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Are Tents A 'Home'? Extending Section 8 Privacy Rights For The Precariously Housed, Sarah Ferencz, Alexandra Flynn, Nicholas Blomley, Marie-Eve Sylvestre

All Faculty Publications

The home, for most of us, is an obvious zone to assert privacy and property rights. However, this is not the case for those whose control of residential space is precarious. Our paper focuses on privacy rights under the Canadian constitution for those living in tents and, specifically, the judicial rejection of a tent as a home garnering legal protection under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We focus on a 2018 case from British Columbia, R. v. Picard, the only judicial decision that we could locate that has explored this question. In holding that the tent is …