When Mother Maggie Helwig saw the number from the City of Toronto’s Encampment Office on the line, she knew trouble was coming. It was Oct. 19, 2023, and for the past year the reverend had been attending to the people living in the small encampment in the churchyard of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields, an Anglican parish perched on the edge of Kensington Market.

I had seen the evolution of the churchyard firsthand. My friends live in the apartment building adjacent to the church, and over the past few years I had been intermittently involved in efforts to support members of this encampment and others in Kensington Market. The churchyard’s population had ebbed and flowed, but it had always been present in some form. People wrapped themselves in blue tarps and sleeping bags in the shadow of the brick steeple. Lasting abodes of pallet and plywood were grafted onto the side of the church. Throughout it all, Helwig allowed people to stay, offering them food, water, and conversation.

In that time, Helwig said, “the city had been taking a fairly confrontational approach” to the encampment, “with notices and threats to evict.”

The local councillor, former environmental lawyer Dianne Saxe, was elected in 2022 after running a campaign focused on housing affordability and the environment. However, upon assuming office, her relationships with homeless advocates and community organizations like Friends of Kensington Market, a residents group that advocates for commercial and residential affordability, soured. “When it comes to unhoused people, it’s a wall,” says Serena Purdy, its chair. “It’s not an open conversation.”

For Saxe, the encampment at St. Stephen’s and other encampments in her ward deprive her constituents of crucial green space. “People need public parks for public use,” Saxe told me. “There shouldn’t be encampments in parks. Encampments are illegal…It badly degrades the city. It is one of the most visible symbols that the city is not looking after public space.”

Homeless advocates say it is precisely the visibility of encampments that incites clearances. “Dianne Saxe has tried a number of fairly dubious routes to see the encampment removed, or just invisibilized in some regard,” says outreach worker Diana Chan McNally. For Chan McNally, Saxe does so by “leveraging…environmentalism, which is the councillor’s background.”

Weaponized environmentalism is not restricted to proposed pollinator gardens. In Allan Gardens, for example, housing advocates say the Encampment Office has used proposed tree trimmings to confiscate tents and personal property. Saoirse is a member of Allan Gardens Community Aid Collective, an activist group whose coordinators are all formerly unhoused, who prefers to remain anonymous due to fear of police reprisal and risk to their shelter. They describe tree trimming in Allan Gardens as a continuous tactic of displacement. They note that falling tree branches present a real danger, but argue that the city uses the health of trees to flout the convention of giving reasonable notice before a homeless person’s belongings are moved or removed.

Saoirse recalls one occasion in May 2023 when the parks department and their tree-trimming boom truck arrived with the Encampment Office to trim multiple trees that had tents in their shade. That day, Saoirse says, “using the tree-trimming as an excuse, they stole and trashed seven tents,” but “they did not trim a single tree that day.” Video and photos obtained by The Local show belongings being loaded into the back of a pickup truck, protesters surrounding an Encampment Office employee, and Parks, Forestry, and Recreation employees gesturing toward a tree. (The City confirmed to The Local that no tree maintenance took place that day but said it was occasionally necessary to relocate homeless people for tree maintenance: “As needed, staff from the Encampment Office and outreach teams will collaborate with encampment occupants to facilitate relocation during these operations.”)

“It is entirely possible to be an environmentalist and have very little care or compassion for humans”

“Remediation” is perhaps the most effective lever the city uses to ensure that homeless people are not able to set up encampments in parks. In 2021, an encampment in George Hislop Park near Bloor and Yonge was cleared and fences were erected in the name of “sod and irrigation improvements.” But “the fences just never came down,” says Greg Cook, an outreach worker at Sanctuary, a charity and church next to the park. The space was fenced off for nearly three years before park renovations began. Nearby Norman Jewison Park faced the same fate in July 2024, when an encampment was cleared and the grassy area was immediately fenced off for remediation.

For Cook, clearances in the name of park remediation are linked to the larger trend of gentrification. “That language of remediation is frankly awful,” he says. “I’ve noticed that environmental reasons are used to displace poor people in neighbourhoods.” Improving parks and saving grass, Cook says, is the rationale, not the reason, for fencing. It serves the dual purpose of providing a retroactive justification for clearances while ensuring new encampments cannot crop up. In its internally circulated plan to clear Trinity Bellwoods Park in 2021 (obtained by housing activists through a Freedom of Information request and reviewed by The Local), the city stated that fencing would be used to demarcate “areas that occupants have property,” and used in order to prevent reentry both during and indefinitely after the clearance. Internally, the stated purpose of the fencing was to prevent another encampment. The public-facing explanation on the fences told a different story: “park remediation is underway.”

The City invokes “remediation” even when green spaces are destroyed. During the Trinity Bellwoods encampment clearance of 2021, a community garden of raspberry bushes and patches of mint run by local volunteers in the park’s southwest corner was razed due to its proximity to the encampment. According to the community group that ran the garden, a city official, in the midst of the Trinity Bellwoods clearances, had implied that some illicit items might have been stashed in the garden. When the fences went up, they bore a familiar sign: “park remediation is underway.” When a pollinator garden was real rather than rhetorical, it was promptly bulldozed.

The use of this ecological rhetoric, says Chan McNally, is “a way of greenwashing people’s hatred.” Park remediation, she says, is effective as a displacement strategy because it hinges on the dehumanization of those who have been cleared so that it can take place. “If you can’t recognize homeless people as people then you’re never going to consider them worthy of being a part of the public, but rather a safety concern, a blight,” she says. “They use all this weird environmentalist doublespeak for nefarious purposes.”

Concerning its remediation policy, the City of Toronto stated: “As individuals are referred indoors and encampments are cleared, staff work to regenerate parks. This may include the removal of fine debris and hazards, removal and aeration of soil/sand, weekly applications of seed and fertiliser, pest removal, tree inspection and/or planting.”

After the call from the Encampment Office, the controversy at St. Stephen’s only deepened. The permit, Helwig learned, was not explicitly for a garden, but was instead a street occupancy permit granted by the Transportation Division (a copy of the permit was obtained through a Freedom of Information Request request made by Helwig). However, just days after the permit was issued to Friends of Bellevue Parkette, it was revoked. The city said that the permit was issued “in error,” but that they still planned to clear the encampment. Trying to prevent the eviction, St. Stephen’s church filed an interlocutory injunction in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. (The city told The Local that no permit was necessary to clear the encampment because of the churchyard’s technical status as a city right-of-way. It’s unclear why the city worked with Friends of Bellevue Parkette to clear the encampment with the support of a permit it did not legally require.)

In late November 2023, a month after Reverend Helwig’s call from the Encampment Office, the eviction took place at St. Stephen’s. Helwig’s injunction had failed to convince the judge, who cited fire safety and aesthetic concerns in his decision. The city’s grounds to evict lay in two provisions of a street obstruction bylaw. The residents of St Stephen’s had been offered indeterminate stays at a shelter, though some had refused this offer precisely because of a shelter’s indeterminacy. Talk of a pollinator garden had evaporated, but agents of the city still arrived and the claw arrived with them.

It was a long and bitter night. Encampment residents negotiated with the city, to little avail, while neighbours, members of the church, and legal observers, gathered to protest and witness the eviction. Ultimately, in the hours before dawn, the encampment’s final tents and belongings were removed. The city’s familiar blue fences were then erected on the south side of the churchyard. Personal belongings were strewn along the sidewalk, spilling out into College Street.

Arturo Garcia saw it all. A longtime resident of St. Stephen’s yard, his belongings were the only ones spared bulldozing because his small abode leans against the western wall of the parish and is indisputably on church grounds. So he watched, he said, and he tried to help, as those who slept just a few feet closer to the street were upended.

Garcia, who is 52, is also known as “Pirate” on account of his eccentricity and eyepatch-style single sunglass. He explained that the night the city came to clear the encampment, the folks who were relocated by the city were not long-term residents of the encampment, but transient ones. According to Garcia, no permanent or semi-permanent residents of the encampment were relocated that night. “They misled everyone intentionally. They were all proud of themselves…but the people who they set up with a place to live didn’t live here. Nobody from here got housing.” Garcia explained that the city betrayed an ignorance, despite their repeated engagements, of who was transient and who had set up more permanent lodging under the shadow of St. Stephen’s steeple.

Three days later, the concrete came—enormous blocks set in place to prevent any future tents. An eviction whose inciting event was a proposed pollinator garden culminated in the loud crunch of concrete blocks being lowered, one by one, onto the frosted soil in the newly fenced-off area.