Community advocates and residents raise concerns with plan to clear Kitchener encampment

The plan to clear an encampment in Kitchener could face some major challenges. CTV’s Krista Simpson explains.

If the Region of Waterloo has its way, a longstanding encampment at 100 Victoria Street in Kitchener will be gone in the next few months to make way for the construction of a new transit hub.

But the people living there, and the community advocates who work with them, say they have little confidence in the plan.

“I don’t think its realistic. Its hopeful, but there has to be more of a plan,” Gregory Pachulsky, who previously lived at the encampment, told CTV News on Thursday.

“I’m very concerned for the people living at the site,” Ashley Schuitema, executive director of Waterloo Region Community Legal Services, said in an interview. “I see in the proposal a lot of dollars allocated to motel space, and we know that’s not a realistic long-term solution for people. This money will run out and people will be stuck having nowhere to go and nowhere where they can camp.”

The Region of Waterloo said they need to clear the encampment to start remediation and construction for the transit hub.

Metrolinx, the company that operates GO Transit, told the region it needs to begin work at 100 Victoria Street North by March 2026. In order to prepare for that start date, the region said the encampment needs to be cleared by Dec. 1, 2025 to allow for site clean up, investigation and geotechnical testing.

Some said they felt blindsided by the news.

“We weren’t given any sort of advanced notice that this was coming down,” said Schuitema. “I also sit as part of the Plan to End Chronic Homelessness, which is a number of organizations throughout the community that are working with the region to try to end chronic homelessness. None of these organizations were given any sort of heads up, so it was quite surprising.”

Noah Helsby, who lived at the encampment for two months, said if the region can offer alternate accommodations the move would be well received.

“All of us are here because we can’t get housing or proper housing that we want to be in. If they can pull it together, I’m sure all of us would like to be indoors before the cold weather. Nobody wants to be out here in the elements and the cold,” Helsby said.

“It has to happen because these people need shelter. This is not a livable condition – porta-potties and rats and garbage around, it’s not livable. The government needs to step up,” Pachulsky agreed.

Advocates, however, are less enthused about the region’s approach.

“We know that this isn’t a solution,” Schuitema explained. “The amount of people experiencing homelessness in our community compared to the spaces that we have available for people, there’s a huge gap. All this will mean is people will be tenting and moving around, tenting and moving around. Which is harmful.

Legal implications

This isn’t the first time the region has tried to dismantle the encampment.

In 2023, the region lost its bid for a court injunction to evict the residents.

Justice M. Valente declined to declare that the people living there were in breach of a regional bylaw.

The ruling read, in part: “The region does not have adequate, accessible shelter spaces for its homeless population of some 1,100 individuals”.

The judge went on to say that the bylaw the region had used to enforce encampment orders “deprives the homeless residents of the encampment of life, liberty and security of the person in a manner not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice and is not saved by section 1 of the charter.”

Waterloo Region Community Legal Services sees a similar legal battle in their future.

“I think the region will have to go back to court to get permission to move forward with their plan as set out in their bylaw, which they’ve indicated that they understand they need to do,” Schuitema said. “There are some previsions in this bylaw which would violate the existing court order.”

She added that trying to sort out the outstanding issues before December seems unlikely.

“I think it’s pretty ambitious of the region to have this deadline in place. Courts are very overburdened and very slow, so the idea of having a court matter like this heard and decided before December is not practical.”

As Schuitema and her team prepare to wade back into the legal quagmire, she expressed disappointment about other work that may suffer as a result.

“It feels very unfortunate. We’re very stretched thin as an organization and I just wish that resources didn’t have to be used in this manner. I’m certainly going to be proposing some kind of mediation option, and I hope that the region would be considering entertaining that because litigation takes up a lot of resources; it costs the region money, it takes resources away from court, it takes resources from our community,” she said.

Finding a new place to call home

For many, the quest to find adequate alternative accommodations is no easy feat.

“I went to the Region of Waterloo Welcome Space and I found that I’m on the housing paths list since 2021 and that’s been four or five years [ago] now. I have to wait for someone to move out so I can move in. That’s the process,” Pachulsky said.

To complicate matters further, the region lost approximately 100 shelter spaces in March as an emergency shelter operating out of the former Schwaben Club in Kitchener closed its doors for good.

Schuitema noted that last time the issue came up, people were offered shelter spaces due to the lack of appropriate and affordable housing options.

“We know for a lot of people [shelter space] doesn’t work. We also have very limited spaces in our community for women, for gender-diverse people, and so if there’s a woman living at the encampment who’s being offered a space at a co-ed shelter bed, maybe that’s not safe for her. The choices that are being offered are very constrained. It really takes away from people’s dignity and their liberty to make choices about where they want to be and what they need to do to feel safe,” she said.

As the weather warms up, she also worries more people will join the encampment, creating an even bigger challenge to find housing for everyone living there.

“We will also see the number of people living at [100 Victoria Street] grow. It always grows in the spring and summer. When we were litigating [in 2022] it was between 70 to 90 people that were living there. That’s the more realistic number that the region should be contemplating,” she said.

For now, residents at the encampment are sitting tight as look ahead to an uncertain future.

“Four walls and a door are better than a tent, but we all tend to stick together, and it is our community,” Helsby said. “We make it what it is. We do have good times.”