Bill 106 – The Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Act – was introduced as a Private Members Bill by Ottawa Centre MPP Yasir Naqvi.
It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Essentially this is what Bill 106 proposes:
“Bill 106 (SCAN) would enable municipalities to appoint a Director of Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods that will accept anonymous allegations of unsafe or illegal activities occurring on or near specific properties. The SCAN Director has sweeping powers to conduct surveillance of accused tenants and homeowners. The Director can then apply to Superior Court to evict the tenant or close the property for up to 90 days through a ‘Community Safety Order’.” (Source: Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario)
You can read the full bill here.
This is what’s wrong with Bill 106:
1. It reeks of American-style approaches to crime and terror. For years now, Americans have been seeing their civil rights eroded under the guise of keeping them safer from evil-doers. (First we’ll pretend you’re in mortal danger, then we’ll pretend to protect you by systematically stripping away your rights.) That’s too high a price for the illusion of security.
2. It opens the doors of all our homes another inch for Big Brother. If we say they can peek into our neighbours’ windows, we’re also saying they can peek into ours. And that old saying about “I’m not doing anything wrong, so I’ve got nothing to hide” might feel a little less innocent when somebody hiding behind a cloak of anonymity points their creepy finger at you.
3. There are already provisions in the existing Residential Tenancies Act and in the Criminal Code to address these same problems.
4. The crime rate has been falling for two decades. We don’t need increased surveillance.
5. This tool will be used disproportionately against members of already marginalized groups, such as racial minorities and poor people. It’s a weapon wielded according to perceptions of danger, which are notoriously inaccurate. Even if it’s not deliberately used in a racist way, the effect will be the same.
6. It will be used deliberately as a weapon by people against people they don’t like: eg, ex-spouses, parents battling for custody, nosy neighbours, etc. (Welfare fraud hotlines provide good examples: see Walking on Eggshells)
7. It promotes secret accusations and paranoia while denying the right of the accused to an open process through which he or she can respond to accusations.
What we can do to help defeat Bill 106:
Bill 106 goes for its 2nd reading today. If you want to help defeat it, please email your local Ontario MPP and tell them you’re opposed to Bill 106. You can find the contact information of MPPs here. Send a copy of your letter to the Honourable Jim Watson, Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing (jwatson.mpp@liberal.ola.org) and MPP Yasir Naqvi (ynaqvi.mpp.co@liberal.ola.org), the MPP who introduced Bill 106.
Spread the word.
TAGS:
Just sent off my letter… Thanks for the post. Some people really have shit for brains. Like, for example, our charming MPP.
I’m so happy somebody did something! Thanks Stella.
Last time I was in Canada there were police! Aren’t the police supposed to investigate illegal activity? These days suddenly giving any government official “sweeping powers to conduct surveillance” is very scary indeed. Even though I am not Canadian, I really hope this is defeated.
Weren’t people in Hintonburg (the Hintonburg Community Association) asking for legislation similar to this ten years ago? I’m pretty sure I remember watching “community action committee members” stapling flyers to telephone posts…
I’m not sure of the date (other than during Dalton’s reign), but Hansard has Richard Patten, the guy who represented Ottawa-Centre before Yasir Naqvi, saying this:
“In recent months the Hintonburg Community Association leaders have organized walkabouts in order to pressure governments to clean up crack houses and to keep prostitutes away from schoolyards and out of residential areas.”
Bills brought in by “private members” are mostly about really-local politics, and since I doubt Dalton is goofy in the head enough to allow this to pass I’d be willing to put money on this Bill being defeated.
But wasn’t there a focus piece on CBC TV news a few months ago looking into how difficult it can be for owners in Ottawa to reclaim their rental units after they’ve been turned into a drug house? I think it was CBC…
Re, that’s exactly how I see it. Creating new appointed bodies with greater powers than the police to monitor people in their own homes, based on anonymous allegations from their neighbours? Yikes.
Gabriel, I’m not sure of what happened in Hintonburg 10 years ago, but I do know that there’s a rally AGAINST this bill at the Hintonburg Community Centre tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m.
If there are problems with crack houses and prostitutes in residential areas, why can’t the police deal with it? Why create another layer of surveillance with more power and less accountability than the police?
Fight now before it’s too late.
In the UK we have:
Street-side fingerprint scanners; DNA databases; number plate recognition; council deputies; ISP monitoring; orders to shoot civilians on sight; railway station scanners; and CCTV everywhere. To name a few.
It is the surveillance society of the 21st century. Look to us for what NOT to do.
From what I remember of the focus piece SOME of it comes down to trying to find the person who actually rents the apartment…
I do know the Ottawa Police Service Street Crime Unit generally tries to get the landlords involved, and work with the owners of the units after they bust a house… but a fair number of the owners are really just slumlords and aren’t interested in the hassle of cleaning their places up. For the decent landlords it can be very difficult to evict someone, even if the renter has allowed their apartment or home to be taken over.
While I was living in Hintonburg I was “lucky” enough to get a few community tours with police officers and they knew where all of the crack houses were. They’d point to a house and say “I was in there last week, and I’ll be in there next week”… and then again, and again. I also had the Ottawa tactical people bust into my rooming house on Spadina a few times looking for “people of interest”.
Hintonburg has improved quite a bit since I lived there, my cousin has a successful store there now. But back in 1996 prostitutes and their johns were having sex in the park during the afternoon, kids were always finding handfuls of needles in the sandbox, I’d find used condoms tossed on the sidewalk and the Mac’s Milk was getting knocked over a couple times a month.
What they did to clean it up, from memory, was form a community action team which took down license-plate numbers of johns, they patrolled the parks at night in shifts, they cleaned the playgrounds everyday, they monitored their neighbours for suspicious behaviours and they had a direct tip line to the police. They also sent the tactical squad into my rooming house, as I said, a few times looking for “persons of interest” where none where. We were just the poorest people on the street.
Those Hintonburg people who are forming a new action committee against this Bill at tomorrow’s meeting might want to take a look at their own history, because it seems to me they got their area nice and sparkly by using tactics very similar to those in this Bill.
All that said, I assume this Bill will fail but I have no idea if it will or not. It doesn’t mean everything in it is bad or not warranted.
Done! Will spread the word via my friends in FB.
I will do it too – I promise!
Oh my god Andrew! I had no idea. The thing about ramping up surveillance is that it never gets ramped back down – it just keeps escalating.
Gabriel, I was living in Hintonburg in the mid-90s (Irving Avenue) and I don’t recall it being particularly run down or infested with drugs or prostitution. I do know that after there was a concerted effort to sweep the streets in the Byward Market, quite a few prostitutes relocated to Hintonburg. The lesson there is that there’s a lot of displacement going on, in which ‘problems’ are shuffled from one community to another, because there’s no serious effort being made to address the root causes of said ‘problems.’
Oh! And Woodsy and Greencolander – thank you.
[…] other things, they called for increased policing and surveillance, and they supported the proposed SCAN legislation, which fortunately died last week on the third […]