CLE Working Paper No. 3/2022--What is the Test for Interlocutory Injunctions Affecting Homeless Encampments? A critique of Vancouver Fraser Port Authority v Brett and associated case law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vancouver Fraser Port Authority v Brett (VFPA v Brett), decided in 2020, marked a new low in judicial responses to the intersecting crises of housing, homelessness, poverty, toxic drugs, mental health, racism and colonialism. By dropping to the ground the already low bar for granting interlocutory injunctions to evict homeless encampments from publicly owned land i n BC, this decision invites a critical assessment of BC courts’ approach to homeless encampment injunctions. In this paper I present the first comprehensive survey of 21st century BC homeless encampment interlocutory injunction applications, which shows that they have an extremely high success rate. I then argue that such applications must satisfy all three prongs of the usual RJR-MacDonald test rather than a more relaxed test based on trespass or statutory violation; that the standard for the first prong should be a strong prima facie case due to the mandatory and effectively final character of most homeless encampment injunctions; and that courts should not decide complex, contested constitutional and evidential issues at the interlocutory stage on the basis of affidavits alone. They should instead reassert the extraordinary character of interlocutory injunctions and repudiate the tendency to treat them as the norm in homeless encampment cases. In short, VFPA v Brett highlighted the urgency of raising the bar for such injunctions to a height that can do justice to the fundamental rights and interests at stake in homeless encampment cases.
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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 | 0.034 | 0.065 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.027 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.043 | 0.017 |
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".