On a blustery night long ago, I found myself camping next to a bus station in northern Ontario. I had arrived with my tent and bags to work as a tree planter and was expecting a ride to camp, but after calling the camp supervisor I learned that I would have to wait until the morning. With limited funds and no phone, I set up my tent next to a no camping sign. In the process, I broke a number of local laws, the first clearly marked by the sign, but many others hidden in the town’s bylaws.
It is this layer of law that most directly impacts the lives of people experiencing homelessness, and it is the focus of Dr. Alexandra Flynn and Dr. Joe Hermer’s new book, The Bylaw State: Encampment Evictions and the Struggle for Public Space (Fernwood Publishing, 2026). In the book, Flynn and Hermer explore the role of bylaws in policing homelessness, as well as the ways that people experiencing homelessness and their advocates are using the courts to fight against these laws. In peeling away the seeming neutrality of bylaws, Flynn and Hermer provide striking evidence of the harms these laws inflict on people experiencing homelessness and illuminate the struggle over who has access to public space happening across Canada.
Bylaws and the Bylaw State
Bylaws are rules or regulations made by local governments, most often at the municipal level (e.g., cities, towns), with the power given to them by provincial or territorial legislation. Canada’s constitution gives provinces and territories the power to allow municipalities to make laws in certain areas (e.g., zoning and land use, parking, waste collection), and these laws are called bylaws.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, many communities faced a growing number of people experiencing homelessness and homeless encampments. As rents also skyrocketed during this time, many municipalities struggled with a lack of adequate and affordable housing. Flynn and Hermer document how many communities turned to bylaws to address these issues, which effectively ban people’s ability to shelter in public spaces and near the critical services they depend on.
The bylaw state is defined as a governance regime where the everyday authority of municipalities is exercised through dense webs of local regulations. These bylaws govern at the smallest scale, dictating what kinds of shelters are acceptable in public spaces, when they are allowed, and what may surround them. Cumulatively, they function as one of the most effective tools for excluding and displacing people experiencing homelessness from the city.
Bylaws in Action
Bylaws shape our everyday lives in ways that are easy to see, as well as ways that may remain hidden or unknown until they are enforced. The no camping sign that I encountered in small-town Ontario can be found across the country marking out where the act of setting up a tent is illegal, yet bylaws are often still enforceable when no signs are in sight.
A powerful example can be found in Vancouver. As of 2020, roughly 23.8% of Vancouver’s park area allowed temporary shelters; by 2024, that had fallen to less than 0.1%. This dramatic decrease followed a series of bylaw amendments, including one barring temporary sheltering within seven metres of a beach, pond, dock, or other body of water and banning shelter under tree canopies entirely. Given Vancouver’s hilly, water-adjacent terrain, this deceptively simple change effectively closed off shelter space across most of the city, even as it left the encampment at CRAB Park operating under a special exemption while the Park Board works to eventually eliminate that designated area too.
The book also discusses Prince George’s Safe Streets Bylaw in depth, which came into effect in 2021 and made activities associated with homelessness all but illegal. With striking similarities to the vagrancy provisions that were removed from Canada’s Criminal Code beginning in the 1970s, Prince George’s bylaw prohibited sitting, lying, or otherwise obstructing a street or roadway, as well as drug use and the disposal of drug paraphernalia. A 2023 amendment eventually allowed people to erect temporary overnight shelters between 7:00 pm and 9:00 am, but only in a narrow city-designated area, less than 1% of which falls within 600 metres of hospitals or other health services. As the book points out, these bylaws do little to address the underlying issues of addiction and homelessness that contribute to public drug use and encampments. Left without a safe place to use or a home to return to, bylaws work to criminalize the simple survival of people experiencing homelessness. us would, in economic terms, push prices down.
Fight for Rights in Prince George and Vancouver
While bylaws are being used by communities to criminalize homelessness, the book also documents how Canadian courts have repeatedly ruled that bylaws restricting people’s ability to shelter violate their constitutional rights.
In 2009, the BC Court of Appeal ruled in Victoria (City) v. Adams that bylaws prohibiting people from erecting even rudimentary overnight shelter, in circumstances where the number of homeless people exceeds the number of available shelter beds, violate section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the Charter)—the right to life, liberty, and security of the person. Since that decision, a number of additional cases have built on this reasoning, often turning on what counts as an adequate alternative. While this issue continues to be debated in Canadian courts, adequate housing is well defined in international human rights law, and in practice, people often face significant barriers to accessing shelter spaces or may be excluded from them altogether because of pet bans, rules around belongings, or zero-tolerance drug policies that do little to work with people in crisis.
While not discussed in the book, a recent decision offers further reason for hope. In May 2026, Justice Michael Gibson of the Ontario Superior Court ruled in Regional Municipality of Waterloo v. Named Respondents and Persons Unknown that bylaws used to clear an encampment in Kitchener violated not only residents’ section 7 rights, but also their equality rights under section 15, finding that homelessness constitutes an analogous ground of discrimination under the Charter. As Justice Gibson wrote in the decision, “The homeless are not Other. They are Us. They are rights bearers no less entitled than any other Canadian citizens to the full benefit and protection of the Charter.” It’s a significant extension of the Adams line of reasoning, opening a second constitutional avenue, beyond security of the person, for challenging bylaws that criminalize homelessness.
Vancouver Book Launch
On June 17th, a crowd gathered at Massey Books to hear Dr. Flynn speak about the book. She was joined by Andrea Reimer, a former City of Vancouver elected official and current lecturer at UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. The two discussed the ways bylaws are shaping our cities and key themes throughout the book, including the ways bylaws are both seen and unseen.
Following the conversation, many audience members asked how to advocate for change that protects the rights of people experiencing homelessness. Drawing on her experience as an elected official, Andrea offered a practical framework for effecting policy change: when the public, municipal staff, and elected officials are all behind a policy, change follows. With only one of those groups at the table, she cautioned, change is difficult. With two, the odds improve. But it’s when all three come together that real movement happens.
Conclusion
The Bylaw State makes a case that’s easy to miss, precisely because bylaws look so mundane. Noise complaints, park hours, and obstruction rules don’t read as instruments of exclusion, but as Flynn and Hermer show through Prince George and Vancouver, that’s exactly what they’ve become for people with nowhere else to go. The courts have offered a partial check on this, from Adams in 2009 through to the Waterloo decision this year, but as the book makes clear, litigation is a slow and uneven tool against a governance system built from thousands of small, locally enacted rules.
For researchers and advocates working on housing policy, the throughline is this: addressing homelessness in Canada can’t stop at the level of shelter beds and supportive housing funding, important as those are. It also requires reckoning with the everyday municipal rules that determine, block by block and park by park, where people are allowed to exist at all.
Written by BSH Research Manager, Dr. Alina McKay.
The Balanced Supply of Housing (BSH) is a SSHRC-CMHC funded partnership grant led by Dr. Alexandra Flynn at UBC’s Peter A. Allard School of Law, focused on land use, housing financialization, and sustainable housing futures across Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal.
