Vancouverites can spend a day at Wreck Beach in the nude, but they could face more than raised eyebrows for doing it at other beaches in the city.
According to the Canadian Criminal Code section 174, no one can be nude, without lawful excuse, in a public space or on private property while exposed to public view; it doesn’t matter if the property is their own or not.
Anyone nude in public view is “guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.”
Vancouver Criminal Lawyer Kyla Lee said nude bike rides or other nude demonstrations are technically illegal. But since they are “protests” that usually involve some form of civil disobedience, police generally “look the other way (so to speak).”
“It’s not harming anyone and arguably not indecent in and of itself,” she told V.I.A.
“If the nude bike riders started doing sexual acts or made a point of deliberately exposing their genitals to passersby (like shaking their penises at people or going spreadeagle or something) that would certainly take it from permissible or excusable and into impermissible and illegal.”
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Lee points out that “technically you can be topless as a woman wherever you want.”
While Indecency criminal laws prohibit nudity in public places, an Ontario woman challenged that rule in the 1990s in Ontario and won. After that, B.C. followed suit and stopped enforcing nudity laws against topless women.
Other places don’t allow youth or have other stipulations that make nudity legal.
“You can be completely nude on nude beaches (ie, Wreck Beach) because people under 16 aren’t supposed to be there. Similarly, you can be nude if you have a ‘lawful excuse.’ I suppose if there were a permitted nudist event where there were walls or something to keep non-nudist folks from viewing it that would be a lawful excuse,” Lee explains.
