Two “final” notices of violation from the City of Toronto posted outside St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Church have been a source of frustration and uncertainty for staff as they continue to support the small encampment of unhoused people around the church.
The notices were found duct-taped to a security fence the city erected more than a year ago after it partially cleared a previous encampment.
Despite the notices warning “City forces” could move in to remove the “combustible accumulation” outside the church, the city confirmed to TorontoToday it has no plans to remove any individuals from the premises.
The city said it intends to “work with the individuals in those encampments and representatives from the church to clean up debris in the coming days.”
But to Maggie Helwig, rector of St. Stephen, one person’s debris is another person’s insulation against Toronto’s frigid winter winds.
“If you have a little thin tent, you're gonna pile cardboard around it. You're gonna pile wooden flats around it, if you can, because that's a windbreak,” she said. “Cardboard is insulation. And yes, these things are combustible but they are also keeping people warm.”
For the past 13 years, Helwig has led the St. Stephen congregation while working on the front lines of the homelessness crisis in Toronto.
The church offers free dinners to people in need on Fridays from 6 to 10 p.m. and free breakfast on Saturday and Sunday mornings from 7 to 8:30 a.m., Helwig said. In total, the church provides over 500 meals to locals each weekend.
St. Stephen has “always been a safe space for people who are unhoused,” Helwig added.
To an uninitiated passerby, the encampment outside St. Stephen would appear to be on church property. The “tents/structures” the city is concerned with in its notices fit squarely in the small concrete yard outside the church and don’t spill out onto the sidewalk.
As Helwig knows all too well, the church yard is technically city property and is owned by transportation services as a “right of way.”
Two long-term residents of the church yard are camped out in an alcove beside the church wall on the St. Stephen side of the property line, Helwig said. The rest are on city property, making it difficult to protect them from being cleared out of the area.
Church staff and volunteers regularly conduct clean-ups of the encampment area and communicate with the fire department to manage the fire risk, volunteer Noah Lamanna told TorontoToday.
But despite the church’s best efforts to work with authorities, St. Stephen has been slapped with multiple notices of violation, even before the two “final” notices showed up on Wednesday and Thursday, Helwig said.
“They put up notices of violation, I presume, with the intention of intimidating people or scaring people,” Helwig speculated. “These people live in a state of displacement and anxiety, there’s no need to add to that.”
The city attempted to clear the encampment outside St. Stephen on Nov. 24, 2023, when crews brought in heavy machinery to remove belongings and construct an eight-foot security fence outside the church that remains to this day. One person refused to leave and was issued a trespass order, Helwig said.
Since the fence was erected, Helwig said there have been two fatal overdoses in the church yard, “compared to zero before that.” The fence obstructs sight lines, making it harder for church staff and volunteers, as well as residents of the encampment, to see their peers in distress and offer aid, she said.
The construction of the fence — and other actions by the city, including refusing to allow St. Stephen to operate as a warming centre — have made it harder for the church to serve people in need, Helwig noted.
Last year, the city put out a request for spaces to operate as emergency warming shelters. St. Stephen submitted an application and was denied for unclear reasons, Helwig said. The city did not put out an open call for emergency warming shelter requests this year.
According to Helwig, the city’s approach to supporting unhoused people during the winter represents a “cognitive dissonance.”
“They're using the rhetoric of people needing to choose to come inside,” she said. “At the same time, they will say the shelters are full and the warming centers are full. I don't know how they are managing to hold these two positions, to both admit that there is no space and at the same time blame people who are sleeping outside.”
The majority of the people who make their home in the yard outside St. Stephen want to take advantage of warming centres, Helwig said.
“We have a frail elderly man who comes to our drop-in [dinner service] every Friday … He told us he’d been turned away from three warming centers because they were full. So he's sleeping on a heating grate,” Helwig said. “How dare you say you are trying to encourage people to come inside. How dare you blame them?”
While the years of working with vulnerable people in Toronto has taken its toll on Helwig, she takes strength in being part of the community that lives outside her church.
“People who are traumatized and suffering and living in a terrible situation, they still have bonds of community,” she said. “I've been allowed to be part of that community, and that's a great privilege."
