A churchyard homeless encampment was cleared less than 24 hours after a priest received the Toronto Book Award for writing about it
Reverend Maggie Helwig called the eviction a “very sad moment”
The Toronto Book Award was given to Reverend Maggie Helwig this week, lauding her memoir Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community, written about her fight to allow unhoused community members to live in the churchyard at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Anglican Church in Kensington Market, where she is the priest.
A Quill and Quire review said the book “shines a light on injustice,” and Toronto author Shawn Micallef wrote that Helwig’s “storytelling from the front lines of Toronto’s housing tragedy is vivid, vital and profoundly human.”
Less than 24 hours after the award was presented, the encampment Helwig wrote about was cleared by city staff, following a removal order from Toronto Fire Services, which said the Bellevue Avenue site posed a safety risk due to the presence of combustible materials.
According to CP24, the city said all encampment residents were offered shelter space and seven accepted. But Helwig, calling the eviction “a very sad moment,” said encampment residents were reluctant to move to city-run shelters. “Shelter space is not a long-term solution,” she told the outlet. “It’s not a particularly manageable way of living. It’s not a particularly tolerable living environment—for all the stresses and rigours of living outdoors, a lot of people find it is a better environment than a city shelter.”
About yesterday’s encampment clearing, Helwig said, “It is extremely distressing. It’s just trauma layered on trauma. I’m very worried about what effect this is going to have on people’s mental health.”
Less than a month ago, the city also cleared the encampment at Dufferin Grove Park. Six people were arrested days later for going back.
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
