The homeless encampment at Toronto's College and Bellevue intersection is seen from the Westside Montessori School’s front yard on June 29.Tuan Minh Nguyen/The Globe and Mail
When Olivia Chow moves into the mayor’s office in a couple of weeks, one of the biggest issues on her desk will be what to do about Toronto’s homeless encampments. Unruly collections of tents and tarps have sprung up in parks, ravines and underpasses around the city. There are a staggering 270 of them, twice as many as a year ago.
They are not nice places to live in. Fires, overdoses and fights are common. They are not nice places to live near, either. Neighbours and passersby often complain about noise, garbage and discarded needles.
One of the most troublesome is just a few blocks from Ms. Chow’s downtown home. It stands in front of a historic Anglican church, Saint Stephen-in-the-Fields, on College Street in the city’s teeming Kensington Market neighbourhood.
Small numbers of people have been camping out in the small, shaded square for years. The church has always been tolerant. Its priest, Maggie Helwig, a poet, novelist and well-known campaigner for social justice, believes it is the responsibility of the church to care for society’s most vulnerable, especially at a time of when shelters are overcrowded and housing costs through the roof. “In a complicated world, our calling has rarely been so clear,” she wrote in December.
But some of the neighbours are getting fed up. Staff at the Westside Montessori School down the block say that they often see people urinating, injecting drugs, fighting or screaming at each other. The school stocks special gloves for picking up the used needles they find.
Several times a week the teachers have to bring the kids in from the playground because something is going on in the street or back alley. A serious fire broke out in the camp this spring. Parents dropping their kids off at school come across people smoking from drug pipes right there on the sidewalk.
City workers routinely try to persuade camp dwellers to leave on their own accord, offering them temporary housing and other help, but some decline and others leave and come back or are replaced by others.
The local city councillor, Dianne Saxe, says the disorder at the camp worsened dramatically earlier this year. “What we began to see was horrible, violent outbursts – crimes being committed, people being harassed, the children being frightened, teachers being chased. It’s just not something that we can continue to tolerate.”
She wants the encampment gone. In its place she would like to see a peaceful memorial garden for people who have died on Toronto’s streets, decorated with works by homeless artists. On Wednesday, city workers posted a notice warning that the camp was in violation of the municipal code and must be removed within 14 days “or city forces shall remove it.”
Easier said than done. Past attempts to clear Toronto encampments have drawn protests from activists, who argue that, with the shelters full and housing so costly, those who live in them often have no other option but to sleep outdoors.
“It’s heartbreaking for me to walk every day through people living in such distress,” Rev. Helwig says. A small, wiry woman known to the 20 or so occupants as Mother Maggie, she often comes bustling out of the church to tend to their wounds with her first-aid kit or calm things down when a dispute breaks out.
On Friday morning, she stood next to a smelly portable toilet as people swept the square of trash, part of a cleanup that happens twice a week. She says 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.
Though she likes the idea of the memorial garden and agrees a churchyard is no place for a miniature village of tents, she says removing the camp by force is no solution. People would just come back and pitch their tents again, or set up camp in the nearby alleyway or park. “Just playing human Whac-a-Mole doesn’t get anybody any further forward,” she says.
Ms. Chow seems to agree. She told reporters this week simply ejecting the occupants of the St. Stephen camp would not work. They would simply return or move elsewhere. The only lasting answer was to have more shelter space, more housing, more mental health care.
All true of course. But those things will take time. What happens in the meanwhile? Her predecessor, John Tory, repeatedly insisted that encampments were illegal and unsafe. He tried to clear a couple of big ones, taking lots of flak in the process. Would she rule out any such action? Does she agree with the councillor, Ms. Saxe, that the situation at St. Stephen is intolerable?
Much of Ms. Chow’s career has been about protecting the disadvantaged. She is rightly admired for that.
But what about the general public? What about the safety and peace of mind of the teachers, students and parents at the Montessori school – or for that matter the daycare next door and the two nearby public schools? What about all the people who use the many lovely Toronto parks where encampments have appeared?
Ms. Chow deserves some leeway to make her plans and ideas clearer, of course. She is not even mayor yet, not officially. This is a tough, tough issue.
But the summer is upon us and Toronto’s encampment problem is getting worse. Even liberal-minded residents who sympathize with the plight of the troubled people they see on the streets or on public transit are growing frustrated with the disturbing and sometimes dangerous disorder they see all around them.
The city’s new mayor will need to grapple with it soon. St. Stephen would be a good place to start.