People of Winnipeg Facebook page shows city warts and all

A popular Facebook page showing Winnipeggers in a not always flattering light is drawing fire from some who work with the city’s poor and homeless.

People of Winnipeg (POW) has more than 17,000 members who post everything from eye-catching urban scenery to photos of people’s bad parking jobs and sometimes questionable fashion choices.

But what’s got some critics up in arms are a number of shots of people, some aboriginal, who appear passed out on the sidewalk or a bus shelter, or rolling around with a shopping cart.

Althea Guiboche, who hands out food to the homeless every week, told CBC News the page should be taken down because it makes fun of people who are obviously struggling. She said she couldn’t believe Winnipeggers were even doing this.

"I would hope all those people try to find something inside themselves to not post stuff like that," she told CBC News.

There’s little doubt no one would want their friends and family to see them in the condition depicted in the POW’s photos and videos (there’s one video of a man picking through the bed of a pickup truck for returnable cans).

Mark Stewart, residential services co-ordinator for the Salvation Army’s Booth Centre, said when he first looked at the POW page he thought its depiction of funny aspects of the city was amusing.

“But then the more and more you look at it, the more you see people getting their picture taken probably in their worst possible moment,” Stewart, whose facility serves about 330 homeless people daily, told Yahoo Canada News.

Stewart was encouraged by some of the comments on the page reacting to the photos and defending their subjects as human beings deserving of dignity.

“I think really [the posters] are just being bullies and being mean and making fun of people,” he said. “But there’s always a 50-50 thing even on the Internet, that if you try to embarrass somebody there’s always going to be somebody that’s actually going to stand up for them.”

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There’s no question POW gives people a warts-and-all look at Winnipeg street life, but it may help foster discussion about the problems of poverty and homelessness in the city.

"Is this the best showcase to try and spotlight this?" Stewart wondered. "I don’t know.”

The answer in the end is no, Stewart concluded. There are more enlightened ways to highlight the problem, which already has a strong profile in Winnipeg. Stewart pointed to a 10-year proposal to end homelessness in the city unveiled last April by a community task force.

Dozens of Winnipeg’s top executives are also going to be sleeping rough on Sept. 18 to spotlight homelessness.

All of which does little to remove the shame that must be evident for those whose images end up on POW. Do they have any right to their privacy?

Under current Canadian law the short answer is no.

Halifax lawyer David Fraser said in general, people have no legal expectation of privacy in a public place when what they are doing is visible to others.

Canadian law enshrines a compelling public interest in news media for being allowed to record images in public places.

“It’s the same kind of interest that allows a journalist to take a picture of a crowd or a scene,” Fraser, who writes on the issue on his Canadian Privacy Law blog, told Yahoo Canada News.

That right extends to commercial street photographers who have operated for more than a century and to today’s social media.

Fraser said the flap over candid street photography isn’t new. It goes all the way back to the Kodak Box Brownie, which gave ordinary people the ability to take snapshots without the cumbersome equipment previously used.

“There were people who were calling for a ban on the Kodak camera when the first cheap portable cameras were made because of fears there would be Kodakers besetting people, hiding in bushes and taking compromising paparazzi-type pictures of everybody,” he said.

There have been similar instances of what Fraser calls “techno panic” over the introduction of camera-equipped smartphones a decade ago and more recently Google Glass and camera-toting drones.

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Fraser said any legal attempt to curtail the kinds of publicly shot images seen on POW or similar sites would likely run up against Charter guarantees of freedom of expression.

The line is drawn if that photographic intrusion extends into someone’s home. But where does that leave the homeless?

The 45-year-old Manitoba Privacy Act, one of the oldest pieces of privacy legislation in Canada, forbids intruding on individuals in their home “or other place of residence.” No one has tested whether a homeless person’s piece of sidewalk or heating grate constitutes a place or residence under the act, Fraser noted.

Roger McConchie, a prominent libel and privacy lawyer in Vancouver, said even that kind of challenge might have trouble succeeding. A public-interest defence is still available to the media, including operators of a Facebook page.

But just because it’s legal doesn’t necessarily make it right, said Fraser.

“Not everything unpleasant, rude, boorish, dickish, for what of a better term, is illegal but that doesn’t make it any less boorish or dickish,” he said.

The only real arbiters of what’s on POW are the page’s administrators and Facebook itself, which can remove posts it deems unacceptable.

Neither of the two (out of four) POW administrators contacted by Yahoo Canada News responded to a request for comment. Administrator Ricky Paskie told CBC News the site tries to remove items deemed offensive but it’s difficult with more than 200 posts a day.

In a comment last week, administrator Jesse James defended POW’s approach.

"This group is about posting pictures of people who are out in public doing crazy things that may seem very unrealistic but are very real," he wrote. "The group is about finding the funny moments that are right in front of us every day because we live in a crazy city."

No one from Facebook responded to Yahoo Canada New’s requests for comment on POW’s content.