Toronto planned encampment clearing operation for months, built profiles of residents

The City of Toronto spent months laying out plans to clear about two dozen people from a homeless encampment in a popular park last summer, building dossiers on those living there and involving hundreds of municipal workers in the process, internal documents reveal.

The details are contained in thousands of pages obtained by activists through freedom-of-information laws.

The city documents, shared with The Canadian Press, reveal the scale of the clearing effort for Trinity Bellwoods Park — an operation that took place last June and eventually turned violent.

Homeless encampments began popping up across Toronto in March 2020 as hundreds fled shelters for fear of contracting COVID-19. Some residents said they felt safer outdoors and sought the feeling of community generated by the encampments.

By late 2020, there were more than 50 encampments across Toronto, the documents show. The city had won a court battle that upheld a bylaw preventing camping in Toronto parks and began focusing on taking action against what it termed the "big four" encampments, including Trinity Bellwoods.

In December 2020, documents indicate the city was making efforts to negotiate with encampment residents and their supporters, with hopes of forming an "encampment discussion table."

Chris Brillinger, executive director of Family Services Toronto, acted as a volunteer mediator between the two sides and wrote to city staff on Dec. 29, 2020

"You need a full time facilitator/mediator for a two-to-three month period to move this forward," he wrote. "The community needs help to organize itself. It is composed largely of front line staff and volunteers who are exhausted, physically and emotionally."

Tracey Cook, the city's deputy manager, responded within in an hour.

"There is certainly one thing I immediately see we all have in common," she wrote, "City staff are also emotionally and physically exhausted."

In early January 2021, bureaucrats began formulating plans to clear the big four encampments.

On Jan. 7, Mayor John Tory's chief of staff sent an email to Cook, saying she and her colleague "were hoping to meet with you in the next couple weeks to discuss encampments and, specifically, our plan for the spring. The Mayor has started asking..."

On Jan. 22, Cook emailed the mayor's office and the city manager a PowerPoint presentation called "Encampment work — proposed next steps."

It noted that the city planned to work in "parallel buckets" — engaging with encampment residents and their supporters while also planning to clear the parks in April.