Tent city a risk to highway safety, ministry lawyer says
The province wants Saanich’s tent city residents removed from land beside the TransCanada Highway because of the safety risk they pose to travellers and themselves.
“This is a highway safety case,” Micah Rankin, the lawyer for the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, told a B.C. Supreme Court hearing on Thursday.
Rankin is applying to the court for the removal of campers, tents and temporary shelters from the grassy strip of land adjacent to Regina Park. The land, or “road dedication,” is not a public park but part of the Trans-Canada Highway, he said, explaining that a highway consists of more than the travelled road and also encompasses shoulders, ditches and side slopes.
More than 45,000 vehicles pass this land every day, said Rankin, who asked Justice Ward Branch to enforce a section of the Transportation Act that prohibits the unauthorized use and occupation of a highway.
The campers are trespassing and causing a public nuisance, Rankin said. The neighbourhood has been disrupted. Tents are getting closer to the roadway. If fire breaks out in the tent city, known as Camp Namegans, residents might flee into traffic.
In addition, firefighters and first responders face greater risks when fire breaks out on a highway, Rankin said. Highway fires cause traffic disruptions and road closures. They’re highly visible and often cause accidents.
“When we’re talking about a fire on a highway at this location, it’s not going to be easy to get there in a fire truck, without fire hydrants,” Rankin said. “A fire on a nearby median burned an area the size of Regina Park in four minutes. Giving people fire extinguishers and hoses just does not match the nature of the danger.”
John Heaney, the lawyer representing the tent city residents, began his submissions describing what campers will experience if the injunction is granted.
The District of Saanich wants campers out of the park for two to three weeks to remove hazardous materials, mow the lawn, prune shrubs and put down eight to 10 inches of wood chips
The court has heard that campers can stay in any one of 102 of 171 Saanich parks. After Regina Park is remediated, they can return and be there 24 hours a day, visiting between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. and taking overnight shelter from 7 p.m. to 9 a.m.
Heaney said that means a person would have wake up, pack up their tent and belongings and walk 600 metres to Saanich Municipal Hall. There, they would put all their possessions into a four-cubic foot Rubbermaid container for storage and go about their day.
“We’re talking about an existence where … they will be constrained to a life of having no more personal possessions than you can fit in a four-cubic-foot container,” Heaney said. “They might bicycle home in a downpour at 6:30 p.m. and if they catch the storage facility in time, swap wet clothes for dry. Then set up their tent, get into the tent, wet or dry, and repeat the same the very next morning.”
Camp residents need a place they can call their own, one that is not 600 metres away, he said. “It’s a step forward, but it’s a step backward from what the residents of Camp Namegans have today.”
The hearing continues today.