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A conversation with author/activist/priest Maggie Helwig and Gregor Craigie

 Check out this event happening in our space featuring Rev. Maggie Helwig, Anglican priest.  You can also check out more about Rev. Maggie here in Broadview Magazine.

Join CBC’s On the Island host Gregor Craigie for a conversation with author and activist Maggie Helwig about her new book, Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community. 

This event is free and open to the public and co-organized by UVic Law Associate Professor Estair Van Wagner and UVic History Professor Jordan Stanger-Ross as part of the UVic City Talks series. 

About Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community

An activist priest provides sanctuary for an encampment of unhoused people in her churchyard

The housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and nail to allow them to stay, battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind.

Encampment tells the story of Helwig’s life-long activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to people needing a home. More importantly, it introduces us to the Artist, to Jeff, and to Robin: their lives, their challenges, their humanity. It confronts our 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.

Maggie Helwig (she/they) is a white settler in Tkaronto/Toronto, and is the author of fifteen books and chapbooks, including Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community, which was awarded the 2025 Toronto Book Award, and Girls Fall Down (Coach House Books, 2008), which was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award and chosen as the One Book Toronto in 2012. Helwig is a long-time social justice activist, and also an Anglican priest, and has been the rector of the Church of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields since 2012.

Gregor Craigie is the host of CBC’s On the Island and the author of Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis (2024).

Free