Realizing the Right:
​Municipal Policy Responses to Encampments

Project Outputs
​This research project is called “Realizing the Right: Municipal Policy Responses to Encampments”. Funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Realizing the Right is a multi-year community-engaged project focused on understanding of how Ontario municipalities are responding to encampments. The project is made up of:
  • An Ontario-wide review of all neo-vagrancy bylaws and protocols in municipalities with populations over 70,000;
  • A review of legal cases concerning encampments in Ontario; and
  • The Realizing the Right Encampment Survey of people with direct experience staying in encampments in Waterloo Region and Hamilton. 
Thank you to the Realizing the Right project advisory committee: Regan Sunshine Brussé, Shabeeh Ahmad, Jammy Loch, Mauleek Bhatt, Sidney Macdonald, David Alton, and Erin Dej for your ongoing and invaluable contributions.

We also appreciate the hard work of research assistants, Valentina Orlenas and Sebastian McPherson. We received funding for this project from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and appreciate this support.

We very deeply appreciate the many informal conversations with community members who have experienced homelessness and housing precarity. These conversations have helped shape our views on these issues and clearly reminded us that policy documents always only tell a part of the story.

Most recent Project material:

​Human Rights & Housing Fights

The Human Rights and Housing Fights section includes presentations of project findings delivered by Realizing the Right team members across Canada. 

Written content 

Reports, Summaries, and Written Research Findings 

​Rethinking Municipal Policy
Responses to Encampments:
Building a Human Rights
​Approach in Ontario

NExt up: