Scrap this bad law
Poverty isn’t a crime in Ontario. But you wouldn’t know that from the fact the heartless Safe Streets Act is still on the books almost two decades after it was passed by the former Harris government.
The law, passed in a panic about so-called squeegee kids, is aimed at halting “aggressive” panhandling — whatever that is deemed to be under this vaguely worded statute.
Not surprisingly, it’s not having the intended effect. After all, those who don’t have money for food are hardly going to stop asking for donations, no matter how often they are ticketed.
Instead, it succeeds only in clogging the courts, draining public coffers and drowning the homeless in a sea of debt that makes it even harder for them to get back on their feet.
Now a Toronto legal clinic has launched a constitutional challenge to the law in Ontario Superior Court, arguing that the law is discriminatory. After all, the largely middle-class people who aggressively solicit on the streets on behalf of charities are not charged.
It should never have come to this. The law should have been repealed long ago.It will be up to the next provincial government to do so before the Fair Change Community Legal Clinic spends any more of its meagre resources to fight it. Consider the costs of maintaining the status quo. First, the act punishes the poor. A 2014 study found that between 2000 and 2010, nearly 70,000 tickets were issued in Toronto, each for at least $500, placing a significant financial burden on those who can least afford it. Those who are convicted of a second offence can face jail time, which threatens whatever employment, educational or housing prospects they have.
In other words, in a catch-22, it actually prevents them from escaping the poverty that is the root cause of their panhandling.
Second, the law is expensive to enforce. It cost the Toronto Police Service about $1 million between 2000 and 2010 to implement. Over that same period the city collected about $8,000 in fines. That doesn’t include the cost of enforcing this bad law in the court system.
If the next provincial government truly wants to stop panhandling it should put in place social measures to end poverty rather than criminalizing it. The poor deserve help, not persecution and punishment.
Ontario’s Safe Streets Act, which punishes panhandlers, is ineffectual and discriminatory