‘Surrender to lawlessness’: How a Hamilton bylaw banning home security cameras is likely a major overstep

Video

Christine Van Geyn, litigation director for the Canadian Constitution Foundation, discusses the controversial case of a Hamilton man ordered to remove 10 security cameras from his property under a 2010 municipal bylaw. She argues that the bylaw is being misapplied and is potentially a violation of rights. The conversation explores broader themes around property rights, privacy expectations in the digital age, and Canadians’ ability to protect their homes amid rising concerns about crime and perceived gaps in law enforcement response.

You can listen to this episode on Amazon, Apple, and Spotify.

Program Transcript

This is an automated transcript. Please check against delivery.

HARRISON LOWMAN: Welcome to Hub Hits. I’m Harrison Lowman, managing editor of the Hub. This week on Ontario, man was ordered by the city of Hamilton to immediately remove 10 security cameras he’d positioned outside his home to keep it safe. They said a 2010 bylaw stated residents are not allowed to have cameras that can view or listen beyond the perimeter of their land. In the midst of talk around crime and safety, it’s raised quite the furor across Canada. People are asking if this is a one off or there’ll be some sort of crackdown across the province when it comes to cameras. For more on the controversy and on property rights and your rights, I’m joined by Christine Van Geyn and litigation director for the Canadian Constitution Foundation. Christine, how are you doing?

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: I’m great. How are you?

HARRISON LOWMAN: I’m good. So what did you make of this whole affair that’s been playing out for the past week or so?

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Yeah. So the details are where everything really matters. So there is a bylaw in Hamilton called the bylaw to prohibit and regulate fortification and protective elements of land. It has a number of definitions. One of them is a definition of excessive protective elements. And that definition includes surveillance equipment. But it is only when the surveillance equipment is designed or operated to view or listen to land outside of the perimeter of the home where the cameras are installed or where the lens of the camera has been obscured. So it’s sort of like a hidden camera. Now, 10 cameras in and of itself, I don’t think would qualify to meet this definition. It sort of depends on where the cameras are pointed. We don’t have the answer to that. But from the sounds of really seems like these are cameras that are capturing sort of incidental other property. They’re not aimed specifically at other property, which is where the problem would come in.

HARRISON LOWMAN: The owner alleges that a unhappy neighbor launched a complaint, potentially because he’d been uploading some of these videos on Instagram. But he says that all these other neighbors have, you know, been okay with him having these up. As we know, cameras disincentivize criminals to rob your house and sometimes even help with your. Your house insurance. I believe in this case, the gentleman says he’s participated in the sharing evidence involving three homicides over 40 break and enters, multiple home invasions, car break and enters, assaults, and even around an investigation involving a serial killer in the area. So the police have actually come to him multiple times and said, can we use the evidence in those security cameras? I guess this leaves a lot of Canadians asking, like, what are your rights when it comes to protecting your property? Like, how could you summarize that for.

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Our viewers in terms of putting up surveillance on your property? My position is that you are entitled to put surveillance up on your property. The bylaw at issue here, I think is being applied inappropriately. The bylaw actually says that the scope of the law does not prohibit people who have commercially available surveillance equipment like video cameras for the purposes of preventing or recording crime on their property. Think of a ring doorbell. So I don’t think it doesn’t seem, unless there are facts that we don’t know, which is always possible. I just don’t think that this bylaw even would apply to this situation. And My expectation is that the city’s gonna have to walk this back.

HARRISON LOWMAN: Yeah, apparently, like, they’ve told him he can apply for an exemption, but I love this because they’re asking him to do more bureaucratic work for them. He would have.

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: He shouldn’t have to apply for an exemption because it shouldn’t. Actually, it doesn’t seem like this is within the scope of the bylaw at all. They have to show that it’s excessive, that the cameras are pointed exactly outside of his property. Not just incidentally capturing, you know, the sidewalk or incidentally capturing other property. They have to show that it was aimed at that other property and it recording it. And I mean, maybe that’s possible, but I really am skeptical that it is because his next door neighbors, the reporting is his next door neighbors are totally fine with these cameras. I understand why. I mean, I grew up in the Hamilton area. The downtown from my childhood has had a lot of social problems with crime. And it’s the same today. So I understand if your neighbor was doing something to prevent crime that would impact your house positively, you’d probably be supportive of it.

HARRISON LOWMAN: So they’re asking him for a letter of support from his landlord, signed permission from neighboring homes that are captured on the cameras, screenshots from the cameras and police reports regarding crime in the area and the support for the need for them. I’ll add to what you said. You mentioned growing up there. Record high number of shootings in Hamilton in 2024. 53, up from 35 in 2023. From your legal perch, Christine, like, what is private property? Like if I have a camera and it catches kind of inside your window from across the street, or it catches you in front of your car or your front lawn. Like, how should we understand private versus public property in this country?

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: I mean, the private property ends at the perimeter of the home. But the problem is when you are intentionally filming other people who are out in public. And you know, we don’t want to live in a society like that where there’s constant surveillance everywhere, everywhere you go, people that could implicate, if the government is doing it, your general privacy rights. But in this case, it just doesn’t seem to be the issue. The issue it seems to be, is there some busybody who noticed that this man is uploading the camera footage to social media? That happens all the time. By the way, I’m in neighborhood Facebook groups where this happens all the time. People share ring doorbell footage of a crime, and this guy just has more cameras than the average bear. And someone is up in arms about it and they brought bylaw down on him. But I think that there, I just don’t think this is an enforceable order.

HARRISON LOWMAN: What is just to push back. What is privacy in 2025 though, Christine? Because, okay, I’m online constantly. My personal data is being scrubbed by the government, by corporations. You mentioned sort of ring cameras. There’s CCTV outside of every convenience store. There’s red light cameras. There’s people taking pictures of me potentially as I cross the street and they’re taking a picture of one of their friends. Like, what is reasonable when it comes to privacy in 2025?

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Yeah. So you’ve really hit a big crux of what the law is grappling with right now as we enter more of a surveillance era. The courts have traditionally treated privacy under constitutional law as existing. When you have a reasonable expectation of privacy privacy, and that expectation is objectively reasonable, we act. It’s a very complex area. A lot of this is still being litigated as new problems emerge. And that’s why we at the Canadian Constitution foundation actually put together a course on privacy where you can learn all of the most detailed nuances of this right at the ccf Cal learn. You know, one of the issues that we are grappling with right now is potential and potentially litigating is a story out of Kingston where the Kingston police have been flying a drone in traffic, like above a red light to look from above down into the, into the vehicle to capture pictures of people looking at their phone at a red light. And we say that that is the people have a reasonable expectation of privacy when they’re sitting inside their vehicle in the contents of their phone that the government and the police ought not to be spying on on them while they do this. But yes, the scope of the right to privacy is a really contentious issue. And that is why we’ve put together this course.

HARRISON LOWMAN: It’s funny, I remember hearing years ago about police officers going in streetcars because they’re high off the street and looking down into people’s cars to be able to catch similarly people texting. So there’s all different.

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Well, this is a high accuracy drone with a zoom, Lens, looking down into your car to see what is on your phone.

HARRISON LOWMAN: Oh, interesting.

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: And taking photos of it.

HARRISON LOWMAN: to actually see what you’re looking at.

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Oh, yeah, yeah. I’m releasing pictures of it to the public.

HARRISON LOWMAN: Okay. So that’s another matter entirely. It gets a bit more 1984-y. Okay, correct me if I’m wrong here, but again, this is Contributing. And we saw the attack in, in Lindsay a few weeks ago where a man was charged for his attempt to protect his homes. An intruder came in at 3am and there’s a huge debate, details are still coming, but there’s a huge debate around whether Canadians are able to protect their property and their families when those are under threat by someone who’s coming into their house. There’s been discussions coming out of the assertion made by York police who said you should leave your keys by your door because there are people around that want to steal your car and to prevent them from coming into your house, why not leave your keys by the door to prevent them from coming inside. So anyway, this contributes to this whole aura, this feeling that not only are the people law enforcement, the people meant to protect us kind of stepping away from their role, but then we don’t have even the tools at our disposal to protect ourselves when they aren’t doing that.

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Yeah.

HARRISON LOWMAN: Does this not feed into, you get this feeling that it’s feeding into that, this general theme?

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: I mean, the frustration that so many people have at these two stories is people are entering private homes with weapons and you can’t defend yourself with physical force without fear of the criminal law being used against you defending yourself and your family. Now, again, there might be facts from the Lindsay story that we don’t know, but that’s what from an outside perspective it seems like. And then you have the police telling people, don’t defend your home, don’t defend your family, give up. And then we have by law enforcement in Hamilton saying you can’t even have security, security cameras to protect your home. When we have this context where homes are being broken into, including this man, the man who has these 10 cameras up, he put them up, he says, because his home had been repeatedly broken into.

HARRISON LOWMAN: Yeah. Like it’s a reaction to the trauma he faced. And ‘I don’t want this happening again.’

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s a reasonable thing to do to put these cameras up when your house is repeatedly broken into and when your neighbors homes are repeatedly broken into. And I just think that telling people to give up and surrender to lawlessness, people aren’t going to listen to that advice, first of all. But it actually, I think will have the reverse effect of encouraging even more vigilantism.

HARRISON LOWMAN: What’s the best argument you’ve heard from the other side? Because the pushback you’re getting, the populist pushback you’re getting from a lot of Canadians is to begin with, why are city staff wasting their Time on this. Like, should they not be focusing their efforts on actually stopping the crime in the first place, preventing it, or going after the people that then commit it? Like what do they have a leg to stand on? Have you found any part of their argument convincing whatsoever?

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: I’m not convinced because it doesn’t seem like the bylaw that this is within the scope of the bylaw. The, the policy rationale it seems to be for fortification law, anti fortification law, is that we don’t want to live in a surveillance state where every home is covered in cameras and barbed wire and laser sights and things like that. We don’t want to live in a society like that. Although my concern more broadly is on state surveillance, not on private homeowners surveilling to prevent people from breaking into their house. So I am sort of sympathetic to the idea that we should have laws that prevent the creation of a surveillance state broadly, even if it includes private actors. Like, I have sympathy for that, but especially because the police do rely on this footage. So there is state involvement to some degree. But I think in this particular case it just seems like some busy bodies who don’t like images being shared on Facebook of people who are addicted to drugs being captured on film, I think.

HARRISON LOWMAN: So it’s like a sensitivity issue.

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: And you know, I think, yeah, I think it’s probably progressive activists who are sympathetic to drug addicted people, which we should have sympathy for people who are exposed experiencing addiction, but we shouldn’t have sympathy for people who are committing crimes against our property and defending our property using security cameras, which is a very non violent and deterrence based prevention of crime is completely reasonable.

HARRISON LOWMAN: Yeah. And it shouldn’t come at the expense of people trying to protect their property, their homes, their families, et cetera. I take your point in that you look at places like South Africa and you talk about castle laws. People have literally had to build castles there and like, you know, 10 foot tall walls and security gates and private security. Like you really hope that that sort of stuff doesn’t enter Canada. You start to see it with the use of like bullards. People are buying bullards that then rise out of their parking spaces so that they prevent their cars from being stolen at night. So I think we see sort of a creep there.

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Right. In that regard, it reflects more of a failure of the. The state though. A failure of policing.

HARRISON LOWMAN: Yes.

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: The problem in South Africa isn’t that people are fortifying their homes. The problem is that there is crime to the degree that fortification is required. I don’t know if in 2010, when Hamilton enacted this bylaw, what situation they were faced with, if they were faced with the same level of violent crime or home invasions or the police response to those home invasions, which has been essentially to tell a lot of members of the public to give up and give in. But yeah, I think that it reflects more of a lack of trust in the police being able to do their job in Hamilton that people are putting up this many cameras on their property.

HARRISON LOWMAN: I think just looking at the bylaw, and I find it, it’s a bit humorous that it also mentions you can’t put up electrified fencing, hidden traps, electrified doors and windows, explosive devices. The idea that they have to put that in there, I wonder what prompted that. But as a whole, as you Home Alone prompted. Yeah, exactly. Home Alone came around. Well, the point is, this law is so many years old, it came out in 2010, and it does not account for the various pieces of technology that we’ve been talking about. And again, proves the need to update some of this legislation. Right. That what kind of cameras even existed back then? There were much.

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: I don’t know that it needs to be updated because I just still don’t think that this conduct even is captured by the bylaw. It’s out of scope by the bylaw’s own definition. There’s a whole section on the bylaw that talks about the scope of the bylaw, and it does not apply to commercially available surveillance equipment. And it only applies when that surveillance equipment is being used excessively and aimed at property outside of the homeowners property. So peripherally capturing other property should not be in the scope of this bylaw.

HARRISON LOWMAN: Okay, let’s end with this. I want to pull the lens back and look at a piece that we had up in the Hub today by Howard Anglin, who I know you know, and just I want to know how you folks and I spoke to your colleague Josh dehaas about this a few weeks ago, wrestle with this fact that, you know, you look at the crime severity index in this country and it’s down 4% in 2024 from the year before. But that does not connect with what people, especially in major urban centers here in Toronto, are feeling on the ground. Their experience when it comes to feeling unsafe, witnessing assaults, whether they be verbal or physical, hearing about B and E’s, hearing about cars being stolen. How do we sort of bridge that gap? How should we be thinking about this as news consumers and as Canadians?

CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Yeah, I think that our perception of crime rates is often skewed by a series of recent reports. So whatever sort of really dramatic story that’s in the news at the moment really sort of dictates what people think about crime and crime rates. I’m not an expert in crime statistics. I would be surprised if vehicle thefts are not up. I think that they are. But in terms of violent crime, the public perception usually has to do with high profile stories rather than the actual incidence rate. It’s sort of based on anecdotal sense of danger rather than real danger because I think overall in Canada, our crime rate still remains fairly low, especially these violent stranger attacks.

HARRISON LOWMAN: Okay, thank you very much, Christine. That’s Christine Van Geyn, litigation director for the Canadian Constitution Foundation. All the best.

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Christine Van Geyn, litigation director for the Canadian Constitution Foundation, discusses the controversial case of a Hamilton man ordered to remove 10 security cameras from his property under a 2010 municipal bylaw. She argues that the bylaw is being misapplied and is potentially a violation of rights. The conversation explores broader themes around property rights, privacy expectations in the digital age, and Canadians’ ability to protect their homes amid rising concerns about crime and perceived gaps in law enforcement response. You can listen to this episode on Amazon, Apple, and Spotify. Program Transcript This is an automated transcript. Please check against delivery. HARRISON LOWMAN: Welcome to Hub Hits. I’m Harrison Lowman, managing editor of the Hub. This week on Ontario, man was ordered by the city of Hamilton to immediately remove 10 security cameras he’d positioned outside his home to keep it safe. They said a 2010 bylaw stated residents are not allowed to have cameras that can view or listen beyond the perimeter of their land. In the midst of talk around crime and safety, it’s raised quite the furor across Canada. People are asking if this is a one off or there’ll be some sort of crackdown across the province when it comes to cameras. For more on the controversy and on property rights and your rights, I’m joined by Christine Van Geyn and litigation director for the Canadian Constitution Foundation. Christine, how are you doing? CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: I’m great. How are you? HARRISON LOWMAN: I’m good. So what did you make of this whole affair that’s been playing out for the past week or so? CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Yeah. So the details are where everything really matters. So there is a bylaw in Hamilton called the bylaw to prohibit and regulate fortification and protective elements of land. It has a number of definitions. One of them is a definition of excessive protective elements. And that definition includes surveillance equipment. But it is only when the surveillance equipment is designed or operated to view or listen to land outside of the perimeter of the home where the cameras are installed or where the lens of the camera has been obscured. So it’s sort of like a hidden camera. Now, 10 cameras in and of itself, I don’t think would qualify to meet this definition. It sort of depends on where the cameras are pointed. We don’t have the answer to that. But from the sounds of really seems like these are cameras that are capturing sort of incidental other property. They’re not aimed specifically at other property, which is where the problem would come in. HARRISON LOWMAN: The owner alleges that a unhappy neighbor launched a complaint, potentially because he’d been uploading some of these videos on Instagram. But he says that all these other neighbors have, you know, been okay with him having these up. As we know, cameras disincentivize criminals to rob your house and sometimes even help with your. Your house insurance. I believe in this case, the gentleman says he’s participated in the sharing evidence involving three homicides over 40 break and enters, multiple home invasions, car break and enters, assaults, and even around an investigation involving a serial killer in the area. So the police have actually come to him multiple times and said, can we use the evidence in those security cameras? I guess this leaves a lot of Canadians asking, like, what are your rights when it comes to protecting your property? Like, how could you summarize that for. CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Our viewers in terms of putting up surveillance on your property? My position is that you are entitled to put surveillance up on your property. The bylaw at issue here, I think is being applied inappropriately. The bylaw actually says that the scope of the law does not prohibit people who have commercially available surveillance equipment like video cameras for the purposes of preventing or recording crime on their property. Think of a ring doorbell. So I don’t think it doesn’t seem, unless there are facts that we don’t know, which is always possible. I just don’t think that this bylaw even would apply to this situation. And My expectation is that the city’s gonna have to walk this back. HARRISON LOWMAN: Yeah, apparently, like, they’ve told him he can apply for an exemption, but I love this because they’re asking him to do more bureaucratic work for them. He would have. CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: He shouldn’t have to apply for an exemption because it shouldn’t. Actually, it doesn’t seem like this is within the scope of the bylaw at all. They have to show that it’s excessive, that the cameras are pointed exactly outside of his property. Not just incidentally capturing, you know, the sidewalk or incidentally capturing other property. They have to show that it was aimed at that other property and it recording it. And I mean, maybe that’s possible, but I really am skeptical that it is because his next door neighbors, the reporting is his next door neighbors are totally fine with these cameras. I understand why. I mean, I grew up in the Hamilton area. The downtown from my childhood has had a lot of social problems with crime. And it’s the same today. So I understand if your neighbor was doing something to prevent crime that would impact your house positively, you’d probably be supportive of it. HARRISON LOWMAN: So they’re asking him for a letter of support from his landlord, signed permission from neighboring homes that are captured on the cameras, screenshots from the cameras and police reports regarding crime in the area and the support for the need for them. I’ll add to what you said. You mentioned growing up there. Record high number of shootings in Hamilton in 2024. 53, up from 35 in 2023. From your legal perch, Christine, like, what is private property? Like if I have a camera and it catches kind of inside your window from across the street, or it catches you in front of your car or your front lawn. Like, how should we understand private versus public property in this country? CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: I mean, the private property ends at the perimeter of the home. But the problem is when you are intentionally filming other people who are out in public. And you know, we don’t want to live in a society like that where there’s constant surveillance everywhere, everywhere you go, people that could implicate, if the government is doing it, your general privacy rights. But in this case, it just doesn’t seem to be the issue. The issue it seems to be, is there some busybody who noticed that this man is uploading the camera footage to social media? That happens all the time. By the way, I’m in neighborhood Facebook groups where this happens all the time. People share ring doorbell footage of a crime, and this guy just has more cameras than the average bear. And someone is up in arms about it and they brought bylaw down on him. But I think that there, I just don’t think this is an enforceable order. HARRISON LOWMAN: What is just to push back. What is privacy in 2025 though, Christine? Because, okay, I’m online constantly. My personal data is being scrubbed by the government, by corporations. You mentioned sort of ring cameras. There’s CCTV outside of every convenience store. There’s red light cameras. There’s people taking pictures of me potentially as I cross the street and they’re taking a picture of one of their friends. Like, what is reasonable when it comes to privacy in 2025? CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Yeah. So you’ve really hit a big crux of what the law is grappling with right now as we enter more of a surveillance era. The courts have traditionally treated privacy under constitutional law as existing. When you have a reasonable expectation of privacy privacy, and that expectation is objectively reasonable, we act. It’s a very complex area. A lot of this is still being litigated as new problems emerge. And that’s why we at the Canadian Constitution foundation actually put together a course on privacy where you can learn all of the most detailed nuances of this right at the ccf Cal learn. You know, one of the issues that we are grappling with right now is potential and potentially litigating is a story out of Kingston where the Kingston police have been flying a drone in traffic, like above a red light to look from above down into the, into the vehicle to capture pictures of people looking at their phone at a red light. And we say that that is the people have a reasonable expectation of privacy when they’re sitting inside their vehicle in the contents of their phone that the government and the police ought not to be spying on on them while they do this. But yes, the scope of the right to privacy is a really contentious issue. And that is why we’ve put together this course. HARRISON LOWMAN: It’s funny, I remember hearing years ago about police officers going in streetcars because they’re high off the street and looking down into people’s cars to be able to catch similarly people texting. So there’s all different. CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Well, this is a high accuracy drone with a zoom, Lens, looking down into your car to see what is on your phone. HARRISON LOWMAN: Oh, interesting. CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: And taking photos of it. HARRISON LOWMAN: to actually see what you’re looking at. CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Oh, yeah, yeah. I’m releasing pictures of it to the public. HARRISON LOWMAN: Okay. So that’s another matter entirely. It gets a bit more 1984-y. Okay, correct me if I’m wrong here, but again, this is Contributing. And we saw the attack in, in Lindsay a few weeks ago where a man was charged for his attempt to protect his homes. An intruder came in at 3am and there’s a huge debate, details are still coming, but there’s a huge debate around whether Canadians are able to protect their property and their families when those are under threat by someone who’s coming into their house. There’s been discussions coming out of the assertion made by York police who said you should leave your keys by your door because there are people around that want to steal your car and to prevent them from coming into your house, why not leave your keys by the door to prevent them from coming inside. So anyway, this contributes to this whole aura, this feeling that not only are the people law enforcement, the people meant to protect us kind of stepping away from their role, but then we don’t have even the tools at our disposal to protect ourselves when they aren’t doing that. CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Yeah. HARRISON LOWMAN: Does this not feed into, you get this feeling that it’s feeding into that, this general theme? CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: I mean, the frustration that so many people have at these two stories is people are entering private homes with weapons and you can’t defend yourself with physical force without fear of the criminal law being used against you defending yourself and your family. Now, again, there might be facts from the Lindsay story that we don’t know, but that’s what from an outside perspective it seems like. And then you have the police telling people, don’t defend your home, don’t defend your family, give up. And then we have by law enforcement in Hamilton saying you can’t even have security, security cameras to protect your home. When we have this context where homes are being broken into, including this man, the man who has these 10 cameras up, he put them up, he says, because his home had been repeatedly broken into. HARRISON LOWMAN: Yeah. Like it’s a reaction to the trauma he faced. And ‘I don’t want this happening again.’ CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s a reasonable thing to do to put these cameras up when your house is repeatedly broken into and when your neighbors homes are repeatedly broken into. And I just think that telling people to give up and surrender to lawlessness, people aren’t going to listen to that advice, first of all. But it actually, I think will have the reverse effect of encouraging even more vigilantism. HARRISON LOWMAN: What’s the best argument you’ve heard from the other side? Because the pushback you’re getting, the populist pushback you’re getting from a lot of Canadians is to begin with, why are city staff wasting their Time on this. Like, should they not be focusing their efforts on actually stopping the crime in the first place, preventing it, or going after the people that then commit it? Like what do they have a leg to stand on? Have you found any part of their argument convincing whatsoever? CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: I’m not convinced because it doesn’t seem like the bylaw that this is within the scope of the bylaw. The, the policy rationale it seems to be for fortification law, anti fortification law, is that we don’t want to live in a surveillance state where every home is covered in cameras and barbed wire and laser sights and things like that. We don’t want to live in a society like that. Although my concern more broadly is on state surveillance, not on private homeowners surveilling to prevent people from breaking into their house. So I am sort of sympathetic to the idea that we should have laws that prevent the creation of a surveillance state broadly, even if it includes private actors. Like, I have sympathy for that, but especially because the police do rely on this footage. So there is state involvement to some degree. But I think in this particular case it just seems like some busy bodies who don’t like images being shared on Facebook of people who are addicted to drugs being captured on film, I think. HARRISON LOWMAN: So it’s like a sensitivity issue. CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: And you know, I think, yeah, I think it’s probably progressive activists who are sympathetic to drug addicted people, which we should have sympathy for people who are exposed experiencing addiction, but we shouldn’t have sympathy for people who are committing crimes against our property and defending our property using security cameras, which is a very non violent and deterrence based prevention of crime is completely reasonable. HARRISON LOWMAN: Yeah. And it shouldn’t come at the expense of people trying to protect their property, their homes, their families, et cetera. I take your point in that you look at places like South Africa and you talk about castle laws. People have literally had to build castles there and like, you know, 10 foot tall walls and security gates and private security. Like you really hope that that sort of stuff doesn’t enter Canada. You start to see it with the use of like bullards. People are buying bullards that then rise out of their parking spaces so that they prevent their cars from being stolen at night. So I think we see sort of a creep there. CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Right. In that regard, it reflects more of a failure of the. The state though. A failure of policing. HARRISON LOWMAN: Yes. CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: The problem in South Africa isn’t that people are fortifying their homes. The problem is that there is crime to the degree that fortification is required. I don’t know if in 2010, when Hamilton enacted this bylaw, what situation they were faced with, if they were faced with the same level of violent crime or home invasions or the police response to those home invasions, which has been essentially to tell a lot of members of the public to give up and give in. But yeah, I think that it reflects more of a lack of trust in the police being able to do their job in Hamilton that people are putting up this many cameras on their property. HARRISON LOWMAN: I think just looking at the bylaw, and I find it, it’s a bit humorous that it also mentions you can’t put up electrified fencing, hidden traps, electrified doors and windows, explosive devices. The idea that they have to put that in there, I wonder what prompted that. But as a whole, as you Home Alone prompted. Yeah, exactly. Home Alone came around. Well, the point is, this law is so many years old, it came out in 2010, and it does not account for the various pieces of technology that we’ve been talking about. And again, proves the need to update some of this legislation. Right. That what kind of cameras even existed back then? There were much. CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: I don’t know that it needs to be updated because I just still don’t think that this conduct even is captured by the bylaw. It’s out of scope by the bylaw’s own definition. There’s a whole section on the bylaw that talks about the scope of the bylaw, and it does not apply to commercially available surveillance equipment. And it only applies when that surveillance equipment is being used excessively and aimed at property outside of the homeowners property. So peripherally capturing other property should not be in the scope of this bylaw. HARRISON LOWMAN: Okay, let’s end with this. I want to pull the lens back and look at a piece that we had up in the Hub today by Howard Anglin, who I know you know, and just I want to know how you folks and I spoke to your colleague Josh dehaas about this a few weeks ago, wrestle with this fact that, you know, you look at the crime severity index in this country and it’s down 4% in 2024 from the year before. But that does not connect with what people, especially in major urban centers here in Toronto, are feeling on the ground. Their experience when it comes to feeling unsafe, witnessing assaults, whether they be verbal or physical, hearing about B and E’s, hearing about cars being stolen. How do we sort of bridge that gap? How should we be thinking about this as news consumers and as Canadians? CHRISTINE VAN GEYN: Yeah, I think that our perception of crime rates is often skewed by a series of recent reports. So whatever sort of really dramatic story that’s in the news at the moment really sort of dictates what people think about crime and crime rates. I’m not an expert in crime statistics. I would be surprised if vehicle thefts are not up. I think that they are. But in terms of violent crime, the public perception usually has to do with high profile stories rather than the actual incidence rate. It’s sort of based on anecdotal sense of danger rather than real danger because I think overall in Canada, our crime rate still remains fairly low, especially these violent stranger attacks. HARRISON LOWMAN: Okay, thank you very much, Christine. That’s Christine Van Geyn, litigation director for the Canadian Constitution Foundation. All the best.

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