Maggie Helwig (Sandro Pehar)

To many, including the most impoverished and disenfranchised people in downtown Toronto, she’s known as Mother Maggie. Author Maggie Helwig, best-known for her 2008 novel Girls Fall Down, is also a veteran social-justice activist with many civil disobedience arrests to her name. But it is her vocation as Anglican priest and rector of the Church of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields in Toronto’s Kensington Market that is at the fore of her provocative, insightful book Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community. 

Part personal memoir, part urban history, part cri de cœur in the face of systemic neglect, Encampment is a compelling account of people with virtually no other options who erected tents next to Helwig’s church, so that they would have a place to live. And it recounts the myriad forces – from fearful neighbours to an unsupportive police force to bureaucrats from the City’s Encampment Office – who tried to get rid of them. In plain-spoken yet stirring, eloquent prose, Helwig centres the experience of this community, rendering a complex portrait of individuals seeking joy and fulfillment – like anyone else – even as they navigate immense, seemingly unending loss.

Through a range of examples, Helwig conveys the daily realities of being poor that might be unimaginable to those who have not experienced them first-hand: perpetually overcrowded and dangerous shelters that are nearly impossible to get into – where a litany of minor infractions can get you immediately bounced back out onto the street; drugs you take to cope, or to just try to feel good – which are near-universally poisoned; extreme mental-health challenges that led to your lack of housing in the first place – which are unsurprisingly exacerbated by sleeping outdoors in the frigid cold under a thin plastic tarp.

Access to medical care is inconsistent at best – and degrading at worst. Helwig recounts how one encampment resident nicknamed The Artist had a disagreement with her mental-health worker. As a result, she “spent about twelve hours handcuffed in the triage area at Toronto Western Hospital before being admitted to psychiatric emergency, where she was uncuffed at least, but had to sleep on the floor … where for a day she sat in a puddle of her own blood because her period had just started, and no one was available to find menstrual products for her.”

Encampment shines a light on injustice, but does not easily assign labels of hero or villain. A veritable SWAT team eventually descends upon the encampment to forcibly evict everyone, brandishing a piece of heavy machinery known as “The Claw” that scoops up tents and their occupants’ possessions to dump them into a trash compactor. But there are moments of grace from unexpected places: the Encampment Office worker who gently affirms to an ill and troubled resident that he will personally protect the man’s belongings from this evisceration or the community police officers who pointedly abandon their stations at a key moment to allow residents to put their tents back up.

“Most of the narratives we create are deceptions,” writes Helwig. And indeed, this is a story with no “ending.” The encampment was levelled. And within days, people were back. People still live there today. May we understand them even a little bit better because of this book. Encampment is required reading for anyone with a home who hopes to understand the lives of the many who do not.