That’s one of the fundamental issues that Osgoode Professor Estair Van Wagner wrestles with in her research and teaching around the often controversial areas of property law and natural resources law. 

Along with her work on homelessness and public space, Van Wagner also focuses her research on Indigenous land rights and property law. 

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, she’s been a sought-after expert on the topic of homeless encampments, especially in the wake of a recent decision by an Ontario Superior Court judge rejecting the Region of Waterloo’s application to forcibly remove a homeless encampment from property it owns because of the lack of shelter space in the area. 

Influenced by a series of B.C. court decisions starting with Victoria (City) v. Adams in 2008, Justice M.J. Valente ruled that the legal remedies sought by the Region of Waterloo violate the encampment residents' rights to life, liberty and security of the person under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 

Van Wagner, who also serves as the co-director of Osgoode’s Environmental Justice and Sustainability Clinic, has overseen or contributed to research that takes a human rights approach to homeless encampments, including an analysis of the City of Toronto’s approach to the encampments during the pandemic and an overview of homeless encampments across Canada, prepared for the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate. 

“My hope,” she says, “is that our research is useful to groups working on the ground to mobilize change at the local level – saying to municipalities that the way you’re dealing with homeless encampments is violating human rights and is a manifestation of our failure to realize the right to housing.”

“Ultimately,” she adds, “my research is really aimed at understanding how property and property law contribute to various forms of injustice.”

Under Canada’s colonial system of property law, says Van Wagner, the concept of ownership is often understood as exclusionary: “It’s our property, we own it, and we get to decide.” 

“We need to really rethink that in order to put human rights and social justice and equity at the centre of our decision-making,” she says. “There needs to be a much more nuanced approach to how we share property.” 

In this regard, said Van Wagner, there is much to learn from Indigenous legal orders and property relations, which go beyond ownership to encompass complex systems of obligations and responsibilities with regard to culture, spirituality, the environment and all that live within these ecosystems. One of her other research projects explores Indigenous jurisdiction and private property in the territory of the Hul’qui’min’um Treaty Group on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

“Until we address the violations of the right to housing that are going on across the country,” she added, “we will continue to see court cases, but litigation is not the way this issue (of homelessness) will be resolved.”

So what about that right to housing? 

While the individual right to adequate housing is recognized in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Canada is a party, and in the federal National Housing Strategy Act, which came into force in July 2019, Van Wagner said Canadian courts have not recognized a right to housing under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, some municipalities such as Toronto have recognized a right to housing in their policy documents. 

“In my view, this is still an open question,” said Van Wagner, “because while we don’t at the moment have a court decision that says there’s a Charter right to housing there absolutely is a right to housing in international and now federal law and that should be informing government decisions at all levels.” 

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This one kills over a million people a year – and by 2050, the death toll could be as high as 10 million annually. 

Ironically, this pandemic is caused by something good – antimicrobial medicines, like penicillin. 

But don’t blame the drugs. The problem – the growing number of infections becoming resistant to the drugs we use to treat them – comes from our overuse of the very medicine that is there to heal us.

“For decades we have overused antimicrobial drugs in humans and animals which has sped the natural process of resistance development in microbes,” says Dr. Susan Rogers Van Katwyk, managing director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre on Global Governance of Antimicrobial Resistance at �첥��Ƶ. 

"By overusing antimicrobials, we've stepped on the gas and we're pushing the whole system forward at a much faster rate than would occur naturally."

Antibiotics are a product of nature, notes Rogers Van Katwyk, an epidemiologist. Long before humans learned to create drugs that can kill bacterial infections like pneumonia and tuberculosis, plants learned to emit chemicals that would destroy the pathogens trying to harm them. 

Later, ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, Serbia and Greece healed wounds by applying moldy bread.

But the antibiotic revolution really got going only fairly recently. In 1908, German scientist Paul Erlich collaborated with others to create an antibiotic to treat syphilis. Then, in 1928, came the famous accidental discovery by Scottish physician Alexander Fleming. He returned to his lab after a holiday and saw that petri dishes containing staphylococcus bacteria had been halted by mold containing a substance called penicillin notatum. 

Since then, antimicrobials have revolutionized health care and led to significantly longer lifespans.“ In the past 30 years, globally, maternal and child health have improved significantly. Deaths have gone way down. And that’s just one example,” says Steven Hoffman, Dahdaleh Distinguished Chair in Global Governance and Legal Epidemiology and a professor of global health, law and political science at York. 

Drug resistance occurs because bacteria and viruses evolve quickly, as we’ve seen with the COVID pandemic and all of its many variants.  With a bacterial infection such as pneumonia, an antibiotic will kill most of the bacteria and your immune system will take care of the rest. 

“But when you use antibiotics as widely as we do and over a long period of time, bacteria develop mechanisms to survive,” says Rogers Van Katwyk.  “Different species of bacteria can share genetic codes for resistance. These genes are like the cheat code for how the bacteria can avoid an antibiotic.” 

At one time, antibiotics such as penicillin took care of pneumonia easily, but Hoffman says that overuse has created new strains of resistant pneumonia that are often fatal. Then there are the ultra-dangerous infections like MRSA and C-DIFF and a form of tuberculosis that are extremely resistant to antibiotics. 

And this overuse is happening in many sectors. Hoffman points to U.S. statistics that show that only 10 per cent of patients who seek treatment for a sore throat will need an antibiotic. But at least 50 per cent of them will leave the doctor’s office with a prescription for an antibiotic. Rogers Van Katwyk says the same is happening in the food industry, where “antibiotics are widely used in meat-producing animals to make them grow faster” and antimicrobial agents are overused on crops further contributing to drug resistance. 

“We’re not saying we should all stop using antimicrobials,” says Hoffman. “We’re saying we must use them when they are necessary, keeping in mind their impacts on human health, animal health, and the environment.”

They believe progress can be made through evidence-based research and capacity building to support the development of better policies. To that end, the Wellcome Trust has awarded Hoffman and Rogers van Katwyk $8.7M to launch what they call a Policy Accelerator. 

“Many countries are rewriting their national plans on drug resistance, and this is one area where our evidence-based policy research can support effective policymaking. We’re going to work with governments to help solve the challenges they’re facing,” says Rogers Van Katwyk. 

"We’re forming a team that will apply the science and expertise we have as a research group at York and a WHO Collaborating Centre and we’ll tailor our work to each country, because what works in Canada will be different from what works in Nigeria.”

Hoffman likens their upcoming work to a consulting role where “we will have a razor-sharp focus on impact for people around the world. Our goal is not to do what we normally do as academics and publish papers. Our success will be measured in policy changes and lives saved. This is an amazing opportunity.”

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