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Laws across Canada controlling and policing panhandling vary widely depending on the city, but the unwritten rules on the street amongst beggars are pretty much the same wherever you go.

From Montreal to Edmonton to Vancouver, “panners” often respect a kind of beggars' code: rules that govern how and where they can raise money. They may in most cases be only collecting coins, but it's clearly a profitable business.

For Louie, who makes roughly $7 an hour, adding up to $200 a week, his “office” seven days a week, four hours a day is the entrance to Granville SkyTrain station in Vancouver's downtown.

Estimates of how many “panners” there are in Vancouver vary but some say it is a hardcore group of about 75 regulars. They know each other, and respect each other's territory. Louie says he secured the Granville Street site only when his predecessor “retired.” Being there day in and day out for three years since has officially staked the 53-year-old's claim.

There's an unspoken rule not to “cut another guy's grass,” he explained. It's one person per 100-metre radius, and first-come, first-serve – with trumping rights going to panners with seniority. But there's still a gentlemanly aspect to this street code.

In Montreal, panhandlers protect their corners of concrete like office workers treat their cubicles – with a few punches thrown in.

Herman Allen begs in front of Schwartz's deli, Montreal's famed smoked-meat shrine. The 57-year-old takes turns sharing this prime panhandling spot with one or two other men. They have banded together to keep interlopers out.

“We've been here so long it's like it's ours,” said Mr. Allen, who often unrolls the deli's awning and sweeps the sidewalk before customers start arriving toward 9 a.m. “Other guys stop by but as soon as they see us come up, they leave. They don't argue.”

No one knows exactly how many people are living on the streets in Montreal – estimates vary wildly from a few thousand to 30,000 depending on whom you count. And the way they spend the money in their upturned caps and cups varies too. Many support drug and alcohol habits, others buy cigarettes, while others pay debts or the rent on an occasional room.

Earnings vary too, but it's not uncommon to make $100 a day. Some panhandlers say the scruffier and more pitiable they look, the better their yield. Motorists in beat-up cars are more generous than drivers of luxury vehicles. Winter is more lucrative than summer, and payday among working stiffs – typically Thursdays or Fridays – find donors at their most openhanded.

Central to collecting is staying off one another's turf. On Viger Avenue, a busy access road to a downtown Montreal expressway, panhandlers stand at successive street corners like human tollbooths. Donny, Gaston, Gilles, Red, Gaétan and “Ti-Père” have their posts and respect one another. Theirs is an organization as elaborate as a small business, replete with hierarchies.

Donny, a 37-year-old who spent many years in Calgary, shares his corner with Gaétan, a veteran who's been there 12 years. “Whenever Gaétan shows up I give up my spot. He's been here longer than I have so he's got seniority. That's how it works on the streets. It's very respectful.”

A welfare recipient, Donny planned to use his panhandled cash one day this week on rent, hot dogs, and morphine. Tipping his Grand Prix cap and smiling at motorists, he says he finds Montreal a pretty tolerant place.

“The people here are very generous. Even the cops are okay.”

Police and shelter workers say they recall no major assaults involving the homeless or panhandlers in Montreal in years, although some storeowners complain about unruly behaviour. As a result, Montreal hasn't been shielded from the hardening attitudes toward street people.

Montreal's Ville Marie borough last year began banning street kids and homeless people from 15 downtown squares from midnight to 6 a.m. This year it banned dogs from two city squares frequented by squeegee kids. In the three years leading to 2006, Montreal police and subway officers issued 15,000 tickets to people with no fixed address, a homeless advocacy group says.

In Edmonton, Don Unger always keeps his eyes peeled for two things: coins and cops.

The 58-year-old former oil-patch worker and welfare recipient has been begging for change at various corners in downtown Edmonton for years. The grandfather said because the city doesn't have a specific bylaw policing panhandling, he's usually told by officers to move along. He hates when that happens because he can lose hours of begging money.

The former crack addict said most of his colleagues are polite but when big events come to town, such as the Capital Ex annual fair, more aggressive panhandlers “come out of the woodwork” to capitalize on the extra money walking around Edmonton.

When that happens, Mr. Unger prefers to stay home at his government-subsidized one-bedroom apartment and wait it out. In some situations, he will chase “the opportunists” away himself. “Those guys give all of us bad names,” Mr. Unger said.

He pockets about $20 a day, usually collecting money from women. Mr. Unger, who moved to Alberta from British Columbia in the 1970s during the last big economic boom, said businessmen – he calls them the “pinstripes” – are often the rudest to panhandlers. “They won't even acknowledge that you exist, but you can hear them jingling their change. They will jingle it on purpose.”

In Edmonton, if police or peace officers want to crack down on aggressive panhandlers they can enforce a traffic bylaw that states: “No person shall crowd, jostle or harass pedestrians in such a manner as to create or cause discomfort, disturbance or confusions.”

Mayor Stephen Mandel said earlier this year that he would like more to done to deal with aggressive panhandlers and suggested the city should do more to control the problem.

Much stricter rules already exist in Calgary. Alberta's largest city has adopted a series of bylaws and even endorsed an advertising campaign aimed at stamping out panhandling.

In 1999, Calgary city council first outlawed aggressive begging, which is defined as those who continue to ask for money after being declined or the use of threatening or insulting behaviour. The city has also banned bothering motorists and passive requests at night, near financial institutions or transit stations. Aggressive panhandlers are fined $50 for the first offence and $100 for subsequent offences.

But despite all these rules, panhandling in Calgary hasn't gone away. Bill Bruce, the city's manager of bylaw and animal services, said with the massive influx of people to Calgary in recent years, there has been an increasing number of panhandling complaints and tickets being issued.

However, he said Calgary's problem with aggressive panhandling isn't nearly as bad as larger centres such as Toronto and that the measures in place are working to an extent. It's estimated that well-intentioned Calgarians hand out an estimated $10-million a year to panhandlers.

Back in Vancouver, Louie, who wouldn't give his last name, is not having a good day. He is trying to collect enough money to stay at the Salvation Army shelter. In 2 1/2 hours, he has collected only $2.35 in a worn Starbucks cup positioned in front of him.

The slightly built man was a heroin addict for 30 years, until he cleaned up and switched to methadone two years ago. After his 10-year marriage broke up in 1983, he moved from Edmonton to Vancouver when a job with a paint company beckoned.

When that organization went bankrupt, he found himself out of a job, with a habit and mouth to feed. A friend who had been begging for years suggested Louie give it a try.

This combination of circumstance and desperation is the typical push toward panhandling, says Paul McClelland, crisis shelter manager for Covenant House in Vancouver. There are no hard figures, but Mr. McClelland estimates there are 1,000 to 1,200 beggars around the city at any given time.

As many as half of these beggars have homes, usually a three-metre-square, bug-infested room in the Downtown Eastside.

Like Louie, many of the homeless in Vancouver migrated from Eastern Canada, lured by the warmer climate and the image of a west-coast lifestyle, Mr. McClelland says. Some are career panhandlers, but others resort to panhandling as a temporary fix – like François Barbeau.

The 39-year-old Quebec native has been begging, and sleeping, on the downtown Vancouver streets for the past week. He says he averages about $20 a day. “I just need enough to buy my mickey, some food, smokes, that's it,” he said.

He had been working in construction, but stopped after an injury. He's been begging for cash while the injury heals. The parolee – he was released from jail last year after a serving 10 years for robbery – says he didn't want to land himself back behind bars to make ends meet.

“I'm not going to break the law. That's why I bum … I need to survive,” Mr. Barbeau said.

With a report from Dawn Walton in Calgary