Residents of the Berczy Park homeless encampment in downtown Barrie are waiting to see what happens next as a 72-hour deadline to vacate the greenspace has come and gone with no action taken yet by the city.
"The city continues to work with the County of Simcoe as the lead on housing and homelessness in Barrie," Dawn McAlpine, Barrie's general manager of community and corporate services, said in a statement emailed to BarrieToday.
"The information that the county provides on the status of the individuals and their housing offers will inform next steps," she added.
The city handed out 21 bylaw infraction notices at the downtown park on Sept. 3, which gave residents there 72 hours to "correct" the noted violations, which cited several infractions for behaviour contrary to city bylaws.
Those infractions included placing debris on city property contrary to the nuisance bylaw, fouling the land by urinating and defecating, and camping within a public park contrary to the parks use bylaw.
On Friday morning, encampment residents who have remained in the park could be seen milling about with supporters who arrived to protest any effort to have the them removed. They were waiting for city officials to potentially arrive and begin the removal of the camps and the people living there.
As of 11 a.m., no action had been taken by the city.
Around mid-morning, a City of Barrie pickup truck arrived and a lone worker tossed a couple of full garbage bags into the back of the vehicle, bags which were sitting at the park entrance off Peel Street.
Meanwhile, the camp's residents seemed on edge, waiting to see what might happen next.
“I expect them to offer us suitable accommodation. We are already living in an environment that is unsafe,” said a 35-year-old woman named Stephanie, who has been living in a tent at the park for the past two months.
She was carrying an armful of food and a bottle of water back to her tent, supplies which were given to her by supporters who set up a table in the park to hand out items.
“We are doing the best we can with what we have,” Stephanie added.
Volunteers with Ryan’s Hope, a Barrie-based non-profit organization that assists the homeless, said they camped out overnight at the park in support of the people who are living there.
“We don’t know really what to expect,” Ryan’s Hope director Christine Nayler told BarrieToday.
She says they decided to camp out as they were unsure when bylaw officers might arrive to begin evicting people, if at all.
“Our friends were really nervous as to what is going to happen to them today, so we wanted to make sure some people were here to witness and document," said Nayler, who says any eviction could be deemed "illegal."
"We would at least have some evidence for court because this is a violation of people’s Charter rights,” she added.
Some have questioned whether the city is acting within the law with its recent moves, and have urged the municipality to reconsider what actions it could take next.
The Busby Centre says it was approached by the County of Simcoe to create 20 additional temporary shelter beds, which would be made available to the residents of the Berczy Park encampment.
The county is responsible for planning, funding and managing social housing programs and homelessness services, along with poverty reduction and shelter retention programs.
Nayler said she's worried that if her group leaves today, the city “will show up tomorrow and evict all our friends?”
She says they have nowhere else to go and they will likely move to another park, which will cost the city money “doing this cycle (of eviction) over and over again.”
Nayler also said there are about half the people here who were living in the park on Monday.
“When they got the eviction notice, a lot of them had already packed up and left, and we don’t even know where half of our friends are right now because they didn’t want to be forcefully removed from their homes, so they left,” she said.
