FROM OCTOBER 2020 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

While the City of Toronto struggles in its fight against homelessness, a group of volunteers is banding together with the residents of the encampments, building trust and gathering what’s needed to keep their community safe. One of those volunteers, writer Jesse Locke, shares an on-the-ground perspective

That’s the guiding principle behind the Encampment Support Network (ESN), a grassroots group of volunteers delivering basic humanitarian aid to people living in tents in six Toronto neighbourhoods. The 140-member team handling this outreach seven days a week includes a number of artists and musicians. They believe the way to make a difference in the midst of a housing crisis, opioid crisis and COVID-19 is by centring the needs of Toronto’s most stigmatized and marginalized population.

Since June, the ESN has collected $83,000 in donations to deliver water, ice, snacks, tents, sleeping bags, fire extinguishers, first aid kits and, most recently, winter clothing to encampments. By building relationships with encampment residents, the ESN reports on activity at a ground level via its weekly newsletter, provides assistance during police harassment and evictions, and ultimately advocates for long-term permanent housing.

It is currently estimated that more than 10,000 people are experiencing homelessness in Toronto, up from 8,700 in 2018, with 1,500 living in encampments. Since mid-March, the city-funded program Streets to Homes (S2H) has moved people into temporary shelter hotels including The Delta at Highway 401 and Kennedy Road and The Edward at Highway 404 and Sheppard Avenue. These locations are intended to address a capacity issue at existing shelter sites; city-wide, they were 95 per cent full before COVID hit. At press time, the Toronto Drop-In Network had counted 640 COVID cases in these crowded indoor spaces, while no cases had yet been reported in the outdoor encampments.

A new report from Right to Housing states that 845 individuals have been moved from Toronto encampments into shelters, hotels or other interim housing. The ESN, however, is hearing about problems in the shelter hotels from people who have spent time inside them. These include distance from the downtown core, strictly enforced rules, and restrictions on visitors in people’s rooms. This increases the risk of overdose deaths, because some people are forced to use drugs alone without peer supervision. The ESN’s eviction report argues that many of the far-flung shelter hotels in Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke disconnect residents of the encampment at Lamport Stadium from their communities, families, friends, jobs, healthcare providers, Ontario Disability Support Program offices and other social supports.

“I’d rather be outside, because I want freedom to choose how to live my life,” says Kiki, a woman living in the Lamport encampment. “This is where my people are that I’ve known for years, and I’m comfortable with them.” She returned to the area after a negative experience at the Bond Place Hotel at 65 Dundas St. E. left her feeling secluded and alone.

“It took COVID for the city to put people in buildings, but they don’t really care,” says Kiki. “It’s just so they can keep more of an eye on us, like surveillance. You have to buzz to go to your specific floor, and can’t go visit other floors. I don’t know what the city was thinking, but they’re just trying to dump people in those spots.”

“I feel more comfortable here than anywhere else,” echoes Seven, a man who lives on the more heavily populated eastern side of the Lamport encampment. “I can be myself and I’m not judged. What we really need is basic humanity and decency. I can’t work because I have a herniated disc, arthritis and my left knee is blown, so I can’t afford to pay rent. All we can do is batten down the hatches and insulate for the winter, or die.”

Seven highlights several ways encampment residents have each other’s backs. Alongside overdose prevention with Naloxone kits, he and his partner, Monica, help reinforce people’s tents with weather-resistant tarps and share blankets with those feeling the chill. Seven says he has also administered bandages to a man whose leg was “leaking poison” and a woman “with a hole through her foot.”

Even though he feels a sense of community in the encampment, Seven longs for a more permanent solution. While we spoke, on Sept. 27, he took a break from attaching tarps to his tent with bungee cords and told me that he’s been waiting weeks for S2H to return his call.

“In a city like Toronto, we have so much wealth,” says Seven. “I look around me and most of the condos downtown are empty. There should be legislation to prevent that. If you leave it empty for more than a few months, there should be a penalty. The Canadian government needs to take care of their own backyard before telling us how to live.”

The seeds of the ESN were planted in March, when musician Simone Schmidt (Fiver, The Highest Order) organized a small group to protest the demolition of encampments under the Gardiner. After witnessing what protesters characterized as aggressive tactics by the city when it cleared the tents there with bulldozers, the same group began visiting other encampments at Moss Park, Trinity Bellwoods and Scadding Court, and buying bottled water out of pocket for encampment residents. When that became too expensive, the group started asking for donations, and the ESN was born.

“We had de-escalation training, overdose prevention training, and learned how to be on Indigenous land doing outreach,” says Nathan Doucet, drummer for the bands Aquakultre and Heaven For Real, one of the original group members who attended the protest in March. “We started asking trusted people to join us, building a schedule, and doing it as much as we could. Eventually we realized that if we organize, we can politicize and have a presence that means more.”

I joined the ESN as an outreach volunteer in July, delivering water, snacks, tents and other basic aid supplies to residents of the Parkdale encampments at Lamport Stadium and the concrete parkette at Queen and Dufferin. During these daily shifts, I helped write reports that are shared internally and compiled into a weekly public newsletter to report on encampment conditions. I have taken part in special events such as hot meal deliveries and park barbecues, while also attending funeral ceremonies for the people who have passed away at Lamport since the summer.

Over the past few months, from the time I got involved, I have seen the unique issues faced by each of Toronto’s encampments coming into focus. People living in Moss Park at Sherbourne and Queen Street East struggled with the public washrooms being locked during this summer’s heatwave, blocking their access to running water; they shared their story with ESN volunteer Aliya Pabani, host of the podcast We Are Not The Virus. The centrally located tent sites of Trinity Bellwoods, meanwhile, became the subject of a fear-mongering eviction petition from the far-right website Rebel News, receiving 3,000 signatures. They are still being targeted in articles in the Toronto Sun.

Down at Little Norway Park, an eviction in June displaced encampment residents across eight city blocks along Queen’s Quay at Bathurst. Doucet says he has witnessed condo residents in that area dumping ice, eggs or hot oil onto unhoused people living below them. He splits his four days of outreach per week between Little Norway Park and Cherry Beach, an isolated location where some encampment residents have relocated to avoid that kind of unwanted attention.

Still, in some pockets of Toronto, people working in or alongside the formal system are treating encampment residents with compassion. Mehdo Dosso provides security and first aid through a private company hired by the St. Felix respite centre next to the Lamport encampment. He says now that residents have developed relationships with ESN volunteers, the dynamic in the park has changed. The only way to make ongoing change, Dosso says, is by being there day in and day out.

As for the shelter program, he believes it’s falling short. “If the situation was better, with food and beds available, people wouldn’t use as many drugs. They have to do whatever they can to survive, and there’s a lot of pressure on them from police, so they feel trapped.” As Dosso sees it, an on-the-ground perspective is the key to understanding. “People working in offices can think about things in certain ways, but they won’t understand until they come down to see it for themselves.”

In September, the city introduced a new plan to create 3,000 affordable homes over the next 24 months, but the ESN is concerned about addressing more immediate risks. The group has offered its own list of demands that include obtaining vacant buildings that could be occupied now, suspending evictions, and ensuring winter survival gear is provided to the encampments. In the meanwhile, fall events including a winter clothing drive, a Moss Park meal and march led by Indigenous community leaders, and a Club Quarantine fundraiser have been organized to help meet current needs.

Lamport encampment residents are now setting up their tents to face each other, fostering feelings of safety and community. At Little Norway, Doucet has seen older women filling secondary tents with clothes to give out to teenagers living alongside them. He says these forms of mutual aid are vitally important to fight despair, providing a sense of purpose no matter what your situation might be.

“It’s the same kind of resilience as what we do with the ESN,” says Doucet. “We saw 2020 coming down the pipeline and somehow found structure to offset the chaos. Caring for other people in a systematized way keeps you focused and hopeful. For the people living in tents, those structured modes of care are what they live for.”