A small win as the city closes in
His hands and feet are blackened with grime.
The eyes, in deep pouches, are bloodshot.
Voice raspy as gravel.
It could all be the outward manifestation of decades of homelessness off and on, mostly on. From the last dozen years sleeping rough around Toronto. From the past two years spent primarily here, at Clarence Square Park, a patch of urban green alongside Spadina Avenue.
But most especially from the more than two weeks that Jordn-Geldart-Hautala has spent confined to a wooden box that measures less than eight feet by four feet — believed to be the last remaining “tiny home” built and distributed around the city’s homeless encampments last year by a good Samaritan carpenter.
This one seems to have weathered the storms, literally and figuratively, fairly well.
It’s not much but it’s something. A visitor thinks, no one should have to live like this.
“This is Day 17,” Geldart-Hautala announces, upon emerging.
Throughout all that time, the 45-year-old Indigenous man — a member of the Sinixt Nation — has been loath to even step foot outside his tiny house. He was under threat of eviction by Toronto Police Services, who have been trying to serve Geldart-Hautala with a warrant that was issued in Quebec. He was charged with obstructing police, stemming from an incident in 2017, and breach of conditions.
He’s been unable to wash, urinates into a bottle and has barely eaten over that time to avoid evacuating his bowels.
Police have told him that no member of the public can give him food or water. Cops can’t enter his shelter or drag him out. But they’re watching for when he surfaces and can be served.
A short audio snippet that Geldart-Hautala recorded on his phone when police first attempted to roust him was played at a media conference called by homeless advocates at 6 a.m. Wednesday — the hour they believed cops would return.
Although the audio quality is poor, what can be made out is an officer saying: “If he steps out and rushes back in there, we’re allowed to come in and take him.”
The officer continues: “We don’t see you staying inside the box for six, seven, eight, nine days.”
Geldart-Hautala: “Oh, I’m way more resourceful than you think.”
His defenders accuse police of “taunting” Geldart-Hautala. It doesn’t sound that way to these ears, merely a law enforcement officer speaking in measured tones about the hardship Geldart-Hautala was facing.
“Nobody’s going to bring him food,” the cop says.
“Why not?” Geldart-Hautala counters. “That’s abuse of power. That’s cruel and unusual punishment.”
On Wednesday, girding themselves for the reappearance of police, other park dwellers moved their tents, half a dozen protectively encircling the tiny house beneath a copse of trees.
And, in fact, within half an hour two officers do descend, warrant in hand. Seeing them approach, Geldart-Hautala retreats inside, door latched from the outside, and an activist manoeuvres her scooter to prevent access.
“From the way you’re blocking the door, I’m assuming he’s in there,” says one of the 52 Division officers. “Jordn, we’re here for your transport as per your lawyer and your social worker. Are you willing to come out? Are you ready to go?”
The cops are in no way aggressive. But the claim that some kind of agreement has been reached by Geldart-Hautala’s lawyer and social worker is hotly refuted.
The warrant has to be put through the door and that’s not happening. The cops, after a few minutes, depart. Geldart-Hautala’s supporters cheer.
Not everyone in this partly residential, partly commercial neighbourhood has taken a benign view of either Geldart-Hautala or the encampment. Graffiti scrawled on park benches reads: “REPORT THIS SCUM” and “LOTS OF HOUSING AVAILABLE THEY JUST DON’T WANT TO GO” and “STOP FEEDING THE RATS.”
Somewhat nervously, Geldart-Hautala addresses his supporters.
“I stand for my land and my rights. I’m practicing my Indigenous rights. They can stand down and f--- off.”
Doug Johnson Hatlem, a street pastor with Sanctuary Toronto, delivers the homeless homily, aimed at what he characterizes as a heartless city. “They say it’s about camping in parks being illegal and unsafe. But this isn’t about health and safety, this isn’t about legality, this is about invisiblizing the problem of poverty that is plaguing not just the 10,000 homeless in Toronto but the general affordability problem across the country.”
The city spent $663.2 million on the homeless last year, shelters and outreach programs and Streets To Homes. Homeless people, Hatlem adds, who’ve died in ravines, on the subway, frozen in bush shelters, and killed in encampment fires.
“Where are they allowed to sleep in this city if not in parks? Where is it that you’re allowed to keep your most meagre of belongings? Nowhere, unless you’re out of sight, unless you’re where you can die and not be found for days.”
Geldart-Hautala recounts for his listeners more pleasant times as an unhoused person. “I used to make $25 a day, go back to my tent, smoke a couple of joints and then go to bed.”
How Geldart-Hautala came to this state of homelessness is difficult to cobble together. He talks about going home one night for Christmas dinner when he was 11 years old — in Alberta, where he was born — and being thrown out by his mother and her boyfriend. He talks about years of a nomadic existence out West, living in a forest wigwam at one point in B.C., venturing hither and yon but rarely with a reliable roof over his head. The why of his peripatetic, marginalized existence is never explained. Maybe he can’t. But 30 years is a really long time.
Geldart-Hautala won’t go to a shelter. “I’ve been attacked too many times in those places, been robbed. I can’t cook my own food. The shelter spaces are too crowded, too many bad things going on in there, prostitution and drug dealing, fights. You’re better off in jail.”
And he insists that he won’t accept permanent social housing until “all my friends are housed, then I’ll eventually find my own.”
The 2,000-or-so homeless people, he means, who doss outside in Toronto every night.
But he’s made this intolerable situation, right now, about alleged police harassment and his Indigenous status. “I have been trapped inside of my home, unlawfully confined, pretty much kidnapped, and not allowed to touch Canadian soil, my ancestral territory.”
And he has lawyered up. Sima Atri, with the Community Justice Collective, on Monday sent a letter to the city, protesting the threatened eviction and transportation of Geldart-Hautala to Quebec. It states, in part, that evicting Geldart-Hautala and clearing his belongings from the park “would violate the Charter, the City’s common-law duties, and his rights as an Indigenous person under the Human Rights Code.”
That’s a dubious assertion. Clarence Park is city property, encampments are illegal and Indigenous status doesn’t afford exceptional rights in this situation.
Last summer, amid the pandemic that drove numerous homeless away from shelters, fearing contagion, upwards of 50 encampments sprang up around the city, nearly all of which have since been dismantled, on one occasion triggering a violent encounter between police and activists. The city recently announced plans to hire private security to monitor certain parks and prevent large encampments from taking root again.
Everybody has to be somewhere, take up space. But the parks are for communal enjoyment, not a de facto domicile for the homeless. This is the friction that countless cities are facing.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Atri relayed to the Star that the Quebec charges against Geldart-Hautala have been dropped and the warrant is no longer active.
He can come out now.
It’s a Pyrrhic victory because nothing else has changed. Still where he ought not to be, still subject to park clearance by the city if and when it chooses.
So hold the huzzahs.