Two things happened last week. 

The encampment of unhoused people beside St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Anglican Church in Toronto was cleared October 16 by the order of the Ontario fire marshal, this after pressure from a city councillor and both the staff and parents from a private school located nearby. 

The night before, the Anglican priest of the church, Maggie Helwig, won the 2025 Toronto Book Award for Encampment, her deeply humane and moving account of the people living in the yard outside St. Stephen, with whom she has worked since the first unhoused people pitched their tents in the spring of 2022.

Encampment is subtitled Resistance, Grace and an Unhoused Community. It’s a slim book, only 197 pages, yet it narrates two years in the life of the community that grew outside St. Stephen. The original campers were followed by others as word spread, tents proliferating as people built a burgeoning if unstable community, eventually numbering around 25 people. With their permission, Helwig introduces several of them and explores the problems they faced, along with efforts she and church volunteers made to help them get housing, medical care and help from social service agencies.

Along the way, her book delves deeply into problems facing homeless people generally and the communities trying to help them—or shut them down.

Helwig doesn’t romanticize the unhoused, making it clear that people living rough have complex and deeply-rooted problems that carom off each other. With burgeoning big-city rents and gentrification, it’s nearly impossible to find an affordable apartment these days even if you have a job, and homeless people generally don’t. Public housing has wait lists up to 18 years long and temporary shelters are rife with theft and assault.

Most important, people living in encampments like the one at St. Stephen often have mental health issues, drug addictions or both, using drugs to try to self-treat their problems. Many have a history of being abused and are cut off from their families. In some encampments, drug dealers move in, although that didn’t happen at St. Stephen. Yet the people living there can be eccentric, loud and obstreperous. 

Writes Helwig, “People who’ve been identified as ‘presenting with mental health issues’ (sometimes, ironically, abbreviated to ‘presenting with mental health’) have included Douglas and Isaac, grey-haired men who were once young and bright and on the verge of a shimmering world, who after decades on the street can be sometimes overwhelmed with grief and rage at what their lives have become. Isaac is a man of great gentleness, blessed for some years with a doctor who cared about him, and a room in a supportive boarding house, writing treatises about time travel, scrawling truly terrible dad jokes on scrap paper as what he calls his art, sometimes bringing his meds to the church so I can bless them, always willing to give the person beside him half his sandwich or his chocolate bar or his spare change, sometimes needing a safe place where he can just scream until the sorrow of all that he has lost recedes. Douglas was clenched and suspicious, much of his character defined by incarceration in the Oak Ridges forensic psychiatry facility at a time when their therapeutic model was best described as torture, an experience acknowledged in the compensation paid to survivors. Convinced that teenage girls on the street were calling him a bad man, collecting ‘letters of reference’ from all and sundry, obsessed with his ex-wives and the girlfriend whom he could not admit had died of cancer, with whom he was still determined to reconcile.”

Helwig isn’t alone in her humane approach to the residents, and has the support of her parishioners in trying to help. 

Yet as she reports, some nearby homeowners grew frightened to find themselves with neighbours screaming out their sorrow as Isaac could, especially women walking past them at night and parents who didn’t want their children to witness behaviour that scared and confused them. It’s true as well that encampments can be dangerous, with small campfires sometimes spreading out of control. Given the lack of proper sanitation, they can also smell pretty bad. Garbage gets scattered, pets leave messes. 

Given all this, the local Montessori private school parents and staff began to complain, and soon started working with city councillor Diane Saxe to try to remove the encampment, leaving open the question of where people were supposed to go.

Sitting back after finishing the book, I reflected on the fact that encampments are the result of policies decades old. Originally, many of these were well-meaning, designed to get people out of the asylums where mental illness (and rebellion) had been confined for centuries. In Ontario, the state began to hospitalize mental health patients during the 1950s and 60s, putting them into facilities that were supposed to be more helpful, sanitary and medically-advanced than the old asylums, although people were still admitted involuntarily. 

Over the next couple of decades, pressure from mental health advocates meant the criteria for involuntary confinement was walked back, people were set free and the worst programs shuttered, and that’s a good thing.

At the same time, I have no doubt that inside government, legislators were glad to be relieved of the expense of locking up mentally-ill people, often for years. That makes it far from surprising that the promised investment in community-based treatment and housing that was supposed to replace the old institutions has never fully materialized. It’s easy to drop an expensive policy. Far more complicated to replace it with an even more expensive one, even though it will save money in the long run, in this case by cutting down on hospital visits and subsidized stays in hostels and hotels. 

Taken altogether, that means many people have nowhere to go but the streets. A city of Toronto street needs assessment in October, 2024, estimated that 15,418 people lived unhoused in Toronto that fall—double the number of four years before. 

And that’s just one city. 

Intractable is the word that occurs, and most of us have trouble getting our heads around the complexity of the situation.

Last winter, I was walking by the tents of some homeless people near the Scadding Court community centre. Two men walked toward me, and after glancing at the tents, one man said to the other, “I suppose the poor will always be with us.” His tone of voice was so superior and ironic and smug that I wanted to put out a foot and trip him. Yet was I any better? I had to ask myself what I’d ever done for people living in tents aside from handing over some spare change.

Maggie Helwig opens her book by offering a couple of simple suggestions.

“One day, as I was starting to write this book, I was leaving the church where I work when an angry woman stopped me, after throwing a bag of garbage into the encampment in our yard, and told me that a person had started sleeping in her yard, and that I needed to tell her how she could find out who it was and make him go away. I suggested that she ask the person himself who he was.

“She stared at me as if I had suggested that she fly to the moon for information, and exclaimed, ‘But he takes drugs!’

“‘You can still ask him who he is,’ I said.

“And she stormed away up the street.

“I tell this story not primarily to illustrate how I have come to be seen as responsible for all homeless people within about an eight-block radius of the church, although that is, for some reason, true. I tell it because there is a great gulf fixed, and very few people are willing to cross it. People who have not lived in the world of which encampments are a part are afraid, and they are angry. And they cannot imagine that there is a way to cross that line, to speak to a homeless person as a fellow human being, without somehow themselves being harmed, being damaged, being touched by a world they would rather deny.”

Talk, Helwig says. And more important, listen.

Helwig tells not only the stories of people who live in the encampment, like Isaac and Douglas, but writes about the challenges she was facing herself as the tents mushroomed, making sure not to claim an elevated status as a priest. She writes about the problems she faces getting help for her autistic daughter, about the death of her father, writer David Helwig, and, so very sadly, about the diagnosis of her husband, Ken Simons, with Alzheimer’s disease, which only misses being defined as early-onset Alzheimer’s by three months. 

At times, it’s the homeless people who comfort her.

Maybe I should write a disclaimer. I know Maggie Helwig a little, although I haven’t seen her in years. Her father David edited my first novel, and Maggie took one of my short stories for an anthology she edited. A writer before she was a priest, Helwig wrote 15 books of poetry, fiction and essays before writing Encampment, and she’s edited multiple anthologies. 

Yet I know many writers and feel I can write about their books objectively. And in this case, I have to fight not sympathy but the opposite: my antagonism toward organized religion. I was brought up by a father, a Second World War veteran, who loathed ministers. “The chaplains they sent us were all cowards,” he often said, pausing before adding, “Except the rabbis. Those rabbis were tough buggers.” 

As my mother got my brother and I ready for Sunday School, he would call from his chair at the head of the kitchen table, “Don’t you believe that crap.” Yet it was the way people at church treated my mother that awakened my dislike of organized religion. 

I’ve said before that it was my father’s ambition to buy a house in post-war suburbia, feeling he was owed for his service, although he was a machinist and couldn’t really afford it, and we were more than a little out of place. Despite this, my mother badly wanted to be accepted. That might have been why she decided we would go to the United Church of Canada, a step down the suburban social ladder from the Anglican Church, which her Scottish mother attended. Since this was the 1960s, it was also supposedly a free-spirited place, and in fact my Sunday School teacher played the guitar and had us singing Kumbaya. 

Yet it was also the place where I remember the minister’s wife saying to my mother, “Oh Betty, aren’t you always so well put-together?” in a tone of enormous condescension. I don’t think I could have named it at the time, but I knew what it was and my cheeks burned with anger and embarrassment at something so, well, un-Christian. Since that was far from the only time we were patronized at church, I refused to go as soon as I was old enough to rebel. (Twelve, I think.) 

What I was reacting to, of course, was the pervasive hypocrisy in organized religion, starting with American Protestant evangelicals swaying and praying to Je-sus for an hour on Sunday while supporting emphatically white Christian nationalism, even though the historical Jesus of Nazareth was brown. Then there are the pedophile priests in the Catholic church protected by their bishops, and the fundamentalist Muslim Taliban theocrats in Afghanistan who recently prohibited women from raising their voices in public, and the so-called peaceful Buddhist monks of Myanmar supporting the rough exile of Rohingya Muslims, and of course in Gaza…

I could go on. And on. But here’s the thing: Maggie Helwig walks the walk, and does it with what looks to an outsider like true Christian humility and grace. I admit that I skipped a few pages here and there when she included sermons and homilies she’d given in church. Yet the book is not only about people living in the encampment around St. Stephen, but about the extraordinary efforts she and her volunteers make to get them the help they’ve requested. And, very importantly, about stepping back so people can create a community to support each other. 

The book ends in 2024 with an exhausting defeat, when most of the tents were torn down by a dreadful-sounding machine called The Claw, leaving many from the encampment even more homeless than before. Afterward, the authorities erected barriers around what looks like church land, but which for arcane historical reason belongs to the city. 

Some must have come back, since only last week the Claw reappeared, more tents went down and more definitive barriers were erected at the behest of the fire marshal and councillor Diane Saxe—perhaps also temporarily, since the people still have nowhere permanent to go and might find their way back. 

According to the Varsity student newspaper at the University of Toronto, “As of October 18, the fenced-off area has a new notice: ‘No person shall, on a street, sidewalk, or boulevard: camp, dwell, or lodge; obstruct encumber, damage, or foul; install or place any unauthorized encroachment, object, article, or thing; set a fire or create a dangerous condition.’ 

“Taped onto the fence, a cardboard sign pointed to the notice with the words, ‘Jesus does not endorse this message.’”

Before closing, let me say in fairness that under the rubric of its Kindred Works project, started in 2019, the United Church of Canada plans to build 7,000 affordable housing units on under-used church property before 2034. As of 2024, Kindred Works had completed seven projects with 635 affordable units, and 20 more projects are underway. 

I also want to note that Maggie Helwig is a very fine writer. I’m glad she received the 2025 Toronto Book Award and hope it brings her readers. I highly recommend Encampment, a powerful testament to powerlessness. 

Which in my non-churchgoing, cranky, agnostic way, I believe can sometimes be holy. 

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community by Maggie Helwig is published by Coach House Books. You can order it here.

The story Helwig accepted for the 1992 edition of Best Canadian Stories is called “Zonians”, and it’s published in my collection The Necessary Havoc of Love.