Encampment: Resistance, Grace and an Unhoused Community. By Maggie Helwig, May 2025. ISBN 9781552455043, e-ISBN 9781770568426, 200 pp, $24.95.
I didn’t intend to review this book. Knowing almost nothing about the encampments of unhoused people that are springing up in towns and cities across Ontario, I thought I should find someone else to write it, someone qualified.
But then some tents and tiny homes moved into the park beside the Synod Office, where I work, and I began to ask myself some questions. Who are these people? Where do they come from? Why are they sleeping outside? And most pressingly, how do they make it through the winter?
So I began to read Encampment, just to see if it would provide me with some answers, and I’m really glad I did because it gave me so much more.
The story revolves around the encampment at St. Stephen in-the-Fields church in Kensington Market in Toronto and the efforts of its priest, the Rev. Canon Maggie Helwig, and her colleagues to look after, defend and advocate for the people who called the place home. The encampment lasted from about 2022 to 2024, when the City finally tore most it down, encircled the ground with a tall fence and put concrete blocks inside it.
“I am writing this because I want you to understand my world, the world I live in, and the world I live alongside,” writes Canon Helwig at the beginning of the book. A little further on she writes, “This is one story, flawed and incomplete, of people who have been trying to look after each other in very hard times, and some of the ways in which we have been changed.”
Canon Helwig lives in and alongside worlds that most of us could scarcely imagine. Ministering to an encampment and its inhabitants is hard, grinding work. It is a world of non-stop need, of exhausting battles with bureaucracy, of endless loss, of disappearance and death, of angry neighbours and apathetic officials, of harassment and humiliation, of heartbreaking vulnerability.
Indeed, it would be almost impossible to read this book if it weren’t for the fact that Canon Helwig is a natural storyteller who effortlessly weaves the various threads of her worlds into a rich, compelling tapestry. She is a candid and surprisingly non-judgmental writer. She also has a wonderfully dry sense of humour with an eye for the comical and absurd – a precious asset for a book such as this.
And she’s entirely at home in the worlds she writes about. “I have never been much more than a tourist in the land of the well,” she writes. “And probably I should have been more patient, and I should have been more understanding. But the land of affliction is, one way and another, my home.”
Wisely, she doesn’t try to write a step-by-step account of the encampment at St. Stephen’s and its eventual and inevitable destruction – the media did a pretty good job of that. Rather, she tells the story of those strange and trying years through the stories of the people who lived there, stories that she was given either formally or through long relationships. “I have a profound responsibility to these stories, a responsibility to tell them, and to tell them as truly as I can,” she writes.
We learn about Chaz the Agent of Chaos, about Douglas and Robin and Isaac, about Jeff and his dog Taurus, about Pirate and the Artist. We learn about the Jane and John Does who come and go and the unnamed girl who died of an overdose beside the church. It’s not a pretty picture but it’s endlessly fascinating. These people keep going despite unbelievable odds against them. They are tenacious and fragile, difficult and loveable, hyper-vigilant and too trusting. They are creative and funny, exasperating and argumentative. They just want to live in peace like everyone else. Most of all, they want to belong somewhere.
As Canon Helwig writes, they’re pretty much the same as the rest of us, except we get to hide it all behind walls.
To her credit, Canon Helwig doesn’t demonize the folks on the other side of the great divide – the city staffers who suddenly show up and frighten everyone, the bylaw enforcement officers serving notice after notice, the jaded bureaucrats, the bogus neighbourhood improvement groups calling for change, the local councillor, the right-wing political candidate who shows up to make a speech, Mayor John Tory, the police and firefighters, the principal and parents of the local Montessori school. Even the Claw, the monstrous machine that the City uses to pluck up tents, tarps, plastic wraps, sleeping bags, boarding and anything else people use to shelter themselves in encampments.
If it wasn’t so tragic, the whole thing would be a farce. And it’s not going to end anytime soon, writes Canon Helwig. As the fight for resources intensifies and the social fabric continues to unravel, there will be more encampments, more unhoused people, more confrontations, more Claws.
But she’s not without hope. Interspersed throughout the story are passages of scripture, quotes from a book by Archbishop Rowan Williams and excerpts from her own sermons given during that time. Her faith is steadfast. Her strength and inspiration is Jesus. “We must love,” she writes. “We must love among the hate and the injustice, among the ruins, we must love those who do nothing to earn our love…”
There are two other aspects of this book that make it worth reading. One is that it provides a rare glimpse into an inner-city parish that is trying to operate in the most challenging of circumstances. The other is that it touches on one of the strangest times in Toronto’s history, from about 2014 to 2024, a decade that included searing heat, orange skies, woodsmoke, a serial killer in the Gay Village, social distancing, masks, COVID-19 and the commodification of housing. It is a vivid snapshot of our recent past, whether we like it or not.
For all the saints