A two-time Yellowknife city councillor and 15-year veteran of outreach with homelessness is cautioning town council from passing a Public Behaviour bylaw, which is up for final vote tonight at Inuvik town council's regular meeting Feb. 26.
The bylaw would establish a fine schedule, specifically a $250 fine for fighting, $150 for public urination and defecation, $50 for spitting, $75 for loitering and $500 each for either depositing litter on town property, failing to remove litter or obstructing a peace officer.
"There's going to be a cost associated with it," said Lydia Bardak. "Bylaw officers will have to be in court for bylaw court so they won't be out there doing bylaw stuff."
She noted Yellowknife had already attempted what Inuvik is proposing, twice, when the RCMP set up a crime reduction strategy to get people off the streets.
"As an example, back in the days of giving everyone tickets under the liquor act, there were two nights of bylaw court where there were dozens upon dozens of people who had to appear on these tickets," she said. "Because that court is held at 7 p.m. which is exactly when the Salvation Army is serving supper, so I was worried about how I was going to persuade people to come to court if they were going to be missing supper."
Barduk noted the strategy amounted to handing out as many tickets for violations as possible, with the intent of of incarceration and giving people access to therapy and counselling. However, that was not how it worked out.
"The first few people who got locked away, there was four of them, they were getting sentences from four to six months for nuisance charges," she said. "They were phoning me and saying 'Hey, no one's helped me, no one's talking to me, I haven't even seen my case manager yet.'
"So once the defence lawyers figured out what was going on, they were having their clients plead not guilty and setting trial dates for what the judges considered very trivial and foolish. So that put a stop to all of that."
She questioned if the town would actually generate any revenue from the new fines if it was paying peace officers to stand in court to ensure convictions for those fines as well as the administrative cost of overseeing them.
Instead, Barduk suggested Inuvik follow Yellowknife's example and establish an Integrated Case Management Team, which has social workers who draw from public housing, income assistance, health care and criminal justice circles to address the problem holistically. School groups could be utilized for a public education to reduce spitting, she suggested.
She added piling fines onto people with no money also limits their ability to get ahead and improve their lives.
"They never be able to get a driver's licence or renew it, because motor vehicles knows if you owe the state any money," she said. "And look how many jobs require a driver's licence. The unintended effects are really huge, and so is having to house someone in jail overnight. Here it's something like $300 a day to keep an inmate, so you're going to spent $300 to collect $200? That doesn't make sense."
Town Peace Officer Matt Hogan told council during a Feb. 24 committee of the whole meeting the town was prepared to work with chronic violators and could utilize alternative measures within the system.
At council's Feb. 12 committee of the whole meeting, when the bylaw was first unveiled, he added peace officers were not able to enforce the liquor act but wrote the bylaw specifically to target problem behaviour in the downtown sector. He added the NWT's trespass legislation prevented the town from regulating trespassing and the loitering fine was an attempt to get around that.
Barduk pointed out that people need to remember they're seeing homeless people urinate and misbehave in public during the daytime hours, but often far-better-off people behave in much the same way in the early hours of the morning when liquor establishments close down.
She also cautioned that the town was wading into murky legal territory by adding provisions for fighting and obstruction of peace officers, noting they were already covered under the criminal code.
"They should not even be touching fighting or assaulting a police officer," she said. "Those are criminal matters that have nothing to do with bylaw officers who are not trained to deal with that. Assault is assault under the criminal code, that has nothing to do with a bylaw. They don't have that authority. So that's ridiculous."
Town council will vote on the bylaw tonight at 7 p.m.