In April 2023, City of Vancouver workers accompanied by the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) carried out a forced eviction of the encampment along Hastings Street.
I was there on the day, trying to provide legal assistance to encampment residents, as city workers forced them to pack up all of their belongings and leave. This was an early introduction for me into how the law and those enforcing it interact with unhoused people. What I saw was disturbing.
The police had set up barricades and checkpoints. There were officers surveying the scene from nearby rooftops. They had lines of officers keeping the public out, including legal observers, protesters, lawyers, and journalists. It felt like being in the middle of a military operation; an operation being waged against some of the city’s most vulnerable residents.
Last week, BC’s Office of the Human Rights Commissioner released its final report from its inquiry into exclusion of media during the decampment.[1] It found that:
“… the City of Vancouver (the City) and the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) failed to strike the appropriate balance between potential safety or other risks with human rights, most notably the right to freedom of the press, resulting in a lack of transparency and impacts on the rights of unhoused people.”
Essentially, the VPD acted outside its legal authority and violated Charter-protected freedom of the press when it prevented members of the media from accessing areas directly around the evictions.
Media exclusion zones are an emerging problem. In 2021, the BC Supreme Court ruled that RCMP exclusion zones preventing journalists from accessing blockades at Fairy Creek were unconstitutional.[2] We’re also currently in court as interveners in a case where the RCMP arrested and detained a journalist that same year who was covering Indigenous resistance to the Coastal GasLink Pipeline in Wetʼsuwetʼen territory.[3]
While the fight against media exclusion zones is critical, it’s important not to lose sight of the underlying contexts in which they’re strategically used. Otherwise, even as we attack exclusion zones and other limits on press freedom, they will be fulfilling their purpose of shielding human rights abuses from public view.
Don Chapman, the VPD officer in charge of the Hastings decampment, is quoted in the Commissioner’s report explaining one consideration for setting up the exclusion zones:
“So, you know, as and what we saw, you know, things were either pushed out on the media, you know, how is that actually gonna affect the, you know, the public’s view of the Vancouver Police Department? This is a City-led initiative, so what is the reputational risk to the City of Vancouver? This is also being led ultimately by the Ministry of the Attorney General and the Ministry of Housing. They claimed ownership over this entire operation from an uber-provincial strategic outlook. So, there is risk to the Provincial Government and both of those ministries.”
But the real problem with these street sweeps is not the embarrassment they may cause to the public bodies carrying them out. The people in power don’t want us to see the deadly impact that decampments have on the most marginalized and vulnerable residents of Vancouver. The report quotes one source as saying:
“We lost a lot of people that day. We never found many of them, and many people died as the result of being driven away to shelter isolated from community.”
The forced eviction that took place on Hastings in 2023 is just one example of the cruel and inhumane approach to homelessness in Vancouver. Every day, the City and police department conduct street sweeps, displacing unhoused people and disrupting their lives. They take people’s belongings, and leave them isolated, unsafe, and without community support.
This is what the City and the VPD are trying so desperately to hide. For 2023, the year of the Hastings decampment, the BC Coroner’s Service reported 458 deaths of people experiencing homelessness. This was a 23% increase over the previous year, and three times higher than in 2020.[4]
These deaths are not accidents; they are the result of policy choices. Street sweeps are not designed to address homelessness. They are designed to serve the same purpose as media exclusion zones, to keep human rights abuses out of sight. As Jason, one of the co-plaintiffs in our Charter challenge against the City[5] puts it:
“Your average person doesn’t want me moving into their neighbourhood because I got kicked off of Hastings; they want me off the street, period. They want me in a house. That’s the solution that people want; the City’s solution is to spread us out and hope that we become less visible.”
Another troubling finding in the report is the complete lack of accountability displayed by the VPD and the City. When a complaint was filed about the exclusion zones, the VPD undertook an internal investigation. The investigation was led by none other than Don Chapman, the very person responsible for the decampment operation. He explained his investigatory process to the Commissioner in this way:
“[T]he steps that I took were looking at our operational plan, noting that … knowing [from] my personal knowledge that an exclusion zone … did not occur … and explaining back to the Board that a safety zone had, in fact, been established.”
No witnesses were interviewed; no external research was conducted; essentially, no investigation happened at all. The Police Board received this information without asking a single question. They then concluded that no exclusion zone had occurred. This is what accountability looks like for police in Vancouver, a serious problem we have also seen in our own work.[6]
The Hastings decampment lasted two days and cost over $500,000[7]. But this price tag pales in comparison to the human suffering it left in its wake. This is the story we need our media to tell. This is the reality that we, as a broader community, need to face.
[1] https://bchumanrights.ca/inquiries-and-cases/inquiries/inquiry/media-exclusion-zones/
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/judge-fairy-creek-media-restrictions-won-1.6112156
[3] https://bccla.org/case/the-narwhal-news-society-and-amber-bracken-v-attorney-general-of-canada-et-al/
[4] https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/coroners-service-report-shows-at-least-458-homeless-people-died-in-b-c-in-2023/
[5] https://bccla.org/campaign/shelter-is-survival/
[6] https://bccla.org/2025/09/press-release-vancouver-police-board-handling-of-surveillance-complaint-raises-oversight-concerns/
[7] https://thetyee.ca/News/2023/11/07/Vancouver-Spent-550000-Evict-Hastings-Campers/
Fighting Media Exclusion Zones. What don’t they want us to see?
In April 2023, City of Vancouver workers accompanied by the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) carried out a forced eviction of the encampment along Hastings Street.
I was there on the day, trying to provide legal assistance to encampment residents, as city workers forced them to pack up all of their belongings and leave. This was an early introduction for me into how the law and those enforcing it interact with unhoused people. What I saw was disturbing.
The police had set up barricades and checkpoints. There were officers surveying the scene from nearby rooftops. They had lines of officers keeping the public out, including legal observers, protesters, lawyers, and journalists. It felt like being in the middle of a military operation; an operation being waged against some of the city’s most vulnerable residents.
Last week, BC’s Office of the Human Rights Commissioner released its final report from its inquiry into exclusion of media during the decampment.[1] It found that:
Essentially, the VPD acted outside its legal authority and violated Charter-protected freedom of the press when it prevented members of the media from accessing areas directly around the evictions.
Media exclusion zones are an emerging problem. In 2021, the BC Supreme Court ruled that RCMP exclusion zones preventing journalists from accessing blockades at Fairy Creek were unconstitutional.[2] We’re also currently in court as interveners in a case where the RCMP arrested and detained a journalist that same year who was covering Indigenous resistance to the Coastal GasLink Pipeline in Wetʼsuwetʼen territory.[3]
While the fight against media exclusion zones is critical, it’s important not to lose sight of the underlying contexts in which they’re strategically used. Otherwise, even as we attack exclusion zones and other limits on press freedom, they will be fulfilling their purpose of shielding human rights abuses from public view.
Don Chapman, the VPD officer in charge of the Hastings decampment, is quoted in the Commissioner’s report explaining one consideration for setting up the exclusion zones:
“So, you know, as and what we saw, you know, things were either pushed out on the media, you know, how is that actually gonna affect the, you know, the public’s view of the Vancouver Police Department? This is a City-led initiative, so what is the reputational risk to the City of Vancouver? This is also being led ultimately by the Ministry of the Attorney General and the Ministry of Housing. They claimed ownership over this entire operation from an uber-provincial strategic outlook. So, there is risk to the Provincial Government and both of those ministries.”
But the real problem with these street sweeps is not the embarrassment they may cause to the public bodies carrying them out. The people in power don’t want us to see the deadly impact that decampments have on the most marginalized and vulnerable residents of Vancouver. The report quotes one source as saying:
The forced eviction that took place on Hastings in 2023 is just one example of the cruel and inhumane approach to homelessness in Vancouver. Every day, the City and police department conduct street sweeps, displacing unhoused people and disrupting their lives. They take people’s belongings, and leave them isolated, unsafe, and without community support.
This is what the City and the VPD are trying so desperately to hide. For 2023, the year of the Hastings decampment, the BC Coroner’s Service reported 458 deaths of people experiencing homelessness. This was a 23% increase over the previous year, and three times higher than in 2020.[4]
These deaths are not accidents; they are the result of policy choices. Street sweeps are not designed to address homelessness. They are designed to serve the same purpose as media exclusion zones, to keep human rights abuses out of sight. As Jason, one of the co-plaintiffs in our Charter challenge against the City[5] puts it:
Another troubling finding in the report is the complete lack of accountability displayed by the VPD and the City. When a complaint was filed about the exclusion zones, the VPD undertook an internal investigation. The investigation was led by none other than Don Chapman, the very person responsible for the decampment operation. He explained his investigatory process to the Commissioner in this way:
No witnesses were interviewed; no external research was conducted; essentially, no investigation happened at all. The Police Board received this information without asking a single question. They then concluded that no exclusion zone had occurred. This is what accountability looks like for police in Vancouver, a serious problem we have also seen in our own work.[6]
The Hastings decampment lasted two days and cost over $500,000[7]. But this price tag pales in comparison to the human suffering it left in its wake. This is the story we need our media to tell. This is the reality that we, as a broader community, need to face.
[1] https://bchumanrights.ca/inquiries-and-cases/inquiries/inquiry/media-exclusion-zones/
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/judge-fairy-creek-media-restrictions-won-1.6112156
[3] https://bccla.org/case/the-narwhal-news-society-and-amber-bracken-v-attorney-general-of-canada-et-al/
[4] https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/coroners-service-report-shows-at-least-458-homeless-people-died-in-b-c-in-2023/
[5] https://bccla.org/campaign/shelter-is-survival/
[6] https://bccla.org/2025/09/press-release-vancouver-police-board-handling-of-surveillance-complaint-raises-oversight-concerns/
[7] https://thetyee.ca/News/2023/11/07/Vancouver-Spent-550000-Evict-Hastings-Campers/
CIVIL LIBERTIES CAN’T PROTECT THEMSELVES