There have never been any squeegee kids out here in rural Ontario where I live.  I can’t say I’ve missed them.  My car’s windshield wipers have always done a perfectly good job—so good, in fact, that when I stop to fill up at my local gas station, I frequently decline the attendant’s offer to wash my windows for free.

I suspect that windshield wipers work equally well in cities, which explains why Toronto motorists found it annoying to have people descend upon them at red lights seeking payment for providing something they already had.
The notion that squeegee kids are entrepreneurs doing valuable work for honest pay strikes me as a pathetic fiction.  I think the squeegee is merely a prop, similar to the sad-eyed pets that other semi-imaginative beggars equip themselves with.  What they’re really relying on is motorists’ charity, guilt or fear, not any genuine demand for window-washing services.

Unfortunately Ontario’s new Safe Streets Act, which outlaws squeegee solicitations on public streets, has served only to kick off further legal and ethical confusion on this subject.  Spokesmen pro and con have talked all around the issue for years now, without ever getting to the real heart of the problem.

For instance, one Toronto lawyer has threatened to challenge the squeegee ban in court, pro bono.  His contest "will turn on whether individuals are allowed to perform this type of job and whether the Constitution protects an individual’s choice of employment."

It’s hard to fathom why he thinks Canadian courts would adopt a "pro-business" stance in this case.  Time and again, they have declared, inexplicably, that the freedom to transact business as one chooses is not part of Charter-protected liberty.

However, framing this situation as an issue of occupational freedom misses the point.  The conflict here is not over whether people can wash windshields for living.  The conflict is over where.

My right to practice law doesn’t include the right to set up shop in your living room.  A person’s right to wash cars, or parts of cars, doesn’t mean he can commandeer my driveway or someone’s private parking lot.  That would be trespassing.  But these are easy cases.

The hard case arises, as always, when the site is public property rather than private.  Who owns the streets?  Nobody—and everybody.  So who gets to decide what use will be made of them?  Without private property rights, the answer is inevitably a political one.  The government of the day decides.

Is this unfair to squeegee kids?  Of course it is.  While they probably don’t pay income tax, they do pay sales tax on whatever they buy.  So they can rightfully claim to be taxpayers, just like the folks who hold down regular jobs.  Why can’t they use their share of the roads as they please?  But then, why can’t their co-owners do likewise?

There is no right solution to this problem because the situation itself is built upon a foundation of wrongdoing.  All taxpayers are coerced by the state into parting with their tax money under threat of force.  The pooled plunder is used to maintain the roads, among other things.  But once the money has already been extracted from its rightful owners, there’s no fair or even rational way to allocate the use of the commingled resources.  The only fair thing to do would be not to steal it in the first place.

I don’t expect to see any Canadian court within my lifetime declaring taxation to be a violation of liberty under the Charter (although I’d be delighted if one decided to prove this prediction wrong.).  However, until we recognize that public ownership of property is neither a fair, nor an effective, nor a necessary way to run things, we’ll face this issue over and over again, and every court decision will violate someone’s rights.  The only choice will be whose.

The Safe Streets Act doesn’t violate occupational freedom.  It doesn’t prevent squeegee kids from plying their trade if they can find some property owner willing to let them operate on their premises.  They could try to strike a deal wherever cars line up—at drive-through restaurants or banks, hotel entrances, or parking lots.  Frankly, I doubt whether any private property owner would consider a resident squeegeeist to be an asset to their premises.  However, it’s not the law that’s responsible for thwarting squeegee kids’ career choice.  It’s reality.