What is the Missing Middle Initiative?
The Missing Middle Initiative, housed at the University of Ottawa’s Institute for the Environment, seeks to revive Canada’s urban middle class. We’re devoted to addressing the challenges facing young urban Canadians, for whom the middle class is getting harder to join. Through research, a Substack newsletter, thought pieces, videos, and the Missing Middle Podcast, we explore the barriers preventing young Canadians and new families from entering the middle class and the policy solutions needed to help them achieve this.
We are big believers in creating a vision of success — a North Star that can help guide one’s thinking and choices. For Canada’s young, urban middle class, our vision of success is as follows:
Missing Middle Initiative’s North Star: A Canada where every middle-class individual or family, in every city, has a high-quality of life and access to both market-rate rental and market-rate ownership housing options that are affordable, adequate, suitable, resilient, and climate-friendly.
In the piece Launching The Missing Middle Initiative, we explain who we are and what we do in greater detail. If you want to know how we define terms like “high-quality of life” and “middle-class,” check out The Goal of the Missing Middle Initiative: A Detailed Look.
MMI was launched on January 20, 2025, as a spin-off from the University of Ottawa’s Smart Prosperity Institute, where MMI’s Founding Director, Mike Moffatt, held the roles of Director of the PLACE Centre and Senior Director of Policy since 2018. At SPI, Mike co-authored highly influential housing-related reports, including the National Housing Accord and the Blueprint for More and Better Housing, which led to a Financial Post Profile: Can This Man Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis?
The MMI team is relatively small, comprising only five full-time employees and an annual budget of under $1 million. MMI has no endowment and must pay for salaries as well as services used both inside and outside of the University of Ottawa; therefore, it relies on supporting partners. MMI currently receives roughly half of its funding through charitable organizations and not-for-profit entities, with the remainder coming from government and private sector partners. Supporting partner organizations provide data, insights, and financial support to MMI.
The goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics of MMI
For a think tank to do good in the world, it must know what it is trying to accomplish and ensure that its vision is shared across the organization. To do this, MMI utilizes Rich Horwath’s GOST framework to guide its activities and has set the following goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics:
Goal: A Canada where every middle-class individual or family, in every city, has a high-quality of life and access to both market-rate rental and market-rate ownership housing options that are affordable, adequate, suitable, resilient, and climate-friendly.
Objective: To have governments across Canada, as well as government-related entities from crown corporations to regulatory bodies, enact evidence-based reforms that move Canada closer to the goal identified by MMI.
Strategy: MMI’s strategy comprises two key components: knowledge generation and knowledge mobilization.
Knowledge generation: MMI collaborates and meets with academics, industry, labour, and governments to identify barriers and bottlenecks preventing Canada from achieving MMI’s goal, then identifies potential policy solutions, including ones in use globally, that can be designed to fit our national, provincial or municipal context. Since MMI is relatively small, we utilize the insights from our discussions to identify areas that have the potential for policy reform within the next two years and focus our attention on those.
Knowledge mobilization: More traditional think tanks tend to release a small number of large reports each year, with mobilization tactics centred around each release, a “few and big” strategy. MMI employs the opposite strategy, focusing on “small, fast, and frequent” releases. We publish content multiple times a week across our newsletter (Substack), podcast, and opinion pieces in third-party outlets, as well as a handful of larger pieces throughout the year. Our goal is to mobilize the knowledge we have generated and have this knowledge reach policymakers, media, industry, academics, and the public. One of the benefits of the “small, fast, and frequent” strategy is that it provides a form of continual peer review, as those pieces generate responses that aid in our knowledge generation and improve our policy recommendations.
MMI is a think-tank, not a government relations shop. We create change through the power of ideas and making those ideas known to policymakers, the media, and the public, rather than through government relations work. This requires MMI to communicate in an accessible way that resonates with the public and the media, on the platforms where they already consume their content.
Tactics: As part of MMI’s “small, fast, and frequent” strategy, MMI utilizes several knowledge mobilization channels, including:
The Missing Middle podcast: Launched in late 2023, our weekly video podcast has become the go-to source for information on Canadian middle-class issues, particularly those related to housing. An episode is released every Wednesday morning, with occasional “bonus” episodes on Fridays. An audio version is also available on platforms such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Microresearch pieces in our newsletter (Substack): At least once a week, MMI publishes a short, accessible, media-friendly, graphics-heavy piece, typically 1000-1500 words in length, though occasionally some greatly exceed this length.
We initially based the design of these pieces on the economic issue reports released by Canada’s big banks. However, over time, we have developed our own MMI-style. We release a piece every Tuesday morning and often release 1-2 other pieces on other days of the week.
Task force, coalition, and convening reports: At MMI, we’re believers in the power of coalitions. Our team has authored or co-authored a number of housing-related reports on behalf of coalitions, including the National Housing Accord, Blueprint for More and Better Housing, the Housing Canada plan, and Decarbonizing Canada’s Commercial Buildings.
Longer reports: Despite our “small, fast, and frequent”, we still author more traditional think-tank style content. These include pieces that are branded as MMI reports, such as Strengthening the Core: Increasing social license for healthy infill development in London, Ontario, pieces that are co-branded between MMI and our supporting partner(s), such as Four Pathways to Housing Affordability, and The Innovation Agenda for Canadian Real Estate, that carry the branding of our supporting partner(s) only, but MMI is given an authoring credit.
Events, editorials, and earned media: MMI staff give presentations and keynote addresses at events, sit on panels, and regularly author guest pieces in outlets from The Globe and Mail to The Hub.
Editorial independence and integrity
Although MMI operates as a not-for-profit initiative housed at the University of Ottawa, it still requires funding to support its activities. MMI has no endowment, receives no subsidy from the University, and must pay overhead fees to cover the use of University resources.
MMI’s credibility hinges on our ability to maintain editorial independence and avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest, a challenging environment for an organization that requires working with supporting partners. To navigate this tension, MMI does not undertake projects that run counter to or outside of our stated goals and objectives. Furthermore, MMI retains exclusive editorial control over all publications and outputs, and our research findings and recommendations are not subject to approval or revision from supporting partners.
MMI recognizes that our need for editorial independence creates potential for tension between our organization and our potential supporting partners, particularly near the end of a project. Prior to starting any project, we work closely with our potential supporting partners to ensure that their goals and objectives align with MMIs and that the final product meets the needs of all parties involved. If a common vision cannot be achieved, MMI will not take on the project.
Political independence
The University of Ottawa, which houses MMI, is a registered charity. The University of Ottawa, and by extension MMI, as a charity, is prohibited from devoting any resources to the direct or indirect support of or opposition to any political party or candidate or from engaging in any other partisan activities.
Relevant links
Our team: Biographies of team members.
Studies and reports: A list of long-form studies and reports, including ones that predate the formation of MMI.
Substack archive: An archive of our past Substack posts.
Our office
MMI is located on the University of Ottawa campus, at:
1 Stewart Street, 3rd Floor
Ottawa, ON
K1N 6N5.
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