Once it was a schoolhouse. Now it’s a wreck.
“The foundation was never proper,” she says. “The ceiling and the walls are caving in so when it starts raining we have to scramble and cover all the machines.”
This is no dodgy factory. The workers are not only occasionally moist, but also unpaid. The machines don’t turn out a saleable product. And people here are far more worried about leaks than tariffs.
I last wrote about this operation on a street near the mouth of the canal a year ago (“The Turner Report: From NOTL bedsheets to soldiers’ slings,” July 24, 2025). Before the sewing room started to collapse.
The Niagara Warehouse of Hope is a well of optimism in a landscape growing more and more barren. Canada at war with America. Racist parties surging in Europe. Battlefields in Ukraine. Despair in Gaza. Airstrikes in Iran. An angry climate and the greatest wealth disparity in history. It’s all here. But so is the soggy sewing room.
“We sew baby blankets,” says Mary Ann Brzeczka. “And bags for new mothers, slings for the Ukrainian army, and children’s hospitals, and whatever we can.”
Understatement. Last year the Warehouse — which neither asks for nor accepts government funding — and its sewers turned out 1,550 cloth diapers, 1,000 new-mother bags, 2,700 baby blankets, over 5,000 sanitary pads and a mess of slings, sheets, facecloths, towels and hospital gowns for the wounded.
All this from donated hotel tablecloths, worn bedsheets and robes which once covered guests at the Prince of Wales Hotel or Great Wolf Lodge.
That’s just the output of the sewing room. This place — founded by 88-year-old Mary van der Zalm (she still works there) — reaches out to the world’s needy people with an array of essentials. Hospital equipment, clothing, recycled laptops, hot-climate mattresses made of braided milk bags, bicycles, tools, dignity and hope.
Last year, they shipped 14 containers: seven to Cuba, two to the Philippines, two to Ukraine and others to Jamaica, Guatemala, Cameroon and Granada. So far in 2026, another 12 have gone to those same locations, as well as the Ebola-ravaged Congo and South Africa.
It costs tens of thousands to launch those containers. They leave packed with donated banana boxes full of supplies aimed at improving the lives of the impoverished, the war-torn, refugees, migrants, dispossessed and unwanted.
Mary’s 150 volunteers have moved to help fill a gap by the dismantling of the massive USAID, and to blunt the treatment being afforded families on the move from strife or climate by countries and governments drifting right.
Sadly, says director Brzeczka, Cuba has been cut off. An American blockade is purposefully pitching that island into a pre-industrial state. The U.S. claims Cuba harbours drones and Iranian military advisors. The island’s government says that’s false — a pretext for the Trump White House’s move to force regime change.
“People are starving,” she says. “We have so many donations for there from people across Canada. But unfortunately, everything is on hold. Cuba is hurting.”
Well, building a new sewing room that volunteer Glenda Jarvis can keep humming ain’t cheap. The budget is $175,000, even with companies like Coton Construction donating materials and services. So far they’re about a third of the way to the goal. The demo phase has started. Sewing machines are being moved.
The hope is to be relocated by January. After a local company donates flooring volunteers will be swarming in to do finishing work, paint, and start sewing up a storm.
At a time when tens of millions in public money is being poured into building a theatrical mega-complex, an artists’ village and a museum expansion — all to facilitate the tourist trade — the struggle to keep volunteers dry while they turn out baby blankets seems small. It’s not. But it does seem to underscore how misaligned this world has become.
Without hope, what’s left?
Garth Turner is a NOTL resident, journalist, author, wealth manager and former federal MP and minister. garth@garth.ca
