The Current - Meet the newest members of the Order of Canada

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

Two Canadians honoured for a lifetime of service. Cheryl Forchuk is a mental health nurse and researcher whose work has changed how Canada understands homelessness, tracing its roots to system failures and pushing for solutions grounded in dignity and data. Mike Stevens is a renowned harmonica player whose music has taken him to remote Indigenous communities, where he’s spent decades helping young people find hope and healing through the power of song. Both have been named to the Order of Canada.

Welcome to the Dudes Club, a brotherhood supporting men's health and wellness. Established in the Vancouver downtown Eastside in 2010, the Dudes Club is a community-based organization that focuses on indigenous men's health, many of whom are struggling with intergenerational trauma, addiction, poverty, homelessness, and chronic diseases. The aim is to reduce isolation and loneliness and for the men to regain a sense of pride and purpose in their lives. As a global health care company, Novo Nordisk is dedicated to driving change for a healthy world. It's what we've been doing since 1923. It also takes the strength and determination of the communities around us, whether it's through disease

awareness, fighting stigmas and loneliness, education, or empowering people to become more active. Novo Nordisk is supporting local changemakers because it takes more than medicine to live a healthy life. Leave your armor at the door. Watch this paid content on CBC Gem. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Let's hear a bit more of Mike Stevens from his latest album, Breathe In The World, Breathe Out Music. This is Like a Little Bird with flying through the darkness Let my world, do a very tough job

Like a little bird, flying through the darkness I'm just waiting, for the beauty to arrive Like a little bird, flying through the darkness. Coming up after your regional update, the CBC podcast understood who broke the internet. Over the coming days, we're going to be highlighting some of the remarkable people who have just been named to the Order of Canada. And today I'm joined by Cheryl Forchuk. She is distinguished university professor of nursing and psychiatry at Western University. She has been recognized for her groundbreaking research in mental health, poverty, and homelessness. Good morning, Cheryl, and congratulations. Thank you, Megan, and thank you for having me here.

What does this honor mean to you? Well, it means a lot. For one, I am very humbled by it because none of the research I do, I do as an individual. It's always a team effort. And so I have a lot of really good partners, community partners, people with lived experience, and my fantastic research team. So I really see it as a joint acknowledgement. How did you first become interested in the problem of homelessness? Well, I started off my career as a psychiatric mental health nurse and as an advanced practice

nurse and a clinical nurse specialist for years. And part of my whole reason with doing a PhD was to look at systems-level issues. What I find in clinical practice all the time, we try to find workarounds to make the system work. So you'll have an individual patient that you're caring for and the system doesn't work for them. And so part of even going back was to see instead of trying to have all these workarounds, how can we make the system better? When I started my career as a nurse, when I worked at the psych hospital, if we had a patient discharged to homelessness, we filled out a form that was the same form as a patient assault. I had a project, this intervention transitional discharge model, we had six hospitals

in Ontario in the particular study. And in all six sites, I was finding people who had been discharged into homelessness. I thought, what the heck is going on here? When I would talk to the staff, they would say, oh, this person doesn't have housing skills or they have different reasons, but how could people across the province at that point all simultaneously lose their housing skills. And what does that mean, housing skills? Well, I think they were focusing on the individual rather than the system. And what had happened was at that time period, we had downloaded housing from the federal level to the provincial

level. And so public housing have been practically stopped across the country in terms of new building. Canada is actually the only industrialized nation in the world that does not have responsibility for housing homelessness at the national level. When you talk about homelessness, you draw a comparison with the Children's Game musical chairs. Correct.

Can you explain why it's such a good analogy for homelessness? Yes, because again, it allows us to think more systems level rather than blame the individual. So if you can understand musical chairs, you can understand homelessness. So the chairs represent the affordable housing available within a community. And I don't mean 30% salary. I mean, what could somebody on basic income support, disability, or OAS actually afford in a community? So across the country, that might mean around $700 a month. If that's your total income, what housing could you actually afford? That's the chairs. The people circling are the people at that income level. So clearly, if you have fewer chairs in terms of housing available for someone at that income level, then you have people at that income level.

You're going to have a homeless problem. And who it is, it's going to be people who have a harder time grabbing chairs quickly. Meaning with people with disabilities or? Yep, yep. Disabilities, people that have been suffering from mental illness, that may not, sometimes youth because they don't have the history of having housing. It could be newcomers, but anyone who has any kind of vulnerability is going to be amplified in grabbing the few chairs.

Now the other thing about the analogy is of course the music. People are vulnerable when the music stops and you think of music as representing transition. So if you've got a transition in your life, that's when you're vulnerable. So that could be aging out a children's aid. That could be coming out of hospital, a relationship breakup, retiring, losing a job, coming out of jail. There's many times when you could be vulnerable. Things that happen to most of us in a lifetime. Yeah, absolutely. So we can try to prevent homelessness by paying attention to the music, but it won't change the overall numbers unless we increase the chairs or decrease the people

struggling. Now it seems like the chairs are not increasing, that the problem of homelessness seems to be getting worse and affecting more and more communities. Why is that? Well both things have happened. We've had a period of fewer chairs being developed. We're seeing more investment in housing, although not always the housing at that level that those people circling need. Really, we're

talking about public housing or rent subsidies. But the other thing is because of the larger financial situation, we've had an increase in the people circling as well. So the two things have happened. When we were doing research during the pandemic wasn't our plan, that's how it worked out. We were finding at that time about 16% had their very first episode of homelessness during the pandemic. 16% of Canadians? No, no, no, of the people who are homeless that we interviewed. I see, okay. So we're seeing that increase because we've got both things happening simultaneously,

not an adequate investment in the chairs as well as an increase to people circling. Part of the problem we think as well is our methods of measuring homelessness underestimate the total. So even though we've seen some better investment, if you don't know how big the problem is, you don't know how much to set aside. And one of the issues is most of our research really has that urban bias. A lot of the federal numbers are really looking at shelter use. Not everyone's using a shelter. And it's only the larger urban centers that tend to have shelters. So these smaller

communities who are seeing homelessness don't have a homeless sector, so they don't have a way of counting it. So it's being systematically underestimated. We've been working on things such as using an algorithm to use health data as a way of getting better estimates. And it would suggest we could possibly triple the current estimates. Triple the current estimates of the number of homeless across the country? Correct, yes.

We do tend to think of homelessness as an urban problem, the encampments and parks, those sorts of things. But as you mentioned, it's not just an urban problem. How has it become a non-urban problem? Well, it has been going on for some time and people, like I've written about rural homelessness quite a few years ago, people have different solutions and it becomes more invisible. People often take people in and try to help it out, like maybe the church helps out.

And as well, we have a lot of people living in the rough. Our current work around veterans, they're often out living in the rough, off the grid, smaller encampments, but they simply don't show up in the data if they're not using shelters. Danielle Pletka Does it have anything to do with the increase in housing prices and people displacing those in what was once more affordable housing? That's part of it, but it has existed prior to that. Because I say like we've seen it prior to that. The other thing that we saw happen, particularly during the pandemic when housing prices were going up, we even found situations like group homes being sold at a profit, being rent evicted, turned into either AirBnBs

or converted to residential properties. And one of the communities we went to, they lost six group homes. And those people became homeless. Wow. Now, you've long argued that homelessness is a solvable problem. What would it take? We have to increase the chairs and decrease the people circling.

So there's many ways to increase the chairs, like certainly public housing, looking at things such as rent subsidies, decrease the people. Circling is related to those poverty structures. So, and again, it depends on the population. We've done a lot of work with social enterprises to help people in some cases reenter or enter for the first time the job market. But also, we need to increase those basic levels of support. It's not reasonable to expect that somebody for, what is it, what Ontario works on, like $360 a month. Is your housing including all costs? Is there anything? What could you possibly get in Ontario at that price? So we really believe that we should be increasing those basic income levels so that there's fewer people circling.

And what's at stake if we don't do those sorts of things, if we don't address this problem? It will just get worse. It will just get worse. And Canada has never had the investment in public housing that we see in a lot of European countries where, in many cases like Finland, they've solved homelessness. And again, these are our most vulnerable people and it is solvable, but it does take an investment. It takes an investment in people and seeing people as people and recognizing how vulnerable we all are. And Cheryl, what does it mean to you to do this work? Oh, well, I always joke and say that's why I haven't retired. There's a lot of work to do.

Yeah, yeah. But no, I really appreciate it. Because of all these partnerships I mentioned at the beginning, like when we were going across the country in particular, but many times, and because we include people with lived experience, so including people who are homeless, either presently or in the past in advising us, being on our advisory group, participating in the research. But we're going to write a paper one time of all the gifts we've got because people, it's the idea of bearing witness. They were so happy to be able to talk about it. We had many times that come

back the next day with, that have picked wild flowers, or they would have wrote a poem for us or drawn a picture and, you know, saying what it meant to be able to participate in the research. So when people themselves see it as significant and tell us how important it is, you know, in some ways that's better than the Order of Canada, but the Order of Canada validates that for them too. Cheryl, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Thank you. Cheryl Forchuk was named to the Order of Canada for her research on mental health, poverty

and homelessness. She is distinguished university professor of nursing and psychiatry at Western University. Welcome to the Dudes Club, a brotherhood supporting men's health and wellness. Established in the Vancouver downtown Eastside in 2010, the Dudes Club is a community-based organization that focuses on indigenous men's health, many of whom are struggling with intergenerational trauma, addiction, poverty, homelessness, and chronic diseases. The aim is to reduce isolation and loneliness, and for the men to regain a sense of pride

and purpose in their lives. As a global healthcare company, Novo Nordisk is dedicated to driving change for a healthy world. It's what we've been doing since 1923. It also takes the strength and determination of the communities around us. Whether it's through disease awareness, fighting stigmas and loneliness, education, or empowering people to become more active, Novo Nordisk is supporting local change makers because it takes more than medicine to live a healthy life. Leave your armor at the door. Watch this paid content on CBC Gem.

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Visit NoMoreDets.org. I'm gonna be a goodica. That is Mike Stevens with his version of Orange Blossom Special. He is also among the latest members of the Order of Canada, this country's highest civilian honour, and he joins us now from Point Edward, Ontario. Good morning, Mike, and congratulations. Oh, good morning, Megan. Thank you so much. So how did you find out that you were being appointed

an officer of the Order of Canada? Oh, man, I'd been touring really heavy. I was away from home for about two months, and we'd just moved to a different house and I was in the basement and just surrounded by boxes. You know how we all collect so much stuff, right? And trying to figure out what I do with all that and really tired and my phone was sitting over on the side on a box and I didn't even have the ringer on and of course I screen

my calls and I look over and my phone is lighting up and it says a call from Ottawa. And I immediately thought, okay, for sure, telemarketer, there's going to be a long pause and we're going to go, hello, Jim? But for some reason I picked it up and instead I was asked a question and I was asked if I would accept the officer of the Order of Canada. I didn't handle it very well. I wasn't very cool at all.

You shed a few tears, huh? I did. I fell apart, yeah. Wow. So, I mean, what does the Order mean to you? Oh, it's deeply personal. No words can really explain it. It's, you know, you look at the history and the people that have received it,

and you look at all the people under the radar doing all the heavy lifting and all the work that never get noticed. So the only way I can describe it, I've thought about it because I've got a gigantic case of imposter syndrome going on. And I just thought, you know what, something like this, something this major and this personal in my life allows me to lean on it when, you know, it's easy to be a nice person and to help when things are going well in your life, but if your health isn't good or if you're broke or if you're having a bad day, it's not so easy. So something like this I can store away in the back of my mind,

and it reminds me to say, how can I help even when maybe I'm not having the best day? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I know you have helped and I want to ask you about that, but I first want to ask you, how did you choose the harmonica as your instrument? Well, it kind of shows me. No one in my family played any music, but there was a harmonica around the house. And I picked it up one day as a kid and immediately made a noise that felt good. It wasn't about music, it just felt really good and I still play

that way. I have synesthesia and of course I didn't know about it back then, but I've always just played exactly what's rolling around in my head because there's always music there and I'm always sort of distracted unless I can sort of push it out of the way. And harmonica lets me express that and it did when I was a kid and I can sort of push it out of the way. And harmonica lets me express that. And it did when I was a kid. And I can be that same kid now at 67 years old when I play. Wow. What a great superpower.

A lot of people listening may have tried to make a few sounds with the harmonica, myself included, with some pretty lame results. But what does it take to play the way that you do? I mean, obviously lots of practice, but what else does it take? I think it takes, for me, I can only talk about me personally. For me, there's no rules. I like bad notes. I can't read any music, but I can play pretty complex music. All I'm trying to do is make a sound that either fits in with the sound around me or creates tension or some kind of a mood or a feel. It's just totally playing feelings. The easiest way to do it is just to try and figure out what you're hearing inside or in your heart and just make a sound.

Don't try and copy anybody else. I think the only reason I've had a career is that I play so different than everybody else because there's no rules and I've never had lessons or anything. Yeah. I mean, there's just so much freedom of expression that comes out of you. Now do you have your harmonica there with you now? Yeah, I do. Can we get you to blow your harp a bit for us and take us through how you do it?

Yeah, let me put the phone up here one sec. Sorry. I'm just speaking with Mike Stevens who's on the phone about to play his harmonica. We may have lost him there for a second. We're going to give him a call back. Mike, do we have you back? You got me back. My giant thumb's probably hung up on you. Okay.

Well, let's hear you blow away if you can. Wow, that feels so good to listen to. Oh, thanks. It really does. Now, the Governor General honored you not only because of your extraordinary playing, but also because of your work with ArtsCan Circle. Can you tell us the story of what inspired you to create that charitable organization? Yeah, it's a longer story.

I'll try and condense it down. I've been really lucky as a harmonica player. Like I feel like Forrest Gump a lot of the times. I just stumble into stuff and, you know, even to get to make a living as a harmonica is like a magic trick. But I got on television and I got on the Grand Old Opry and Roy Acuff was my biggest fan and so I got really well known playing on the Grand Old Opry and was flying all over

the world playing shows as a harmonica player and I got asked to play for Peacekeepers. We were headed to Bosnia and to alert the northern tip of Ellesmere. And we stopped off for fuel in Goose Bay, Labrador. And I'd heard a little bit about what was happening with, you know, low level flights and shesheshi and some of the suicide rates and the problems that were going on there. So we had a concert that we had to play at the theater in Goose Bay. So I played the concert and I thought, you know what, I'm just going to talk about those kids in Shesha Sheehan and dedicate a song to them. So I played Amazing Grace and got a really unusual response.

You could tell that it was really close to the bone for everybody that was in there. And it was, for me, a little bit uncomfortable and it just was something that you could tell everybody was thinking about and dealing with. So after that song, I backed away, went to the record table and a guy said, look, I'll drive you out to the community if you sneak away from the tour. It's a military tour, you're not really supposed to do that. But I thought, you know what? What kind of a guy with a microphone talks about a community and dedicates something, but then doesn't follow through.

So I ended up going to Shoshishi, and I won't go through the whole story, but changed my life. One moment in particular as we were leaving, we rounded a corner and there were kids who were sniffing gas. They had garbage bags with gas in them. I got out and by a fire, I got out and played music for them for about 45 minutes and it changed my life. Taught me more about music than my whole fancy career before that. These kids didn't tell me to screw off and they had every reason to. They didn't get violent. They didn't, they asked me about my family.

They asked me if I had kids. They asked me what their names were. These are kids with sniffing gas and it totally cracked me open. And they taught me that, they just taught me that music isn't for selling stuff. And did they, any of them pick up the harmonica? Yeah. So I decided that I would send harmonicas back to the school and books and all that stuff. And then I started collecting musical instruments and collected a whole transport load and got

them all the way up the Trans-Laborador Highway into Shashishieh and they gave me the treatment center and I filled the treatment center full of instruments. Never have done a workshop in my life. They just trusted me and the morning of the workshop I looked out and there were like 80 kids lined up outside the door and they all came in and it was like the best punk band you've ever heard in your life. It was raucous and maybe a photocopier got kicked over maybe, you know. But you know what, it was beautiful.

It was like everybody let go and that showed me that there's something to this. Yeah. Wow. Amazing story. Thanks so much for speaking with us and congrats again, Mike. Thank you for taking the time. Mike Stevens is a harmonica player and the founder of ArtsCan Circle. He's among the latest people to be named to the Order of Canada. You've been listening to The Current Podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening.

I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.