In downtown Toronto, not far from the gourmet cheese shops of Kensington Market, is St. Stephen-in-the-Fields, an Anglican church that has, over the last few years, allowed people to build a tiny, cramped tent encampment on its lawn. Church staff and volunteers provide its tenants with warm meals, help with laundry and basic first aid. Some people have been there since 2022.
Late in the fall, the city cleared the encampment. In a heart-wrenching essay for Maclean’s, Maggie Helwig, the church’s outspoken priest, describes what that was like. She explains how hard her staff have worked, over several years, to find shelter beds for the people in the churchyard, often to no avail. And she describes the pain of watching city officials dismantle the tents. It’s an honest, eye-opening account from a woman on the front lines of the housing crisis.
—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief
