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The Court Ruling City Hall Is Celebrating Settled Almost Nothing


By Arthur McInnis
July 12, 2026

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The Court Ruling City Hall Is Celebrating Settled Almost Nothing

Victoria won in court this month. Read the headlines and you’d think the fight over homeless sheltering in city parks is over. It isn’t, and the number the city is quietly leaning on to make its case, 34 parks, is doing more spin than substance.

What the Court Decided

On June 11, Justice Jacqueline Hughes of the BC Supreme Court dismissed a petition in Fox v. Victoria (City), 2026 BCSC 1076, brought by three people, Krystle Fox, Kimberly Scheu, and Shea Smith, who argued the city’s bylaws restricting sheltering to a defined list of parks violated their Charter rights and international legal obligations. The city relied on the Community Charter, which lets municipalities regulate public places.

Justice Hughes found the bylaw is legislative, not administrative, in nature. That distinction means the Charter-values-balancing test the petitioners wanted applied, the framework used to review discretionary decisions, doesn’t apply to a bylaw at all. Justice Hughes also rejected the argument that international law, specifically the right to water and housing under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, constrains what a municipality can legislate, since treaties aren’t part of Canadian domestic law unless Parliament or a legislature implements them by statute.

Both petitioners’ arguments lost. But what didn’t get decided is whether the bylaw violates the constitutional right to shelter that Victoria’s own courts established in the first place, in Victoria (City) v. Adams, 2009 BCCA 563.  The Adams case that held people have a right under Charter section 7 to erect temporary shelter in parks when indoor shelter is inadequate. Justice Hughes was explicit about the limits of her own ruling: “I make no comment about the scope of section 7 of the Charter as it relates to temporary overnight sheltering in parks post-Adams…”

Therefore Council didn’t really win the argument, it just won the right to keep having it. The dismissal is explicitly without prejudice to the petitioners bringing a direct constitutional challenge.

The “34 Parks” Number Is Spin, Not Generosity

Somewhere along the way, the city fundamentally reversed the structure of the bylaw. The Court’s reasons confirm as much. At paragraph 19, the Court notes that the City replaced a list of 24 parks where overnight sheltering was prohibited, making it lawful everywhere else by default, with a list of 34 parks where overnight sheltering is permitted, making it prohibited everywhere else by default.

The significance of that change becomes clear when viewed against the city’s own parks inventory. Victoria has 108 municipal parks. Under the former bylaw, overnight sheltering was presumptively permitted in all parks except the 24 specifically excluded, well over one-half of the city’s parks. Under the new bylaw, it is permitted in only 34 parks, roughly one-third of the total. A list of 34 parks may sound expansive until it is compared with the regime it replaced. In practical terms, the area where overnight sheltering is permitted has been reduced.

But the parks that got cut weren’t seemingly random. Before the 2024 ban, Irving and Victoria West were two of only five city parks with 24-hour washrooms, and the two closest to Quadra and Pandora, which both the city and the petitioners agreed in court is where services for unhoused people are clustered. After the ban, the three remaining washroom parks, Oaklands, Pemberton, and Gonzales, are all farther away.

James Bay and Vic West and the Nuance Nobody’s Reporting

Here’s what the “two banned parks” framing misses. Irving Park (James Bay) and Victoria West Park (Vic West) are off the list. But Fisherman’s Wharf Park and Holland Point Park, both in James Bay, are still on it. So are Banfield Park, Barnard Park, Sitkum Park, Lime Bay Park, and Songhees Hillside Park, all in Vic West. Council didn’t shut sheltering out of either neighbourhood. It targeted the two most visible, most litigated parks in each one and left the others remaining. That is a Council managing optics, park by park, rather than setting a coherent citywide policy.

And Council Doesn’t Want Your Problem Showing Up on Its Lawn

Buried in Section 18 of the bylaw is a provision barring any other government or public authority from directing, transporting, or discharging a homeless person into Victoria without first securing them indoor shelter. The translation of this don’t send us your problem. It’s a defensible position for a city that’s absorbed a disproportionate share of the region’s unsheltered population, but it also tells you Council understands exactly how thin its 34-park allowance really is. You don’t write this clause into a bylaw if you think you’ve built enough capacity.  The city should be given credit here for recognising what many have known for some time.  People are being sent here.

Victoria didn’t solve homelessness in its parks this month. It won a procedural fight, shrank the legal footprint for outdoor sheltering but left the constitutional question sitting on the shelf for the next petition.

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