The battle over a homeless encampment outside Abbotsford City Hall is heading back to court.
In October, the B.C. Supreme Court upheld an Abbotsford bylaw that would allow the city to remove the encampment but ruled housing options must be made available for the people being displaced.
Abbotsford Mayor Ross Siemens said the city simply doesn’t have the financial ability to do that and is taking the case to the B.C. Court of Appeal seeking to have the conditions removed.
“We are happy with the ruling, but the conditions that are attached are jurisdictions that are clearly in the provincial government — whether it is BC housing or Fraser Health — and so to expect the city to be able to meet those conditions is, from our perspective, not realistic,” he said.
“We simply don’t have the resources.”
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Last week, the city installed fencing around the encampment, and removed eight people from the site it deemed to be new occupants.
Brittany Maple, program coordinator for the Abbotsford Drug War survivors, said her group is confident in its legal position and happy to head back to court to have the issue clarified.
“We recognize that decamping people does put them at risk of death, particularly in a toxic drug poisoning and housing crisis, so the city really has a responsibility not to infringe on those charter rights unless people have access to appropriate services such as harm reduction and accessible housing,” she said.
“The city doesn’t necessarily have to provide those services.”
She also alleged the city had “cherry-picked” parts of the court order it wanted to abide by and ignored others.
Maple said the city needs to stop passing the buck to other levels of government and work with those living in the encampment on a solution.
The city says it will continue to work with BC Housing and community outreach partners to address the needs of those in the encampment.
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