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A court in Ontario did something remarkable last week. Justice Reid of the Superior Court ruled that homelessness is an analogous ground of discrimination under section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, meaning that people experiencing homelessness are entitled to the same constitutional protections as any other group. This is the first time a Canadian court has said this explicitly, and it came out of a four-year legal fight over an encampment at 100 Victoria Street in Kitchener that has existed since people fled shelters during COVID-19. That context matters. The encampment wasn’t a lifestyle choice or a public nuisance to be managed. It was a rational response to a shelter system people didn’t trust or couldn’t access.

The numbers the court cited are not abstractions. Waterloo Region had 377 emergency shelter beds and 2,371 people counted as homeless in 2024. The region had been trying to clear the encampment through the courts since 2022, using bylaws as its instrument. What the ruling says, essentially, is that you cannot use a bylaw to paper over a constitutional obligation. If you want to evict people who have nowhere else to go, you need to offer them a genuine alternative, not a referral to a waiting list or a shelter bed that doesn’t exist.

Premier Ford called the ruling “cockamamie” and the most ridiculous thing he’d ever seen, which tells you a lot about how his government has been thinking about this. The political instinct, across party lines in Canada but especially on the right, has been to treat encampments as a public-order problem. Clear them, disperse the people, move on. The court is saying that framing is constitutionally inadequate. It’s a significant rebuke, and not just to Waterloo Region.

What strikes me about this ruling is that it doesn’t invent anything. It applies existing Charter principles to a population that has been systematically excluded from them. The Federal Housing Advocate welcomed it as an affirmation of dignity and equality, which is true, but it’s also just a court doing what courts are supposed to do: holding governments accountable to the law they wrote. The fact that this feels surprising or controversial says more about how low the bar has been than about how high this ruling sets it.