A tent community came together in a downtown Toronto churchyard. Then, in November, the city cleared it.
| This Toronto churchyard encampment was a safe haven. Then the city cleared it. | | 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 | | | | |
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| | | SOCIETY | | I moved from India to Alberta to live the multigen lifestyle | | Vandita Jain was 16 when her older brother, Kash, left their home of Delhi for Canada. After moving back in with her parents during the pandemic, she realized that nothing comes before family. So when her parents decided to relocate to Canada to unite their family again, she told them she was ready to make the move. “It took some time to get settled into my new life in Canada, but now I can’t imagine living away from my family. It’s so good to be reunited,” she writes. | | |
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| | | How one Canadian tech millionaire built a tiny-home community | | | | Marcel LeBrun made millions as a software tycoon, then funnelled his fortune into 12 Neighbours, a planned community of 99 affordable tiny homes in Fredericton. In this feature from the March 2024 print issue, Maclean’s writer Sarah Treleaven writes, “LeBrun’s gargantuan act of altruism, channelled so efficiently into diminutive 240-square-foot homes, has raised questions about what the country’s policy-makers might learn about how to rectify its housing woes from one man with deep pockets—one who stepped in where the government has failed.” | | |
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