The Ghost of Barriefield: Why Kingston's Modern Encampment Strategy Recycles a 90-Year-Old Blueprint of Failure
By Melissa Marie Reid — Kingston, Ontario, May 2026
To walk along the riverfront perimeter of Belle Park today is to witness what many consider a modern, unprecedented crisis: tents pitched on a former municipal landfill, citizens exposed to the brutal shifts of Canadian weather, and a visible, painful manifestation of extreme poverty. Local commentators and politicians often speak of this encampment as a sudden anomaly — a tragic byproduct of modern inflation and a broken social safety net.
But as a fifth-generation Kingstonian, I know this city. I know its geography, I know its institutions, and I know its history. And history tells a far more calculated story.
The crisis unfolding at Belle Park is not a novel catastrophe. It is an engineered policy outcome, executed via a spatial and political playbook that Kingston first deployed nearly a century ago. Belle Park is not an anomaly; it is the modern-day reincarnation of the Barriefield Relief Camp of 1933.
During the Great Depression, Kingston faced a remarkably similar structural challenge. Economic collapse had pushed thousands of single, unhoused, transient workers onto the railways and into urban centers. Rather than fixing the broken economic floor or building affordable housing, the federal government opted for punitive containment. Under the direction of the Department of National Defence, the state established a network of Unemployment Relief Camps.
Locally, that meant pushing the unhoused population out of Kingston's commercial and residential core, across the natural boundary of the Cataraqui River, and onto the windswept military common at Barriefield.
The structural parallels between 1933 Barriefield and 2026 Belle Park are both undeniable and damning:
Geographic Displacement as Social Cleansing
In the 1930s, the state utilized the east bank of the river to keep the unhoused "Royal Twenty-Centers" out of sight of downtown shoppers and residents.
Today, Belle Park serves the exact same spatial purpose. By concentrating the city's most vulnerable citizens on the peripheral, industrial edge of the inner harbour, the modern system manages to keep mass poverty away from the thriving commercial assets of Princess Street and residential subdivisions.
Out of sight remains out of mind.
Environmental Injustice and the Normalization of Risk
At Barriefield, men were subjected to grueling elements in basic, militarized bunkhouses.
At Belle Park, the state has allowed a literal reclaimed municipal landfill to become the primary staging ground for human survival. Expecting traumatized, low-income citizens to live unsheltered on top of decades of buried industrial and municipal waste is a profound violation of human dignity. It represents an administrative acceptance of substandard living conditions for those the housing market has rejected.
Containment Over Solutions
The Barriefield camp was never designed to cure economic destitution; it was a holding pen.
Public capital was funneled into guards, fences, and basic rations while the men performed backbreaking manual labor to build RMC's foundations for a meager 20 cents a day.
In 2026, we see a parallel waste of resources. Millions of public dollars are continuously routed into emergency shelter management, continuous police monitoring, court injunctions, and administrative optics. We are spending a fortune to manage the visible symptoms of a crisis, while the funding required to build permanent, low-barrier, gender-focused non-market housing remains frozen.
Modern homelessness is a manufactured deficit. Between 1973 and 1983, Canada treated housing as critical infrastructure, building roughly 20,000 to 25,000 units of social and co-operative housing every single year. When the federal government froze that funding in 1993 and subsequently downloaded the costs onto municipalities, the structural floor collapsed. What we are seeing at Belle Park today is the compounding, long-term interest on that 30-year policy debt. Municipalities were left holding a systemic bag they did not create and lack the tax base to fix.
But defaulting to the 1930s blueprint of geographic exclusion and punitive enforcement is an abdication of leadership. Eviction notices, bylaw crackdowns, and fence lines will not build a single square foot of deeply affordable housing. They merely shuffle human suffering from one city block to another.
If Kingston wants to lead, it must break this century-old cycle. We must demand systemic integrity over political optics and replace temporary crisis containment with metric honesty. That means treating housing once again as a non-market public utility, aggressively protecting our existing lower-cost housing stock from speculative private equity, and establishing permanent, dignified, and supportive bricks-and-mortar infrastructure.
Until we do, the ghost of Barriefield will continue to haunt the banks of the Cataraqui River, reminding us that a society that chooses to hide its poorest citizens on a landfill has not progressed, it has simply recycled its past. And as we look at how City Hall continuously dusts off this exact same ninety-year-old blueprint to manage human suffering, we realize how well the city handles its recycling.