Eight years after U of T graduate student Elan Ohayon was beaten and arrested for protesting homelessness by sleeping out in Allan Gardens, the City of Toronto and Toronto Police have paid a settlement of $116,000 to him and the two activists who were present at the protest. The activists have announced that the money, totaling nearly $70,000 after legal costs, will be directed at funding grassroots housing initiatives throughout the city in the next five years.
“The money will be put in a trust fund by the Allan Gardens Project,” said Oriel Varga, Allan Garden activist, alumna, and staffer of U of T’s part-time student union. “We will review submissions and pick ten every year with $1,000 funding each project. We want to support local projects and creative ideas and continue our activism.”
The Allan Gardens “sleep outs” began on August 1999, running for 120 successive Friday nights until November 2001. Protestors, including students and other community members, called for the government to provide adequate housing for the homeless, and set up temporary measures while housing projects were underway.
Organizers wanted to shed light on regular instances of police harassment suffered by the homeless sleeping in Allan Gardens.
In October 2000, the protesters were harshly awoken and arrested by a pair of police officers. Ohayon claimed that police assaulted him and destroyed his video recorder.
During his bail hearing, Ohayon did not accept the condition not to go within 50 metres of Allan Gardens, and was sent back behind bars only to be released a few weeks later.
Following the arrests, Ohayon, Varga, and Alex Brown, a third activist, continued sleeping in Allan Gardens every week. They reacted against police aggression by launching a lawsuit which finally reached settlement on December 2008, just days before the scheduled trial.
Varga currently faces charges stemming from an unrelated protest against rising fees. Last year she and thirteen others were slapped with criminal charges after a March 20 sit-in at Simcoe Hall. Charges against nine of the original fourteen have recently been dropped.
Civil rights lawyers Peter Rosenthal and Vilko Zbogar represented the activists. Had there been a trial they would have argued that given the lack of safe affordable housing, the homeless have the right to sleep out and set up shelter free of police harassment. The lack of affordable housing also meant that a police crackdown of the kind that took place in Allan Gardens was a violation of Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the right to life liberty and security of person.
Referring to the considerable amount of time it took to settle the case, Varga said, “Unfortunately it shows how long it takes with the courts. This is time we don’t have to spare; two people die on the streets everyday.” Varga terms homelessness a “national disaster.”
