Mike Morin: The badge guy with the biggest heart
At CSC’s national headquarters, there’s one person almost everyone sees throughout their career: Mike Morin, the man who hands out security badges with a warm smile and a steady handshake. It’s a small exchange, a quick photo, a badge slid across a counter, but for Mike, it’s a chance to greet someone by name, ask how they’re doing, and mean it.
Before joining CSC six years ago, Mike spent decades as a truck driver and worked in private security. Today, he’s known internally as the badge guy. Outside the office, he’s known for something else entirely.
Every holiday season, Mike and his wife Cathy turn their home into a workshop. They make festive wooden décor, bears, snowmen, Christmas boards, and bring them into the office on a “pay what you can” basis. Every dollar goes into care packages for people experiencing homelessness: gloves, mittens, hand warmers, nuts, non-perishable food, and wool blankets.
He then drives around personally to hand them out. He knows everyone by name. He asks what they need.
“It all started one Christmas Eve during the pandemic,” Mike recalls. “I had cooked enough food for about 20 people and my wife gently told me, ‘No one is coming.’ So we packed everything up and dropped it off for people we saw on the streets.”
What began as a simple act of generosity around the holiday season has quietly grown into an ongoing effort, supported year-round by coworkers, friends and family. “I couldn’t do any of this without everybody else willing to help out,” Mike says. “People donate money, say ‘check your bank account, I just forwarded you some funds to pitch in.’ It’s not just me doing this.”
Mike Morin regularly takes the time to reconnect with his Indigenous roots.
Along the way, he has formed relationships with people most others pass by. There was the University of Ottawa student living under a tarp, who would complete his coursework by connecting his laptop to public Wi-Fi hotspots. It was all he had left after his roommates moved out one by one and his savings finally ran out.
There was the firefighter who lived daily with crippling PTSD. And then there was Marcus, a man living with schizophrenia with whom Mike would converse for hours, and for whom he would drop off bags of birdseed so he could pass the time feeding the pigeons. Months later, Mike ran into him again, cleaned up, smiling while in line at a Tim Hortons, and newly approved for an apartment in social housing. Those moments of progress stay with him.
Justice Dallaire, a CSC colleague who works in the human rights division, says what sets Mike apart is intention. “He doesn’t do it for recognition. He just wants to help,” she says. When Justice mentioned she makes candles on the side, Mike offered to sell them from his office, directing part of the proceeds into the care kits. He’s even researching how to manufacture survival candles, compact tins that can safely provide heat, light, or a way to cook outdoors, so they can produce and donate them together.
Mike’s generosity also surfaces in small, everyday gestures. At the Bramasole Diner, where he often stops in the mornings, he’ll quietly pay for hot meals or a breakfast sandwich and coffee to bring to people on the street. At the convenience store on the main floor of the building at 340 Laurier, he has been known to cover the next 20 coffees for colleagues without saying a word. Around the holidays, he helps organize Christmas and New Year’s dinners for those who might otherwise spend the season alone.
Colleague Tracy Millar says she first saw that generosity firsthand during one of Mike’s holiday fundraisers. She eventually asked Mike to make a custom set of wooden winter bears, one for each member of her family of six, which have since become a cherished part of their Christmas decorations.
“What stands out most is how invested Mike is in the cause, frankly in everything he does,” says Tracy, manager at the national IT service desk. “Any chance he had, he’d share updates about how much money had been raised or how meaningful it was to deliver the items. You could see how proud he was, not for the recognition, but for the impact.”
That same care shows up in his day-to-day work inside the building, which was formally recognized last year when he received the Dr. Linda Panaro Extra Mile Award for CSC employees who go above and beyond in their roles. Because of his attention to detail, Tracy says, Mike often anticipates issues before they become problems.
“He makes sure my staff have the access they need, and if anything comes up he lets me know right away so we can fix it together,” she says. “Mike approaches every interaction in a way that makes you feel valued and heard.”
His instinct to take care of people traces back to his childhood, growing up in Ottawa’s Hintonburg neighbourhood, in a house where the door was never locked and the table was never empty.
His father painted signs for the City of Ottawa. His mother ran the home and the door was always open. “If you came by, you ate,” he says. At the age of 11, he started delivering the Ottawa Citizen and the Journal every afternoon after school, covering more than 500 households in one weekend. It was hard work, but it taught him discipline, and introduced him to the quiet dignity of ordinary people.
His family story also carries deeper roots: his grandmother was Mohawk, while his grandfather came from a well-to-do Laurentian family that disowned him for marrying her. Mike carries that history with pride, and perhaps a deeper understanding of what it means to be excluded.
Today, he’s a father of three and grandfather to five, who regularly takes the time to reconnect with his Indigenous roots through smudging and attending powwows. On weekends, he retreats to his hobby farm outside the city with his children and grandchildren. There are no video games there - instead he teaches them how to start a fire, how to work with wood, and how to appreciate the outdoors.
In a world that often rushes past suffering, Mike Morin does the opposite. He slows down. He listens. He shows up. He remembers your name. Whether he’s handing you a security badge or a warm pair of gloves on a freezing Ottawa night, he does it carrying the same quiet message: Someone sees you, and someone cares.