Catherine Boucher has stepped down as executive director of the Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation.
Inside Centretown’s Montgomery Legion, the growing crowd buzzes. They laugh and reminisce over the photographs pegged on a wall. The hues change from black and white to colour, enhancing in vibrancy with the life and times of the woman who has touched their lives as an advocate for social housing.
The room fills in honour of a woman who has pioneered affordable social housing in Centretown for more than three decades. Judging by the laughter and tears she evokes from the guests who have travelled from across the province to bid her farewell, she is already sorely missed.
Catherine Boucher retired as executive director of the non-profit housing organization Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corp. (CCOC) on Oct. 9.
“I’m leaving myself open to exploring parts of my brain that I haven’t used in the last 30 years,” Boucher explains, sipping a café au lait in “her new office” – the coffee shop across the road from CCOC.
Boucher was born in Quebec City in 1949. Despite a sometimes mischievous youth, she has left her fingerprint on the Ottawa community since moving here when she was a year old. The most vivid mark remains on the city’s social housing sector.
Boucher began advocating for affordable housing with CCOC in 1978. She didn’t know anything about the organization when a friend who lived in CCOC at the time suggested she apply for a job they had advertised.
The organization was created in 1974, four years prior to her recruitment. For 31 years she worked to accommodate people from different age groups, income levels, cultures and lifestyles in affordable housing units. Some tenants pay full market rent, others with special needs receive subsidies.
“Housing is primordial. People need somewhere to live to be able to thrive,” Boucher says.
Since 2000, Jay Koorntsra has worked closely with Boucher as the executive director of Bruce House, Ottawa’s HIV/AIDS residential care organization.
In the late 1980s, Koornstra recalls Boucher as the woman who defended the right for people living with HIV/AIDS to be housed with CCOC. When the rampant fear of the virus caused anxiety amongst staff she took a brave approach and eliminated fear by providing knowledge, he says.
“She is probably the only person I know that gets up every morning, looks in the mirror and says, ‘today I’m going to solve the problem of homelessness,’ ” Koornstra jokes. “She’s a small lion that roars, but she looks like a pussycat. When she speaks with her passion, that’s when you see the lion.”
Boucher’s appearance is far from menacing. At her retirement party, she greets guests with a warm smile, and a jolly laugh. They happily stoop to meet her small stature for an embrace.
A tenant once described her as, “the girl with the beautiful eyes and lots of hair,” when she initially joined the CCOC. Now 60, her thick hair is short and charcoal grey, but her eyes are still beautiful. Over the years they have grown soft with wisdom and patience. They still have that mischievous twinkle.
Boucher has overseen the growth of CCOC from 65 to over 1,300 rental units since she joined them as rental coordinator of a Lisgar St. property. She has watched Centretown prosper with diversity.
“I come away from my role and I can walk around the part of the city I love, look around, and say that I had a part in making this city better.” Boucher says. “And not just for the people who live in CCOC housing, but the city itself, because a city that doesn’t provide affordable housing for people is not a good city for anybody.”
Boucher says with seniors, single parents, couples, and people living with mental and physical disabilities, the mixed income housing is a microcosm of the people that make the Centretown community vibrant.
She has made a difference to them all, converting derelict taverns into affordable housing.
CCOC’s properties do not stand out as homes of Centretown’s less-affluent community. Behind a Lisgar Street block of red-brick, heritage house units, common backyard belongings scatter the parking space: a basketball hoop, a washing line, a bicycle.
In the nearby Gilmour Street highrise, all tenants have access to gardening plots and children’s play equipment. Every tenant arrives to their new home with a welcome kit including a recycling bin, a cloth shopping bag, and a toilet plunger. Boucher explains these small details are important, because “there is a house, and then there is a home.”
Her resume includes work for Interval House, the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association and the Canadian Housing Renewal Association. She co-founded the national homelessness charity Raising the Roof and received a lifetime achievement award for her work with the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association.
Ray Sullivan is her successor at CCOC. Her shoes as executive director will be impossible to fill, he says.
“She is part of a generation of people who were the community builders,” Sullivan says. “A generation who in the mid and late 1970s rebuilt urban centres and created these kinds of institutions. It would be impossible to pretend myself or anyone else could replicate that kind of pioneering.”
Over three decades, CCOC grew with Catherine at the helm. It has developed in her image, Sullivan says. He says he has learned from her for ten years and now feels prepared to take on her role.
And Boucher is ready to pass the baton.
There is a big change coming soon at CCOC as government agreements are expiring, and the organization will have an opportunity to do things very differently, Boucher says.
“We could essentially govern our own destiny and decide the rules that we want to make for ourselves,” she says. “In this new phase, it’s a good time for me to step down.”
Her level head and absence of ego has garnered respect when dealing with governments, councillors and politicians. Somerset Coun. Diane Holmes, also an advocate for affordable housing, has worked on projects with Boucher for 22 years.
“She is the most experienced person in the city on housing, and that includes our own staff,” Holmes says. “She is very good at dealing with both the political and administrative levels and is very much appreciated here. She really is an invaluable asset.”
Holmes says she will miss Boucher’s common sense and her dedication to a project. But, just like Sullivan and Koornstra, she doubts that Boucher will sit still in her retirement.
The hushed crowd inside Montgomery Legion listens intently to stories of their lively leader and her time at CCOC. They whoop and cheer at the images of her life, full of cigarettes and smiles, projected on the screen.
No one believes they have seen the last of Catherine Boucher. They erupt in laughter and applaud at co-worker Carolyn McGuire’s closing comment: “See you at the next staff meeting.”