Eviction leaves woman, 91, homeless

Pat Fenemore is living in a Cambridge motel and is searching for a home she can afford

A picture of the Toronto skyline hangs over the bed of the Cambridge Super 8 motel room. It’s a different Toronto than Pat Fenemore remembers from her youth. At 91, most things are different these days.

The bed is expertly made, and a Tim Hortons container of chili sits beside a small, black microwave that functions just like the one Fenemore had in her trailer.

It’s about the only familiar item in the room, and it’s a small relief.

Fenemore is still figuring out her magnetic key card, so she doesn’t leave the room very often unless someone comes to see her — she doesn’t want to lock herself out and not be able to get back in.

This isn’t her home. Up until the end of April when the sheriff knocked on the door, Fenemore lived beside the banks of the Grand River in a trailer park tucked away in North Dumfries.

She has no surviving siblings. Outside of a brief marriage that feels like a lifetime ago, she’s spent much of her life in solitude. Her closest relative is a nephew, Rick, who will be in Europe until August.

Now, sitting in a motel room in a region of more than 600,000 people, she’s never been more alone, trapped inside a system that has somehow overlooked her.

Long eviction fight begins

Fenemore knew the knock from the sheriff was coming.

Even before Pat Campbell became the landlord at the Everglades Mobile Park in September 2019, the Ministry of the Environment had been working with the previous owner to deal with environmental concerns about the trailer park’s sewage system.

The ministry imposes certain standards on any sewage system that produces more than 10,000 litres of sewage a day.

The Campbells “seriously” looked at redoing the entire waste system at the property, wrote Caitlin McIntyre, the lawyer for the Campbells, in an email to Fenemore’s legal counsel.

But that solution was just too costly, leaving the owners with no choice but to evict some tenants so that the park could meet ministry regulations, McIntyre said.

The Campbells proposed reducing the number of tenants at the

park to bring its total sewage below 10,000 litres, she said in the email.

However, the ministry said it did not suggest evictions, nor did it require it.

“This was the decision of the property owner to address outstanding environmental approval requirements,” said ministry spokesperson Lindsay Davidson.

A ministry inspection in 2017 made it clear the trailer park’s sewage system might need enhancements to meet ministry approval, Davidson said.

“We have been in constant communication with the owner of the site since the inspection and continue to work with them to ensure compliance,” said Davidson. “Until the necessary approval for the current system is obtained, we continue to require enhanced maintenance, monitoring, inspection and pumping to ensure no off-site adverse effects.”

Meanwhile, the Campbells decided to move forward with the evictions, giving the tenants a year’s notice in March 2020. In a statement sent to the Record, McIntyre said Campbell had no further comment on the matter, and did not explain how the owners chose which tenants to evict.

A hearing was scheduled with the Landlord and Tenant Board in September 2021 to fight the eviction, but neither Campbell nor Fenemore showed up. When a second hearing was scheduled in December, Fenemore failed to show up again.

On April 22, the sheriff arrived on Fenemore’s doorstep and told her it was time to leave. That’s when things started to unravel.

Nowhere to go, but to sleep under the stars

Fenemore didn’t have a plan on where she was going to go next.

She has three cats she considers family and wanted to find a solution that could keep them together in peace.

She bought the converted trailer 15 years ago for $50,000 and had been renting the spot by the river ever since. Her nephew, Rick Fenemore, describes her as a former beatnik, a woman who lived on a boat in the Toronto harbour, then on a farm, and then for a period in her car, travelling across the country.

She planned to live in her car when the sheriff showed up, so she packed her things up and drove over to the campsite side of the park and hunker down for the night. But a gate locked the campsite, and Fenemore crashed her car as she tried to back it away and turn around.

“That didn’t quite work out the way I was hoping,” Fenemore said with a little smile.

When police arrived in response to calls about the crash, they told her she needed to find an actual place to stay.

Her car was towed to a garage in Ayr, where a woman who heard Fenemore’s story offered her a place for the night.

The next day, after getting her car back, Fenemore said she headed into Paris in search of a motel after returning to the trailer park to check in on her cats.

“I drive around and all I see are these developments, reaching up to the sky in every direction, filled with more and more people,” she said. “Yet somehow they want to evict one old woman from a trailer on the river.”

Losing her bearings, Fenemore finally pulled into a convenience store. After hearing her situation, the clerk called a local taxi driver, who got Fenemore to follow him as he went from one motel to the next.

When she finally found a hotel that had a room available, her hearing loss made the check-in process difficult. Fearing that she might have dementia, the hotel manager called the police.

“I’m in my room, finally, and then there’s a knock at the door,” said Fenemore. “It’s a police officer, and when I tell him there’s nothing wrong with me, he won’t believe me, and I have to do all these tests.”

Fenemore passes the tests and confirms she is lucid and acting on her own accord.

But living in a hotel is no longterm answer, so the police officer connected her with Michelle Knight, who works in eviction prevention with Social Development Centre Waterloo Region. Knight has been helping Fenemore ever since that April night.

“The problem is that Pat essentially falls through the cracks,” she said. “She doesn’t have any major physical health issues or brain deterioration that can fast-track the situation and get her into care immediately. And what is terrifying is that I know this could be me when I get older. This could be any of us.”

Instead, she’s stuck on a modest fixed pension that isn’t enough to get her an adequate one-bedroom apartment. Some places that she has qualified for won’t accept her cats, who she won’t abandon.

“What she’s really after is just a place in the country, out of the way from everyone, where she can live with her cats on her own terms,” said Knight. “Unfortunately, there aren’t many options like that available.”

I drive around and all I see are these developments ... filled with more and more people. Yet somehow they want to evict one old woman from a trailer on the river. PAT FENEMORE

Fenemore quips in — “People don’t understand but those cats are my children. I’m not interested in continuing without them.”

More help on the way

Knight eventually brings Fenemore to the Super 8 in Cambridge where the costs are lower than the spot she first came to.

Then she introduces her to Crystal Laforest, an outreach worker with Langs, a community organization in Cambridge that connects people dealing with homelessness to health care. Langs and Knight also connect Fenemore with other service providers that focus on housing and food.

Since moving to the Super 8, Fenemore has been getting food dropped off from the Cambridge Food Bank. She’s also been referred to Home and Community Care to help with finding a more permanent housing option. Meanwhile, the motel is charging her $80 a night, down from its regular rate of $120 a night, but it’s still too expensive, and the bills are starting to pile up, including the bills for her three cats. Their stay at a kennel is costing her about as much as her motel bill.

With each day that passes, it’s getting more expensive.

LaForest says she’s concerned that the lack of a home could start impacting Fenemore’s health.

“We are noticing that it is becoming more frequent that we are getting people who are 80plus and have nowhere to go,” said Laforest. “It’s obviously an extremely stressful situation, and with seniors, that’s often when their mental health will start to deteriorate. So, the goal is to alleviate those pressures as quickly as possible.”

Many seniors can’t navigate the web to find the little housing that is available, she said, and it requires a lot of help.

“To do a competitive housing search, you have to be on Kijiji, you have to be on Marketplace,” said Laforest. “If you’re not familiar with that environment, it almost seems impossible.”

Fenemore will likely end up in an apartment in the city through social housing. It won’t be what she wants, Laforest said, but it will keep her safe in the meantime.

“If I can wave my magic wand, she can get everything she wants, which is living in a rural environment. That’s what she’s used to, that’s what she’s comfortable with,” she said. “The problem is, there’s hardly any housing in Kitchener and Waterloo. Once you go to the smaller communities, it’s even worse.”

Fenemore’s nephew, Rick, and his wife Nancy wrote up a biography of Fenemore to send out to agencies in the area that could help.

The description offers a look inside what aging with dignity can look like, and what happens when it’s stripped away.

“Pat looks after herself, drives her own car, does her own shopping, cleans her own eavestrough, takes her cats to the vet when necessary. She does not drink or do drugs and is reclusive. No loud parties, or any parties at Aunt Pat’s,” he wrote.

“She does not own a TV, listens occasionally to a staticprone radio, reads a newspaper that someone might have given her, and loves the library. In other words, she is living on her own, the way that she wants to. She is proudly independent. She always believed that she would be able to stay in her cosy little home, with her family, her cats, until the end.”

Standing in her motel room, waiting to go see an apartment building in the middle of Cambridge, Fenemore summed it up like this: “I had a pretty good life on my own until this whole situation.”