Alexandra Flynn and Joe Hermer’s new book, The Bylaw State, is an important exploration of municipal power and the outsized impact that the exercise of that power can have on vulnerable people. More specifically, their book shows that a complex web of municipal bylaws, often thought to be relatively benign, is used to target and remove homeless people from public space simply because they are homeless. Such removals have devastating consequences for unhoused people who have their personal possessions destroyed and are forced into a cycle of moving from one location to another at the discretion of municipal officials. Though scholars have long argued that municipalities use bylaws in harmful ways,Footnote ¹ Flynn and Hermer make a significant contribution to this body of scholarship by focusing on the minutiae of the bylaws that municipalities in Canada use to carry out homeless encampment evictions. Going further, they argue that bylaws are the main way that municipal governments have responded to rising rates of homelessness.

The Bylaw State proceeds in eight chapters, with Chapters 1–3 providing context as to the social, political and legal background against which encampment evictions take place. Homelessness has been steadily rising in Canada since the late 1980s.Footnote ² In recent years, with the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and tightening housing markets, the rates of homelessness have skyrocketed. There has not been a comprehensive count of the number of homeless people in Canada since 2016, leading to a serious underestimation of the problem at the national, provincial and municipal levels. A decade ago, researchers found that 235,000 people experience homelessness each year in Canada.Footnote ³ Meanwhile, a 2026 report from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario recently found that 85,000 people experience homelessness in Ontario alone.Footnote ⁴

Against this background, municipalities have increasingly taken to enacting and enforcing what Flynn and Hermer call “neo-vagrancy” bylaws that “reproduce repealed and discredited vagrancy law offences that were used to police ‘crimes of character’—that is, they target people primarily for who they are” (p 18, emphasis in original). Indeed, rather than invest in the creation of housing, municipalities have turned to anti-camping bylaws as the primary way that they manage homelessness. Though courts in British Columbia and Ontario have imposed constitutional limits on the enforcement of these bylaws when no other shelter space is available, it is cold comfort to those sheltering outside to be able to invoke that case law when municipal officials show up with police, heavy equipment and garbage bins.

Chapters 4 and 5 of The Bylaw State present case studies of encampment evictions in British Columbia: two in the City of Prince George and another in Vancouver’s CRAB Park. The purpose of these case studies is to illustrate the way in which municipalities work within, and sometimes in direct violation of, the constitutional limits imposed by the courts.

Moreover, as Flynn and Hermer argue, even if municipalities act within these limits, they still fall short of meeting their obligations under international law. This is particularly troubling in British Columbia, where the province and the City of Vancouver have endorsed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and a majority of the homeless population is Indigenous. Encampment evictions of Indigenous peoples are in direct contravention of UNDRIP as well as the human right to adequate housing enshrined in international law.

Chapters 6 and 7 examine the way in which bylaws are seen and unseen, respectively. Flynn and Hermer argue that bylaws can be seen through the placement of trespass notices, fences and caution tape by municipalities during the bylaw-enforcement process. These physical manifestations of bylaws indicate that unhoused people are not welcome in the space. And, more than that, they represent assertions of municipal ownership over the property.

Bylaws are also made visible by acts of contestation from those living in encampments. Flynn and Hermer draw our attention to signs put up by encampment residents to assert their legal rights. These signs are not only a form of on-the-ground legal advocacy, but also serve as a way to communicate to the public that sheltering in public spaces is a “rights-based issue rather than a nuisance” (p 90).

Chapter 7 shows that bylaws are unseen by homeless people who are not given notice as to the actual rules laid out in the law. For example, as a direct response to the case law finding that bylaws have to allow some overnight camping, some municipalities have carved out camping zones in certain public spaces. But often these municipalities do not indicate (e.g., through signs) where camping is or is not permitted. As a result, unhoused people may be found in violation of a bylaw and subject to eviction as a result.

Flynn and Hermer conclude The Bylaw State by reflecting on the limits of seeking justice for unhoused people in the courts. While I generally agree with their critique, the most recent US Supreme Court decision on sheltering on public property has laid bare the importance of even the narrowest of constitutional wins. In that case, City of Grants Pass v Johnson, a majority of the Supreme Court held that generally applicable ordinances banning camping on public property do not violate the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause.Footnote ⁵ The majority explicitly reversed Martin v Boise—a Ninth Circuit decision that prevented municipalities from enforcing their anti-camping ordinances when the number of homeless people in their jurisdiction exceeded the number of “practically available” shelter spaces.Footnote ⁶

Since the decision in Grants Pass, municipalities across the United States have enacted outright bans on camping in their jurisdiction under which violators of those bans may be criminally charged and prosecuted.Footnote ⁷ One of the many problems with giving municipalities such broad powers over public property is that it enables localities that are by definition parochial and self-interested to expel homeless people from their jurisdiction and push them into another.Footnote ⁸ This creates a cycle in which homeless people are being moved around to different places not just within a locality, but between localities. Building on the important and timely work of Flynn and Hermer, future research may consider how bylaws can be used to control the movement and existence of homeless people inside and outside of the jurisdiction in which they are enacted. Such research would bolster the case that municipalities have immense power over the physical, social and political landscape of Canada.