Municipal governance, jurisdiction, and punitive local responses to health and social crises in a small British Columbia city

Vollständiger Abstract

Worum geht es in dieser Arbeit?

The Province of British Columbia (BC), Canada, is experiencing acute and overlapping health and social crises that have spread from the largest cities into smaller municipalities, where limited resources and supports are increasingly strained by visible poverty, homelessness, and substance use on local streets. While some smaller municipalities have responded by seeking additional supports for affected populations, others have pursued more punitive measures, such as dismantling tent encampments, opposing harm reduction initiatives, and enacting restrictive bylaws. In this paper, we examine the City of Campbell River, BC as a case study in municipal opposition to provincial health and social interventions. Drawing on political and legal geography and law and society scholarship, we identify three oppositional strategies used by the city: lobbying upper levels of government, creatively deploying nuisance bylaws, and leveraging financial and budgetary tools. We argue that these actions, while grounded in local governance, had discursive and political reach beyond municipal boundaries. They not only recalibrated the boundaries of what is considered permissible municipal action, they influenced broader legal and political discourse in the province. They also limited the spatial extent of housing and social service provision in the community, and by extension, where marginalized people “could be.” The case also illustrates how smaller municipalities can scale up actions and rhetoric to influence upper-level legislation in ways that reverberate back to affect vulnerable populations locally. By tracing these dynamics, the paper contributes to critical understandings of how municipal law and policy can shape governance of overlapping social crises.