By Nathalie Sturgeon, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The St. Croix Courier
The municipal council in St. Stephen has rejected the creation of a vagrancy bylaw.
During the Sept. 2 council meeting, council did not discuss the vagrancy bylaw but Mayor Backman said they were not moving forward due to the fact that communities were moving away from these types of bylaws.
“Our bylaw, which you’ll see coming up shortly, [will] look at behaviours that we want to control, rather than individuals,” he said.
Backman said they were working on another bylaw that would more effectively deal with the issues the council was trying to address rather than a vagrancy bylaw.
He said the council had requested staff look at creating a vagrancy bylaw at a previous meeting.
In 1994, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that loitering-based vagrancy restrictions violated Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms for being overly broad.
In May 2025, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice issued a decision that unhoused people are entitled to full constitutional protection under the Charter and that governments must apply a human-rights based approach in responding to homeless encampments.
“We don’t want to have a bylaw where we’re already in violation of the constitution,” Backman said.
Staff recommend against it
Staff from the Municipal District of St. Stephen (MDSS) asked the council not to proceed with creating a vagrancy bylaw for the community, according to a report filed by the town’s chief administrative officer.
“If council wishes to address identified public-space concerns, administration should instead be directed to assess specific behaviours, existing legal authorities, service gaps and enforcement capacity and return with narrowly tailored options developed with legal, policing, bylaw enforcement and community service patterns,” the report said.
According to the Homeless Hub, vagrancy bylaws were designed to target anyone whose simple presence was perceived as a threat to the prevailing social and economic order.
The town has been grappling with a homelessness crisis for several years, with more than 100 individuals considered unhoused.
Neighbourhood Works Inc. has operated a shelter at 9 Main Street that has been the focal point for community concern. It is a 30-bed shelter funded through the provincial government.
A previous council rejected a proposal for transitional housing to be built prior to the general election in May.
Renaud’s report said the Local Governance Act does give broad authority to regulate public spaces, nuisances and matters affecting safety, health and welfare.
“That authority may support carefully drafted rules governing specific conduct,” he said in the report. “It does not make a broad, status-based ‘vagrancy’ bylaw advisable.”
The report said the term vagrancy is dated and imprecise.
“It tends to associate enforcement with poverty, homelessness, unemployment, appearance or presence in public rather than with objectively harmful behaviour,” he said in the report. “Such an approach creates substantial risk of vagueness, overbreadth, arbitrary or unequal enforcement, Charter challenges, human-rights complaints, duplication of Criminal Code provisions and damage to public trust.”
Renaud also pointed to issues with enforcement capacity. He said it would require trained and available personnel, after-hours coverage and reliable evidence and records, among other things.
“Without those components, adoption would likely produce uneven enforcement and public expectations that the municipality cannot meet,” he said in the report.
The report said the question is not whether council wishes for public spaces to be safe and accessible, but whether a broad vagrancy prohibition would be lawful and effective.
“In the administration’s view, it would not,” he said in the report.
Move to create nuisance bylaw
The council has voted to move forward with a nuisance bylaw with some councillors saying there is a desire to get control of what is happening in the community.
In his report, Renaud recommended a scoped review, but that “any draft returned to council should regulate clearly defined conduct and measurable impacts — not personal status, poverty, homelessness, lawful presence or subjective characteristics.”
The report said a public nuisance bylaw can be an appropriate municipal tool, but the value depends on its scope.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) said it understands the pressures municipalities are facing when it comes to housing and homelessness.
“So the premise [of] vagrancy bylaws, nuisance bylaws, bylaws that restrict or prohibit encampments, are all measures that will just displace the problem to another locality,” Harini Sivalingam, CCLA director, said. “It doesn’t actually address the underlying causes.”
She said, while these bylaws can be created to seem neutral, they won’t impact everyone the same way.
“I think it could lead to criminalization of poverty and they disproportionately impact people who are indigenous, racialized, living in poverty, with queer identities who are overrepresented in homelessness population,” she said.
Sivalingam said it is often easier to look for short-term solutions, but they do not actually address the root cause.
“I want to emphasize that these are still responsibilities between all levels of government,” she said.
University of New Brunswick professor Julia Woodhall Melnik said these types of bylaws are often created out of desperation.
She said in bigger provinces, cities and municipalities have more resources to build housing, especially affordable housing. New Brunswick is not in that position.
“We don’t have the tax base at the municipal level to do things like build housing,” she said.
She said funding support from the provincial government is not adequate either.
“Councils don’t have access to the capital they need to be addressing these issues,” Woodhall Melnik said. “The most effective thing that the council can do at this point is appeal to the provincial government.”
She said bylaws are tools municipalities can use.
“However, as we know, vagrancy bylaws are a violation of human rights,” she said. “They will not stand up to court challenges.”
Woodhall Melnik noted that the previous council rejected a proposal to put transitional housing at 199 Union Street. The council rejected the proposal due to its proximity to the municipally owned property and concerns from the community.
“It’s them telling you what they are willing to do,” she said. “They were offered money for transitional housing, the last council was, and they turned it down. That would have helped things considerably.
“So basically, they’re telling you what they’re willing to do and really building that transitional housing with the provincial dollars is what they should be doing to regulate. This is their way of saying, well, we feel like this is in our control, but then voting down zoning when the province tries to intervene is not effective at all either.”
The Courier has reached out to the New Brunswick Housing Corporation for comment and is awaiting a response.
