During Montreal's summer festival businesses are pressuring the government to remove the city's homeless from the streets. As a result, the local police are handing out more tickets to homeless people, for such things as panhandling and loitering. Most of the homeless people who recieve these tickets cannot afford to pay their fines and so, end up in jail. The director of RAPSIM (a Montreal advocacy group for the homeless) says that ticketing is not the solution to homelessness; in fact, evidence has shown that it costs more to keep the homeless people unable to pay their tickets in jail, than the amount of the ticket they were charged. Although the Quebec Human Rights Commission is looking into the situation, no solutions have been put forward. For more information read the CBC article on the jailing of homeless people.

Justice for Girls, a Vancouver-based advocacy group for girls in poverty, released preliminary results from a multi-year study on girls’ experiences in prisons in Western Canada entitled Locking Them Up To Keep Them "Safe": Criminalized Girls in British Columbia (in PDF).