The Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) strongly condemns the passing of the Ford government’s Bill 6, The Safer Municipalities Act. This legislation gives municipalities and police sweeping new authority to issue trespass notices and forcibly remove unhoused individuals from public spaces, targeting those who have already been abandoned by the system. This makes it a direct attack on people experiencing homelessness and a dangerous expansion of the state’s power to criminalize poverty.
This legislation does not make anyone safer. It does not create housing, improve shelter conditions or provide necessary mental health support. What it does do is allow governments to conceal the visible consequences of capitalism under the pretense of public safety. It punishes the poor, while leaving the economic structures that produce homelessness completely untouched.
This is what capitalism looks like: a system where housing is treated as a commodity, not a right; where developers and landlords profit while thousands live rough; where public land is sold off, social housing is neglected and working-class people are squeezed out of their own communities. Bill 6 is a weapon in this system — used not to solve homelessness, but to hide it from sight.
The homelessness crisis in Ontario is not accidental. It is the predictable result of decades of austerity, privatization and deregulation that have gutted public housing, slashed social services and handed our cities and towns over to corporate developers. The Ford government’s refusal to invest in affordable, publicly owned housing or universal mental healthcare is a political choice that protects profit over people.
We need a fundamentally different approach: building at least 200,000 units of publicly owned, rent-geared-to-income social housing; expanding rent control to cover all units; raising social assistance to livable levels; and fully funding mental health and addiction services. Yet even with expanded rent control, housing costs remain a massive assault on working people’s living standards. To address this, we need legislated rent rollbacks ensuring no one pays more than 20% of their income on housing. Ultimately, this means taking housing out of the hands of speculators and implementing a comprehensive provincial social housing program that treats housing as a public utility, delivered according to need.
Bill 6 is not about safety. It is about upholding a capitalist system that thrives on inequality and discards those it cannot exploit.
The Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) calls for the immediate repeal of Bill 6. We stand with the unhoused, with housing advocates and with all working-class people fighting for dignity, justice and a future where the right to housing is realized.
