Our Team
The Missing Middle Initiative is housed at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of the Environment, and all of our staff are University of Ottawa employees. MMI’s vision is to revive Canada’s young, urban, middle class, and 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.
The MMI team is relatively small, comprising only five full-time employees and an annual budget of under $1 million. Our current team members are as follows:
Sean Foreman, Creative Producer
Sean Foreman is a digital media producer specializing in crafting projects that both engage and inform. With a focus on storytelling that cuts through the noise, Sean has developed a diverse portfolio of work featured on MuchMusic, CBC, and Rolling Stone.
During his time at TVO, Sean created two original series — Ontario Chronicle with Steve Paikin and Forgotten War — both of which continue to reach wide audiences, with content from these series surpassing three million views on YouTube. He also hosted and produced segments for TVO’s program Big If True, showcasing his versatility both behind and in front of the camera.
Since leaving TVO, Sean has launched his own media company, Epicentre Media, producing a range of editorial and branded projects. Epicentre Media produces The Paikin Podcast, a rapidly growing show known for its insightful conversations and deep dives into the issues shaping Canada and the world.
Sean’s creative skill set spans writing, editing, motion graphics, voice-over, hosting, and thumbnail design, allowing him to shape projects end-to-end with a cohesive vision. As Creative Producer at the Missing Middle Initiative, he uses his technical and storytelling abilities to bring the team’s excellent research to life through compelling visuals, videos, and podcasts.
Jesse Helmer, Senior Research Associate
Jesse Helmer is Senior Research Associate at MMI, where he focuses on climate-friendly housing policy and the real costs of urban sprawl. Based in London, Ontario, where he has served two terms as a city councillor, including six years on the planning and environment committee, two years as deputy mayor (2018-2020) and eight years on the transit commission. He is particularly interested in the intersection of housing, mobility, and climate policy, as well as actionable strategies to build cleaner, greener, and more affordable cities and communities. He was named one of London’s Top 20 Under 40 in 2019.
Jesse is a graduate of the University of Waterloo (BA) and Queen's University (MPA), and is currently a Ph.D candidate in political science at Western University, where his research focuses on the political participation gap between homeowners and tenants (www.greatsuppression.ca). He teaches part-time at Western in the local government program and Huron University College in the governance, ethics and leadership program. Jesse lives with his wife, Kate Graham, and their daughter, Flora, in Old North.
Meredith Martin, Senior Producer
Meredith Martin is a founding member of the Missing Middle Initiative and the co-creator and senior producer of the Missing Middle Podcast, where she combines deep production expertise with a passion for making complex policy issues accessible to broad, mainstream audiences. A veteran producer of video, field, interview, and panel-discussion content, Meredith has spent more than 20 years shaping high-impact current-affairs storytelling in Canada.
Before co-founding MMI, she spent two decades as a producer at TVO, including 17 seasons with The Agenda with Steve Paikin, where she crafted long-form interviews and panel discussions with Canada’s leading thinkers, policymakers, and public figures. Her work has taken her from fast-paced newsrooms to live field environments, directing shoots, conducting interviews, scripting video packages, and managing full-cycle production from concept through to broadcast.
At the Missing Middle Initiative, Meredith brings that same journalistic rigour and production skill to a digital-first format. As co-creator and senior producer of the Missing Middle Podcast, she oversees research, video direction, episode structure, and the show’s visual and editorial narrative—helping to build one of Canada’s most engaging platforms for discussions on housing, affordability, and the future of the middle class.
In addition to production, Meredith plays a central role in the marketing and distribution of the podcast and its ideas across social platforms, including YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram, Threads and Facebook. An unusually early adopter of social media for a legacy media journalist, she has been active across major platforms since their earliest days and brings that long-view digital fluency to audience growth, engagement strategy, and issue amplification. Across all her work, Meredith is known for translating complex policy into compelling visual stories that resonate across traditional broadcast and modern digital ecosystems.
Mike Moffatt, Founding Director
Dr. Mike Moffatt is the founding Director of the University of Ottawa's Missing Middle Initiative (MMI) and co-host of the Missing Middle Podcast, and subject of the Financial Post feature Can this man solve Canada’s housing crisis?. Mike’s family is from Whalen Corners, Ontario, but Mike grew up in London, Ontario, around the corner from a tire rim factory and near Pottersburg Creek. Mike has spent most of his career analyzing environmental policy and the evolution of Southwestern Ontario’s manufacturing sector and housing markets, motivated by these experiences.
Prior to founding MMI, Mike served as the Chief Innovation Fellow for the Government of Canada, advising Deputy Ministers on innovation policy and emerging trends. He has also previously held the titles of Founding Director of the PLACE Centre, Senior Director of Policy at the Smart Prosperity Institute, Interim Director at the Lawrence National Centre for Policy and Management, Director of Policy at Canada 2020, and Chief Economist at the Mowat Centre, University of Toronto. Mike has held a number of academic positions, including Assistant Professor at Ivey Business School, Western University, where he taught courses on global macroeconomics and geopolitical risk for nearly two decades.
Mike has worked with politicians and policymakers of all political stripes in several countries to craft more effective public policy. From 2013 to 2015, Mike served as an economic advisor to Liberal leader Justin Trudeau.
Mike holds a Ph.D. in Management Science from Ivey Business School and an M.A. in Economics from the University of Rochester.
Cara Stern, Senior Producer
Cara is a journalist who has spent her career creating educational content to help people understand the intersection of housing, affordability, and politics. She spent almost a decade as a producer on The Agenda with Steve Paikin, the flagship current affairs program on TVO, the Ontario public broadcaster. While at TVO, she created discussions on a wide range of topics, with a particular passion for debates on housing. She also produced several political leadership debates.
She is the co-host of the Missing Middle Podcast, where she conducts conversations with economist Mike Moffatt and guests about the decline of the middle class in Canada.
She holds a Bachelor of Journalism from Carleton University, with minors in Sociology and History.
Sabrina Maddeaux, Missing Middle Podcast Co-Host
With Cara on leave, Sabrina has graciously agreed to join Mike as co-host on the Missing Middle Podcast.
Sabrina Maddeaux is a National Magazine Award winner and political columnist whose work has appeared in the National Post, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, The Hub and many other outlets. She frequently appears on Canada's top radio and TV programs, as well as at premier thought leadership forums, to provide political and economic analysis, often from a millennial perspective. In 2022, she was indefinitely banned from Russia under sanctions imposed by President Vladimir Putin as a result of her writing on the Ukraine invasion and international corruption. Sabrina has also passed the Canadian Securities Course (CSC) offered by the Canadian Securities Institute and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science (Honors) from St. Bonaventure University (NY), with a double minor in Journalism and Theology.
Learn More about MMI
For more information on MMI, please refer to the following links:
About us: Who we are and why we exist.
Our mission: Details on the strong middle-class Canada we are trying to create.
Our strategy: How we will create a strong middle-class Canada
Our impact: Our success, to date, in creating a strong middle-class Canada.
Our team: The team working towards creating a strong middle-class Canada.
Support us: How you can help us create a strong middle-class Canada.
As well as our knowledge mobilization outlets, including:
Reports: A list of long-form studies and reports, including ones that predate the formation of MMI.
Podcast: Links to the Missing Middle podcast (available in both video and audio versions), video content, and our social media content.
Media: Links to MMI mentions in the mainstream media, along with guest pieces written by MMI staff in outlets from The Globe and Mail to The Toronto Star to The Hub.
Substack archive: An archive of our past Substack posts.