shelter bed they can safely occupy — at the moment of their arrest, on penalty of further criminalization — is to require the impossible of those with the least."

That is the entire argument, compressed into a single sentence.

The receipts

Kingston has 412 shelter beds. Its 2024 point-in-time count identified 1,840 unhoused residents.

The math is not subtle.

Did you know that twelve other Canadian cities have by-laws virtually identical to Kingston's — and that they were all watching this case?

They now have a green light.