When Should Publicly Owned Land Be Considered Private in Homeless Encampment Cases? A Critique of Recent Developments in BC
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two recent decisions of the Chief Justice of the BC Supreme Court, Evans (2016) and Brett (2020), introduced a dangerous new idea into homeless encampment jurisprudence: that the purportedly “private” character of encampment sites determines that defendants’ Charter rights are not engaged, and that government landowners are entitled to interlocutory injunctions evicting homeless encampments from publicly owned land. These decisions distort the established test for engaging section 2(b) of the Charter, collapsing a nuanced spectrum of government-owned property into a formalistic dichotomy in which any state-owned property that is not formally open to the public as of right is “private property” for civil and constitutional purposes. Moreover, they inappropriately extend the section 2(b) “public arena” inquiry to section 7, ignoring the established test for engagement of the right to life, liberty, and security of the person. These decisions drop the already low bar for granting interlocutory injunctions to evict homeless encampments from publicly owned land onto the ground, further tilting the homeless encampment litigation playing field against some of society’s most marginalized and vulnerable members. They should not be followed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".