Colby Cosh: Homeless people ridiculously exempt from Nova Scotia's forest ban

National Post

8 hours ago

CBC News' industrious Taryn Grant gives us a fresh occasion to peep at Nova Scotia, that parched corner of Hades wherein it is currently forbidden to go for an invigorating saunter in the woods. A couple of weeks ago I discussed the controversial and suffocatingly broad travel restrictions imposed by the province in response to dangerous wildfire conditions. Nova Scotia, not content with everyday tools of regulation like campfire or vehicle bans, has almost totally denied its citizens access even to privately owned woodlands. When critics outside the province yoinked a few questioning eyebrows upward, they were told they failed to understand the precious communitarian spirit of Nova Scotia or its particular vulnerability to forest fire.
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Well, let's concede that the government of Nova Scotia is answerable primarily to the people of Nova Scotia. In our usual sunny, optimistic way, I scanned for the glint of a silver lining in the exotic, ambitious ban on walking in or through the forest. Perhaps, I remarked, it betokened a new no-nonsense approach to the regulation of public amenities.
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'If 'extremism in defence of public property is no vice' is to be the new rule in Canada, we are surely going to see a lot of big changes to urban public parks and other land patches, which, for a decade, have been beset by nomadic tent-dwellers who make copious and inveterate use of propane tanks, electrical heaters, camp stoves, improvised wiring from hijacked power supplies, and open fires.'
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Well, don't hold your breath. The CBC has now inquired into the possibility that some members of the Wandering Fire-Bringer class may be testing the Nova Scotia fire ban. Turns out it's made of vapour. The province's Department of Opportunities and Social Development estimates that an estimated 137 rough sleepers are still living in the Nova Scotia woods and 'cannot be convinced' to leave. They've been visited repeatedly by a team of 'outreach workers' who themselves enjoy an exemption from the travel rules. A few of the tent-dwellers, worn down by social-worker nattering, agreed to move on or accept spaces in urban shelters. Most have stayed put as if they'd grown roots.
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And the state turns out to be helpless, even though one fire may already have been started at an 'encampment.' It seems to be generally agreed that there is no point in fining any of the fairy folk of the forest. The provision in the provincial fire proclamation that allows for $25,000 penalties is reserved exclusively for those who might conceivably have such a sum to cough up.
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Well, what about the ordinary police powers of arrest and detention? After a fortnight of hearing Nova Scotians insist that the current forest-fire risks are unprecedented, and that the traditional mobility privileges of citizenship must necessarily shrivel into abeyance, I am suddenly assured by a legal-aid lawyer that anyone collared for being unlawfully encamped 'would have to be quickly released, as the offence would not warrant being detained.'
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This ultra-confident prediction leaves me confused. One struggles to understand, from outside N.S., how forest protection can be so important as to justify a ministerial fiat of extraordinary and unprecedented character — but not so important as to be at all enforced.
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