The Edmonton Encampment Litigation and The Charter Claims We Didn’t (Get to) Argue
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, the number of unhoused and unsheltered individuals in Canada has risen dramatically. In urban centres across Canada, unsheltered individuals have gathered together in encampments for safety and a sense of community. Municipalities frequently respond to these encampments by forcibly evicting them. In autumn 2023, the Coalition for Justice and Human Rights filed a claim on behalf of Edmonton’s encampment residents, alleging their rights and freedoms, as enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms sections 2, 7, 8, 12, and 15, were unjustifiably infringed by the City of Edmonton'’s encampment displacement policies and practices. The case was struck on a preliminary ground, because the court held that the Coalition lacked public interest standing, and thus the court never made a decision on the merits of the Coalition's Charter claims. This article provides a procedural chronology of the Edmonton encampment case and sets out the Charter arguments that the Coalition planned to advance. In doing so, this article aims to offer guidance to others engaged in encampment litigation, to broaden the conversation about how the Charter is implicated in encampments and governmental responses to them, and to give voice to the unhoused individuals, who provided evidence in support of the Coalition's lawsuit.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".