Meet the guy ‘off the street’ behind a stunning $203-million gift to CAMH — the largest mental health donation in Canadian history

On the elevator ride up at CAMH that day in 2017, McKean — a “guy in jeans off the street” — casually dropped a big number, one that left his tour guide stunned.

“Well, I was thinking, you know, $50 million.”

McKean, a then little-known retired federal civil servant had suddenly become quite wealthy and he was here, he let them know, to make a difference.

Today, that big number has grown to $203 million, making McKean’s support for CAMH the largest cumulative donation toward mental health research and care in Canadian history — and a large part of the latest $100 million instalment is earmarked for a new secure care and recovery wing for patients intersecting with the criminal justice system.

The new wing is under construction at CAMH’s Queen Street location and, once completed, will be named Waverley House — sharing the name of the foundation McKean, 78, established after an investment in a startup called Shopify, co-founded by his son-in-law, took off in a huge way.

On Thursday, CAMH made the cumulative donation and the man behind it public for the first time at an emotional celebration held in an auditorium packed with guests and staff. Up until that moment, only a small group of people at CAMH knew the identity of the donor they referred to for years as “Anonymous,” always with a capital “A.”

This is a “coming out” of sorts for Waverley House, and for McKean, who initially asked that the CAMH donations be kept anonymous, partly over concerns that the sudden wealth would prompt “solicitations, scams, people with wonderful stories” but also out of a family belief that one does “good stuff and doesn’t boast about it.”

But McKean’s coming into public view for a reason — the same reason that’s led him to make a game-changing donation for mental health, and a facility where people end up after being found not criminally responsible for their actions on account of mental disorder.

It’s one that’s very close to his heart.

On a recent afternoon, Alexander (Sandy) Simpson is still on the mend after a bout of COVID — but there is no evidence of that as he quickly bounds down flights of stairs in an older secure part of CAMH’s Queen Street site. The elevator in the brutalist concrete building is unavailable and Simpson, a senior scientist who holds the Research Chair in Forensic Psychiatry at CAMH and the University of Toronto, navigates locked door after door and out into the afternoon sunshine, to “the pit.”

Construction cranes loom over the vast hole in the ground along the southeast corner of the site. Once open, Waverley House will bring CAMH’s secure care and recovery facilities out of the 1950s and ‘60s and into the 2020s; for “forensic” patients sent to CAMH on court orders, it will mean a more humane experience that will help improve care and recovery.

The building will enhance CAMH’s existing philosophy and approach to what is known as “secure recovery.” Simpson, who came to Canada and CAMH in 2010 from New Zealand, worked on mental health reforms there that were guided by the Maoril; at the heart of the approach is a “broad concept” of personhood.

“The four cornerstones of Maori health are physical, mental, family and spiritual well-being,” Simpson said. “And so it’s rather more than the biomedical, technical view of an illness that needs treatment so that the person gets on with their life. It’s a much broader sense of who you are.”

Waverley House and Temerty Discovery Centre are the last bit of the CAMH site to be rebuilt. Evidence of that transformation is plentiful on the Queen Street site, including a relatively new psychiatric emergency department.

Construction on the final phase of redevelopment began in March 2024 and is expected to be finished in 2029.

The 758,000-square-foot Waverley House building will accommodate 214 in-patient beds. In addition, there will be a 20-bed “swing unit” to be used as a provincial resource, outpatient clinics for patients living in the community, Ontario Review Board Hearing Rooms, recovery-based therapeutic spaces and secure outdoor spaces.

One major change will be a larger and more humane “secure envelope,” where forensic patients will have more freedom of movement during their days. (For now, the envelope is confined to one ward, and movement is difficult.)

Patients in Waverley House will have a “bedroom area, your living room area, your dining room area, community area,” Simpson said. “There’ll be a shared therapeutic space where people can hang out. There’ll be an outdoor space, which is multi-purpose, so that people can get outside much more than they do now.

The patient’s stay will be “more dignified and respectful, much less institutionalized,” he said.

Recoveries in the new wing will also be studied. Does the need for seclusion and restraints melt away? Do people feel more understood, more respected in terms of their movements, and does that generate other positive gains for people?

“Those are some of the things we will be looking for,” Simpson said.

On a September afternoon, perhaps Canada’s most unassuming and philanthropic billionaire sits in a board room at CAMH, in a T-shirt, jeans and a dog-chewed HMCS Porte St. Louis ball cap — a remnant of his time in the Navy reserve.

These days, years after that first elevator conversation, he’s taken very seriously and hugely appreciated by CAMH.

The reason for his generosity is his godson, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager.

“Anyone can end up mentally ill,” McKean said. “His journey took his family and myself and others on a journey through drama, fear, courts, police, emergency rooms, probation officers … And for several years, he was like the other people that I see on the streets of Toronto, my godson was one of them.”

In part because of the work CAMH does, his godson is now 47 years old, and “not a casualty.”

For more than 30 years, McKean and his wife, both federal civil servants, lived in Ottawa in a house on Waverley Street (they now call Toronto home).

The house became a meeting place of sorts for newcomers to Canada, and kids going through rough times knew they could come and crash. The McKeans may not have had the money they now do, but they gave whatever and wherever they could.

“In the beginning, there was no money, and then there was money, and what do you do with it?” McKean said. “My wife and I looked at each other and said, ‘Well, the family’s taken care of. We don’t have a mortgage. What are we interested in? What will we do?’ And the answer was, instantly, give it away.”

When McKean had to come up with a name for his foundation — “It was not going to be the Bruce McKean Foundation!” — a friend suggested Waverley House because of that history of being a place of “happiness, drama and adventures.”

Philanthropic foundations now abound in the McKean family. His daughter has one, focusing on climate change, as does his wife, which supports refugees and new Canadians. Shopify investments underpin all of them.

There was never much question about what would be funded. In addition to his godson’s illness, there were suicides — a brother-in-law and an uncle, “work colleagues, two of them to suicide. My daughter has lost classmates to suicide, and those, those are just the suicides,” McKean said.

His gifts to mental health research started “under the radar” in 2015 with $6 million to the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre. (The Emerging Research Innovators in Mental Health is a just concluded six-year project that supported recent graduates through the early stages of their careers.)

Gifts similar in scope and larger have supported mental health projects at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario & The Hospital for Sick Children, the University of Victoria, Aga Khan Foundation Canada and Dalhousie University.

But CAMH is the big one: $100 million in 2018 went toward the creation of the CAMH Discovery Fund, investing in research by young, mid-career scientists and researchers to discover the causes and cures of mental illness; $100 million donated this year will go to the secure care and recovery building and the Temerty Discovery Centre; and, $3 million toward CAMH’s Research Chair in Forensic Psychiatry, which is helping, CAMH says, “to attract and retain the world’s most accomplished and promising scientists to lead life-changing research.”

That would include Sandy Simpson.

Simpson and McKean met years ago in Simpson’s cluttered office, when McKean’s money started flowing in anonymously, earmarked initially for research. Forensic psychiatry sounded to McKean like the name of a television series, but he learned more about the field from Simpson, and also of the rather dated conditions of the facilities.

While many people are willing to give to medical and other health causes, “very few” do so for forensic mental health, let alone with their names attached, says Simpson. For all McKean has given, Simpson says he is grateful for “a remarkable man.” 

As for why he’s donating now: “The issues are so important,” McKean said, adding he believes there has been better “public attitudes and public engagement” around mental health but it’s not enough.

“So, what, in addition to the money, could I do? I decided that it was time to stand up and step out of the shadows and say, ‘Yep, this is important, and this is why I did it,’ and encourage others to do the same,” he said.

“It puts a face on the money, and that is useful to CAMH, that’s useful to the issues that we’re trying to address. So, it’s all good.”