Wendy Muckle, Ottawa Inner City Health co-founder, appointed to Order of Canada

Calls from the governor general’s office haven’t been out of the ordinary for Wendy Muckle.

“Certain governor generals were very interested in some of the same causes I was involved in,” she says. “It’s not unusual to hear from them.”

However, one recent chat with the office of Gov.-Gen. Mary Simon was unlike the many that came before it. In the comfort of her Hintonburg home, Muckle was told she had been appointed to the Order of Canada.

“I was completely shocked … It’s hard to imagine how it feels,” she said.

Muckle co-founded Ottawa Inner City Health in 2001 after noticing what she saw as a lack of adequate services for homeless people.

“We could identify 70 individuals who seemed to go from one facility to the next, generally creating a bit of fuss as they went and clearly not getting their needs met,” she said.

Muckle recalled the different circumstances of homeless people she saw around that time, including one individual who had a frozen shoulder X-rayed seven times in a month.

“That started to give us a picture of how our systems were not working,” Muckle said. “Even if we didn’t have more funding, even if we didn’t have more resources, (there were) things we could do to figure out how to make our systems work better.”

Muckle called the origins of Ottawa Inner City Health a “wild journey.”

“We didn’t have money,” she said, adding that the organization initially relied on loans from others such as The Ottawa Hospital and the Ottawa Mission and friends who helped to pay start-up bills.

The organization did not receive provincial funding until 2005, Muckle said.

“Everybody who was a partner in the process made their contributions,” she said. “When people talk about myself and (co-founder Jeffrey) Turnbull, yes, we were an important part of that effort, but it was really a community.”

Early Ottawa Inner City Health programs, Muckle said, included a hospice to help the homeless during the AIDS crisis and an alcohol program to address chronic alcoholism in the ByWard Market. Now, Muckle said Inner City Health programs focus on providing homeless people with mental-health services and helping those with drug addictions.

Muckle retired as CEO in 2022. She said her program-development-loving self was no longer the right fit for infrastructure and process-building that Ottawa Inner City Health required.

“It was time,” she said. “Organizations need change. I had been there for a very long time and I felt like I had made my contribution.”

For Muckle, retirement was far from the end of her philanthropic journey.

“The joke at the office is that I’m a very bad retiree,” she said with a laugh.

Muckle regularly volunteers with Block Leaders, an Ottawa Inner City Health program that recruits homeless people and drug users as peer mentors to help their community.

“Once you’re sucked into those things … It’s very hard to extricate yourself,” she said. “What sort of kept me going is just seeing the potential of individuals.”

Muckle recalled seeing the growth of people she knew who used to live on the streets take on Inner City Health leadership roles.

“To see people’s untapped potential, and to be able to journey with people through that process … I think that’s what human nature is. Human beings are always striving to do better,” she said.

In addition to her work with Ottawa Inner City Health, Muckle and close friend Peggy Taillon have spent 20 years helping raise money for widows in Kenya with The Hera Mission, a Canadian-based charity they established.

Muckle said it had been “really encouraging” to see her work recognized at a national and global level. She also said she hoped that the Order of Canada appointment reflected what it meant to be a “good citizen of Canada and of the world.”

As for celebrating the Order of Canada, it was to be business as usual for Muckle. After coffee with a friend, she planned to visit homeless shelters to deliver snacks.

“Happy retirement to me,” she said.

Three other Ottawa residents were included in the Order of Canada appointments announced Wednesday:

• Maureen Boyd: communicator, connector and community builder who served as chair of the Parliamentary Centre and supported immigrant and Indigenous families as founding chair of the Mothers Matter Centre.
• André B. Lalonde: gynecologist and obstetrician whose leadership has fostered best practices and helped recognize the pivotal role of midwives, introduce birthing rooms in Canada and return childbirth to the Cree community in Quebec.
• Jean-Pierre Kingsley, former chief electoral officer of Canada who helped modernize our voting system and strengthened the integrity of our electoral process and also worked internationally to promote democratic development and improve elections around the world.

The governor general’s office announced 88 new appointments to the Order of Canada overall on Wednesday, including one Companion, 24 Officers and 63 Members. Three of the appointments involved promotions within the Order.

With files from Postmedia staff