Tents in the Churchyard

Homelessness has started to redefine the urban experience in Canada. It is hard to walk, ride, or commute the streets of any city without intersecting with unhoused people. In Montreal, where I live, barely a day goes by that the media doesn’t report on problems of itinérance. Our transit system, the Société de transport de Montréal, recently announced it had no choice but to be more aggressive in evicting homeless people from its stations, due to feelings of insecurity among riders. Local hospitals are also noting more and more unhoused people squatting in emergency rooms. Even Trudeau International Airport has a homeless village of approximately fifty within its walls.

Then there are outdoor homeless encampments, the most famous being on Rue Notre-Dame, near the boarded‑up Molson Brewery. It numbered over 300 people during the early days of the COVID‑19 pandemic. Officials eventually disbanded it for fire safety reasons, but it has occasionally been resurrected, albeit in a smaller size. Over 450 other encampments were dismantled across the metropolis in 2024.

The intensifying homelessness crisis is caused, in large part, by a housing crisis. There simply isn’t enough affordable lodging for all, and there isn’t enough emergency shelter space for those who want or need it. It’s therefore not surprising that homeless people are spilling out into public spaces. Yet the stories and the statistics of encampment creation and dismantlement rarely give insight into those actually living in places never intended for their use. Instead, these portraits are usually of an unkempt and drugged‑up mass. The absence of nuance contributes to the stigmatization of campers as meritless criminals deserving little more than incarceration. In this context, Maggie Helwig’s Encampment is a timely corrective.

Helwig is called Mother Maggie by the parishioners at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields, an Anglican church near Toronto’s Kensington Market, where she has been the priest since 2013. Encampment is essentially her journal about those who set up their tents in the churchyard during the pandemic, some briefly and some for longer spells, and how she and her allies attempted to protect them from the forces of eviction.

Helwig adeptly describes the members of what is a colourful community of mutual support. Readers meet the ostensible mayor, Jeff, who flits about, checking on the welfare of others, including Robin, Pirate, Isaac, Douglas, Chaz the Agent of Chaos, and the Artist, who believes she owns “eight hundred houses in other dimensions.” Their individuality, distinctiveness, and interdependence are on full display, in contrast to the monolithic treatment homeless people often receive. In June 2023, five months before the city cleared the site after a lengthy legal dispute, a Globe and Mail columnist wrote that, according to Helwig, “many camp dwellers are good people who cut each other’s hair, guard each other’s belongings and rush to administer life-saving drugs when friends suffer overdoses.” Her book is filled with examples of such humanity; one can’t help but root for these resilient souls who, because of poverty, illness, or misfortune, have found themselves clinging to one another — and to Helwig — in the “storm” of a housing crisis. “This is the flood that each one of us is trying to survive,” Helwig writes.

She offers vivid accounts of bureaucratic and often dysfunctional services, along with the competing agendas of elected councillors that result in ever-changing rules for encampments. Helwig irreverently dubs three boorish officials Molly, Polly, and Mr. Holly, and she refers to the city’s compact excavator —“one of the best-known and most-feared machines in the world of encampments”— as the Claw. Readers may shake their heads at how a municipality could act so incompetently and so inhumanely at the same time. “A dystopia would never be this absurd,” Helwig writes. I wish the reality she poignantly recounts were limited to Toronto, yet many cities struggle to make and implement coherent plans.

While Encampment is a call to action for all authorities to up their game, it does have drawbacks. Helwig tries to give credit where credit is due, but she can’t seem to help playing the constant blame game. Readers will sense early on that there is an entirely other side to this story, like that of a nearby Montessori school, which is portrayed as a group of heartless ogres who truly have it in for St. Stephen’s. Readers may also frown about the religious overtones of the book and the verbatim inclusion of several of Helwig’s homilies and sermons. Details of the numerous personal challenges she faced during the period covered, mostly involving her husband, child, and cat, might have better been left for a future memoir, while other pages are given over to situations with only tangential connections to the primary story, including a long sidebar on a serial killer in the local Gay Village who was arrested in 2018.

On balance, however, Encampment represents an important contribution to literature regarding homelessness of the “absolute” kind — or rough sleeping. It’s a big-league issue, and Helwig demonstrates that a big-league response is necessary. Mother Maggie and other front-line heroes can’t be expected to provide the entire range of services necessary for those struggling to find affordable housing. That responsibility rests with better governments than we currently possess.