A video of her acceptance speech at the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing is here
A transcript is below. (Check against delivery.)
[Maggie Helwig] This is not my book. This book belongs to a community. I am cognizant that I am in the kind of room which I am not in very often, and which my community is never able to enter, and I have a deep responsibility to bring their voices into this room.
There is a tendency among politicians these days I find to speak as if you were helpless, as if you had no real volition or power, but were slaves of the God of the economy. But the God of the economy is a human creation, and human lives are what really matter. You do have power, and you do have choices about how you use that power. Government does not exist to turn a profit, but to meet human need.
If I am to address specific policy issues, I will address some: Building more market rent housing is not in itself, a bad goal, but it will not cause rent geared to income and supportive housing to spring up from the earth like warriors from Dragon’s Teeth. Closing safe consumption sites and criminalizing street drug use; these are policies which will create only death and trauma. Turning Social Assistance into a punitive exercise, is a policy of an inhumane society which is choosing to hurt people because they are vulnerable.
Those of you who make policy, when you make choices, think about the 1000s of people who are sleeping out tonight in the rain, in ravines and alleyways and heating grapes. Think about trauma, pneumonia, infected wounds. Think about a girl named Summer who was 20 years old and who died in our churchyard and whose body lay on the concrete in the rain while we waited for hours for a coroner’s van to take her away. Think about the person who died in the stairwell of my church whose name we never even knew.
Think about my friends sleeping outside tonight. Think about them struggling with pointless, almost incomprehensible, systemic barriers which make it nearly impossible for them to find a safe place, aside from those tiny places of safety they create for each other.
Think about them, because they are your neighbors, because they are your children, because they are us.
Jury Citation
“A necessary, on-the-ground view of Canada’s homelessness crisis, Encampment succeeds where much of political handwringing and wishful thinking around housing and poverty consistently fail. Maggie Helwig never lets compassion impede lucidity, and her book avoids both cynicism and battle fatigue. The result: a clear-eyed call to not look away, but to deepen understanding of the issue. As more and more of our neighbours find themselves living unsheltered, this book is essential reading.”—2026 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing Jury (Norma Dunning, Chantal Hébert, Paul Wells)
About the Book
The housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. Encampment tells the story of how some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto’s Kensington Market where Maggie Helwig is the priest. An outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind. The book also introduces readers to the Artist, to Jeff, and to Robin: their lives, their challenges, their humanity. It confronts society’s callousness in allowing so many to go unhoused and demands, by bringing their stories to the fore, that we begin to respond with compassion and grace.
About Maggie Helwig
Maggie Helwig was appointed as priest-in-charge at St. Stephen’s Anglican Church in Toronto in 2013 before being appointed rector 2015. She chairs the diocesan Social Justice and Advocacy Committee, and before her ordination worked as a writer, editor, and arts organizer. Helwig has published thirteen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her novel, Girls Fall Down, was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award in 2009 and chosen as the Toronto Public Library’s One Book Community Read in 2012. Her latest book, Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community, won the 2025 Toronto Book Award. Helwig lives in Toronto.
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