There is nowhere to go

This column will be published in January, but as I write, it is just about one year since the City of Toronto partially evicted the encampment in our churchyard (which was, as we all learned, not church property but a transportation right-of-way). Two people have continued to live in the tiny area that is actually church property, and a few others have come and gone. Half of the churchyard is now, and has been for a year, blocked off by an eight-foot metal fence surrounding a mass of concrete blocks, something that makes it very hard for us, as a parish, to present a welcoming face to the neighbourhood. We have asked the city over and over to consider taking down the fence, which attracts garbage dumping and is a safety hazard, as well as being unsightly, but so far it has refused, even though on the night that it was put up, I was told that it would be there “for the weekend.” Some people have set up tents on the other half of the yard – there is a large tent housing three people there as write – but they have been anxious about what the city might do, knowing now that the church doesn’t own the land, and sometimes don’t stay long.

As for the people who left the churchyard, nearly all are still living in encampments. I know of one person who went to a shelter-hotel the night of the eviction, and seems to be thriving there, but most of the others are in Bellevue Square Park, or Clarence Square, or down by the lakeshore. We visit them as much as we can, and they visit us at our Friday night drop-in; we try to retain those relationships. Some of them have been evicted from other encampments several times since leaving the churchyard. In most cases, their mental and physical health has deteriorated. And at the same time, the provincial government is well on the way to closing both of the nearby safe consumption sites, meaning that we will find more bodies in our yard, more bodies in our stairwell, more deaths we were unable to prevent.

There is nowhere to go. In a particularly depressing exercise in cognitive dissonance, Gord Tanner, the head of Toronto Shelter and Support Services, recently presented the city’s winter plan, admitting openly that it would not be anything close to sufficient to meet the obvious need, but also saying that it would include city workers going out to “encourage people to shelter indoors.” Why, in this crisis, the city persists in rhetoric that blames vulnerable people for failing to go to an “indoors” that doesn’t exist is something I still cannot understand.

The City of Toronto has been better than many. They are creating some new supportive housing – not nearly enough, but probably as much as they can without more assistance from other levels of government. Mayor Chow did not sign, and openly criticized, the letter sent to Doug Ford by 12 other Ontario mayors, demanding that the notwithstanding clause be used to suspend the Charter rights of homeless people and empower these mayors to “move encampment residents along.” (Along to where, we must wonder; perhaps medically assisted death?)

But right now – and although it has been an exceptionally, indeed frighteningly, mild November, it will surely be cold by the time you read this – there is nowhere to go. During the warmer weather, we worked with the two people on church property, and others with whom we have close relationships, to sort out some of their longstanding legal issues, connect them with primary care and help them attend hospital appointments. But during the coldest months, our focus is mostly on just trying to keep people from freezing. Giving out blankets, gloves, handwarmers, hot food, hot coffee – the small things we can do.

Last year, when the city put out a request for spaces to offer themselves as emergency warming centres, we submitted an application, along with a number of other Anglican churches. And along with a number of other Anglican churches, we were turned down, without an explanation. The diocese wrote to Gord Tanner asking for an explanation and received a reply saying that they had examined the sites and decided against them, and that Gord Tanner was not happy that people were sleeping outside St. Stephen’s and Holy Trinity, still with no explanation as to why we, and others, were not suitable for indoor warming centres. This year, no request was openly issued.

And in the great world around us all, we see the predications coming true that when the climate emergency truly arrived, when the floods and fires and food shortages became undeniable, people would turn to hatred and exclusion and choose authoritarian governments in the belief that this would save them. Terrified people are searching for targets – trans people, immigrants, “drug addicts,” the chronically homeless, whoever seems easy to exclude. In a time like this, that ancient and absolute instruction to love your neighbour is more radical than ever. We must train ourselves in that love when it is hardest, not a love that centres on people whom we may love easily. Because everyone is your neighbour. And we must love most of all our unchosen neighbours – our strange, unruly, foreign, frightening neighbours. The person lying unresponsive in a ditch, and the heretical outsider who pulls them out. Never what we want, and never what is easy. But the neighbour, finally, whose presence can save us too.

Canon Helwig’s book, Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community, will be published by Coach House Books in May.