🔧 Plenty of People Know Michael Judd. Few Know How Much He Has Done for Kingston.

The first time I met Michael Judd, he had already spent part of his morning cleaning up a bus shelter somebody had wrecked. Nobody asked him to. Nobody was watching. It only came up because he explained why he was running late that day.

That is not what you expect from a man who sits on four boards. Michael is a director at the FLA Primary Care Network, at Independent Living Centre Kingston, at Community Living Kingston and District, and at Resolve Counselling Services Canada. People at that table usually delegate the bus shelter. He was doing it himself, and doing it while living with severe chronic pain he does not bring up.

Michael Judd is a community advocate in Kingston, Ontario, who volunteers on health and social service boards, organizes for the north end neighbourhoods of Kingscourt and Rideau Heights, and pushes on accessibility, food security and the state of the waterfront.

Michael grew up in Oakville and came to Kingston in 2018, after taking early retirement. He had been coming here most of his life anyway, to fish and boat and sail. He bought in Portsmouth first, then found the house and the property were more than his injuries would let him manage. So he moved to a small wartime house in Kingscourt, one of the first group built there in 1941.

About those injuries. Michael has lived with chronic pain for years and he is straightforward about it. He told me he has good days, bad days, and absolutely horrible ones, and that he gets through because a lot of good people help keep it all working. He has written publicly about the injury that forced his early retirement, and about losing his sense of usefulness along with his income. He calls it his second bout of disability. The first came from flatwater kayaking at national level, and cost him three years on crutches in his late twenties and early thirties. This one is not going away, and he says he works with it and is okay. Plenty of people who meet him have no idea.

Before any of that, he was a carpenter. He trained through a formal apprenticeship and George Brown College, then ran his own kitchen and bathroom renovation company for more than a decade. Sales came next, then executive roles. He handled national accounts for Kohler. He spent years as the sales and development lead for a company that makes the pumps and water systems that municipalities and homeowners depend on. For twenty-five years he was also a marine surveyor. That is the person who inspects a boat and tells you what is actually wrong with it.

The advocacy is not new either. Long before Kingston, Michael took on the loyalty rewards companies over points Canadians had already earned and were about to lose. He kept at it until Ontario changed the law. Air Miles points stopped expiring, and the rules shifted nationally after that.

Retirement did not take. Since moving here, Michael has pointed the same persistence at Kingston problems: a derelict sailboat, disability parking rules, an empty shelf at the food bank, a neighbourhood that wanted something to feel good about. Most weeks he is also in a board meeting or a committee room somewhere.

He is also one of three candidates for city councillor in District 7, Kingscourt-Rideau, in the municipal election on October 26, 2026.

In May, Michael Judd took me on a walk through Rideau Heights. It took a while. He cannot get far without someone calling out to him, and he calls back, and there is often a conversation in between.

By the time we'd covered two blocks, Michael's enthusiasm for the area had me mentally filing Rideau Heights as somewhere I should consider living.

We started at a fenced site at Shannon Park where the Inclusive Playground was going up. Michael walked me through it. The swing seats come in different sizes. Some are small, for small children. Others are built for an adult who is six feet tall and three hundred pounds, because a person can be that size and still want to use a playground. You still have to serve everybody, he said. The ground had been dug out deep, and the surface going on top is designed to absorb a fall.

Across from the Rideau Heights Community Centre, a row of raised garden beds. Kingston Community Health Centres uses them to teach growing and food sustainability, and anyone can join in. Michael reckons there are fifty or more community gardens across the city. He mentioned a workshop coming up for people with no yard, on growing food in pots and from kitchen scraps.

A block away, eight small white houses in two blocks of four. They are Habitat for Humanity homes, but not the usual kind. Habitat rents these rather than selling them, which Michael says makes it the only project of its type. Resolve Counselling sponsored units, furnishing them and fitting appliances. Students in Ernestown Secondary School’s Building Construction Internship Program did much of the building, on a site in Amherstview

Around the corner on Wilson Street, the newest build was nearly ready for insulation when we saw it in May. Habitat held the home dedication for the first half of that project on September 8. That one is the standard Habitat model: two paid leads who are skilled trades, then skilled volunteers, then whoever from the community turns up. The families who move in put sweat equity into other builds. Michael covered the last one on Facebook almost weekly, start to finish.

He was warned off this neighbourhood when he moved to Kingston. Stay out of the north end, he was told. That is not what he found. He told me he could walk anywhere in Rideau Heights and nobody would touch him, and that he feels less safe downtown. There is petty crime and not much else. There are million-dollar homes a few streets over, and only one small pocket of the area is subsidised. Public transit is here, and in minutes you can drive to anywhere in the city and parts north. Anybody who lives here is a person, he said, and most of them are passionate about the place. There are a few bad apples, and bad apples are very good at being bad apples.

He knows all this because he came up here during the 2022 election out of curiosity, and liked what he found. He started picking up garbage. Stephanie Wheeler, who does community development for Kingston Community Health Centres and facilitates the Rideau Heights Events Committee, told him he might as well join.

In late June 2026, two tractor trailers arrived at Partners in Mission Food Bank in Kingston carrying nearly 35,000 pounds of pasta from Barilla Canada, with a retail value of roughly $170,000. Michael Judd had arranged all of it. By his count that is close to 200,000 adult-sized servings, and one of the largest single food donations the city has ever received.

Barilla has owned Catelli, Lancia and Splendor since buying them in 2021, along with the Catelli plant in Montreal, which is the city the trailers picked up the pasta from.

The pasta was one company. Getting it here was another. Dan Irwin, the food bank’s executive director, told me the transport was the hard part and that he did not have the connections to solve it. Michael did. Cooney Transit Inc, a Kingston trucking company, hauled both trailers from Montreal for nothing, as it has done for him before. Writing about it afterwards on his Facebook page, Michael said he tried to thank Wayne Cooney with something special and was turned down, because the appreciation was enough.

There is a smaller story behind that one. Another Montreal load was too big for Michael’s own vehicle and too small to be worth a trucking company’s trip, and he was about to turn it down. Bradie Johnston of Autohouse Kingston rented a large cube van, handed Michael his credit card, and sent him to Montreal to collect it. It went to Partners in Mission and about eight smaller places. Bradie and his father Ken, who started the business, had never met Michael in person before that day.

I asked Michael how a person with no title and no budget gets a corporation to do that. He said it is sales, and that it is easier to ask a company for twenty thousand dollars of product than for a thousand. His working life was spent with senior executives, and he says you learn what moves them, which is usually just telling them the truth of it. We have need, it is summer, there is an empty warehouse, let us fill it.

The other half of the job is taking no. He said the only hard part is being someone who can accept a lot of it, and that companies almost always leave the door open. When one tells him the year’s budget is spent, he asks when the next cycle starts, then knocks three or four weeks before it does. His view is that anybody could do this.

Kingston needs it. Dan told me the food bank helped 8,229 people in the first five months of 2026, 2,495 of them children, with household visits up 25 per cent on the year before. That is higher than during the pandemic. The food bank takes no government or agency money at all.

Michael also wanted one thing said that he did not think anyone else would cover. Food banks do not just hand out food. They supply hygiene products, diapers, formula and baby food, and those are the hardest things to get donated. He has been working on it and has not cracked it yet.

By noon the interviews were done. Michael’s day was not.

He worked through the shipment choosing particular kinds of pasta for particular places, because what one kitchen can cook is not what another one can. Ten-pound bags went to the programs that cook in bulk. Chickpea penne went where a full protein meal without meat would help. We pulled boxes off the pallets, weighed what we took, and loaded his SUV.

We stopped at Kingston Community Health Centres, where he has volunteered for years, and at Independent Living Kingston, whose space is at Providence Village. Then we pulled into the Glenburnie Grocery parking lot to meet Katie Koopman of The Lunch Box at Battersea and moved boxes from his vehicle into hers. She took bulk food for the Lunch Box, and packaged goods for Rev. Heather McLurg-Murphy’s food pantry at Storrington Pastoral Charge. Michael’s line about it, again on Facebook, was that two people with a trunk full of pasta trying to look casual resembled a shady parking lot deal, and that it was the opposite.

That was part of a longer run that also reached Odessa and other places that feed people quietly.

Where the rest of it went: St. Vincent de Paul Society of Kingston, Martha’s Table, Youth Diversion, Independent Living Centre Kingston, Lionhearts, and food banks and pantries across the province through Feed Ontario.

I asked Michael why he does the driving and the carrying himself. He could have left the lot at the food bank and called it done, and he is the first to say Partners in Mission is the hub that makes everything else flow. But the small pantries have no vehicle and no capacity to come and collect. So we carried the boxes in at every stop.

Michael Judd started the Rideau Heights Neighbourhood Photo Contest to bring people together through photography and to celebrate the places they live. It is now in its fourth year, and for 2026 it opens up: entries are welcome from across the greater Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington area, not just Rideau Heights.

The contest runs mostly through the Rideau Heights neighbourhood group on Facebook, which Michael administers and which has grown past 6,000 members. Last year’s contest drew 209 entries, and more than 40 people turned up for the awards night. Janet Trost and Monica Lapajne are both back as judges.

After the first year, it caught the attention of Danika Lochhead, the City of Kingston’s Director of Arts and Culture, who saw what it was doing for the neighbourhood. The City has supported it every year since, and is backing it again this year. A photo exhibition of the winners now hangs at the Rideau Heights Community Centre, listed by the City alongside its other public art projects there.

Entering costs nothing. This year’s contest runs from October 1 to January 1, with the full rules still to come. Michael has also pledged a donation of his own to a local food bank in connection with it, while making clear that no donation is required to enter. He just asks that if the contest makes you want to give something back, you find a local organisation and do it.

The website is run by a volunteer. Andie, a former Kingston resident, offered her web skills when Michael asked for help getting the contest online.

Michael is looking for sponsors for the 2026 contest. Anyone interested can reach him at [email protected].

Kingston allows some new buildings to go up with no parking at all. If a building has zero parking spaces, then zero of them are accessible ones. That is the problem Michael Judd has been putting to Kingston City Council.

For some people a car is not a convenience. It is the thing that makes leaving the house possible. On his campaign site, Michael puts it plainly: a resident’s vehicle is sometimes a legal accessibility aid, not a convenience.

He did not stop at Council. On June 7, 2023, Kingston and the Islands MPP Ted Hsu rose in the Ontario Legislature and presented a petition on accessible parking permits circulated by Michael Judd, and it is in the record. MP Mark Gerretsen presented a petition of his in the House of Commons as well.

A large sailboat sat abandoned in the water near Doug Fluhrer Park. It had bothered Michael Judd since the year he arrived in Kingston. He spent twenty-five years as a marine surveyor, so he knew what was on board a boat like that: diesel, coolant systems, cleaning fluids. All of it sitting in the Great Cataraqui River.

So he started making calls. One visit to the Coast Guard in person, then five phone calls and seven emails to them. About the same again to Transport Canada. Then a long run of calls and emails with the office of MP Mark Gerretsen.

It took a year. The boat came out of the water on November 15, 2022.

"I shouldn’t have had to push a rope for a number of months," Michael told Global News after it was gone.

What he says about the ending is more generous than that. Writing on Facebook afterwards, he said that once everyone was connected, the MP’s office took the ball and ran with it. They could push harder and higher than he could, and that let him step back. Gerretsen’s constituency assistant wrote to tell him he had been "certainly instrumental in getting the process started".

Then he pointed at the next one, a smaller boat that had run aground beside the bridge to Belle Island. Not as dangerous as the first, he says, but still a serious problem. That one came out too.

Boats are not only a problem he solves. Michael has also volunteered with a sailing program for people with visual impairments, helping run events and taking people out on the water himself. What he taught them was how to feel the wind and trim the boat to it, sailing by feel rather than by sight. He tested their sighted helpers once by having them turn around and face the back of the boat. They were nowhere near as good at it.

Most of what Michael Judd does is not a shipment or a contest. It is meetings.

He is a director on four boards: the FLA Primary Care Network Corporation, Independent Living Centre Kingston, Community Living Kingston and District and Resolve Counselling Services Canada. He is a former director of Kingston Community Health Centres and still sits on its events committee. On the Frontenac, Lennox and Addington Ontario Health Team he is the community spokesperson for the community council and leads its new ambassador program. The Primary Care Network sits alongside that council under the same health team. When it incorporated, he was elected to its board, and he also sits on it as one of two representatives of the health team. He is a community representative on the City’s Rideau Heights Advisory Committee as well.

There is a method behind it. Michael earned a McMaster University Faculty of Health Sciences microcredential, Engagement and Partnering for People-Centred Care, sponsored by the Frontenac, Lennox and Addington Ontario Health Team. That is training in building programs alongside the people who will use them, rather than for them.

Not long after Michael joined the health team’s community council, he started pushing on a rule that was catching people out. Anyone who wanted to register with Health Care Connect, the provincial service that matches people to a family doctor, first had to come off their current doctor’s roster. Kingston is a city people retire to. They were arriving at the age when care matters most, and finding they had to give up what they had before they could look for something better. Michael says it was not on the leadership’s radar until he raised it, and that once it was, they moved. Roughly six months later the requirement was dropped province-wide.

He also administers three Facebook groups that do quiet work: Kingscourt Neighbourhood Watch, the Kingston Disability Network, and the Rideau Heights Neighbourhood Kingston group.

A lot of this started before Kingston.

Michael was a carpenter first, and he spent the nineties volunteering on Habitat for Humanity builds. He worked the July 1993 build in Waterloo, which was Jimmy Carter’s first Habitat project outside the United States, and was lead finish carpenter on a Hamilton build later that decade. In 2005 he went back for a Carter-led build in Windsor-Essex, and watched Carter sign the wall studs.

The Whig-Standard asked Michael to write for its Community Speaker Series in June 2025. Volunteering is not giving with nothing in return, he wrote. The return is immense, and volunteers are not just helping, they are investing: in health equity, in neighbourhood trust, in social capital. He called it the unseen scaffolding of our entire community. Then he made an invitation, to anyone on the sidelines, to try an hour a week, find a cause that resonates, or simply look around their own street.

Two other campaigns are worth knowing about, and neither of them was local.

On March 6, 2025, Michael was one of 27 people from this region awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal, at a ceremony in Kingston City Hall. Residents nominate the candidates, the local MP or MPP vets them and forwards the strongest, and the Governor General’s office narrows the list again. Michael believes six or seven people put his name in. He knows of three: Janet Trost, Dinah Cotter and Connie Howes. His mother and stepfather, both in their eighties, came from Belleville for it, and his sister drove them.

Michael Judd is one of three candidates in District 7, Kingscourt-Rideau, in Kingston’s municipal election on October 26, 2026. The others are Kevin Smith and the incumbent, Brandon Tozzo.

His site lists what he calls the challenges we face. It is a list of about two dozen things he says he keeps hearing, on doorsteps, in emails, on social media, and through the governance work he already does. Housing. Roughly 600 overdue sidewalk repairs, by the City’s own count. Mental health, addiction and homelessness. The Memorial Centre. The proposed aquatic centre. Lemoine Point Farm. The 19 per cent council pay raise. Decisions made without citizen input.

Two on that list will sound familiar by now. He names accessibility and mobility. And he names underinvestment in Kingscourt and Rideau Heights, which he describes as bare bus shelters and neglected upkeep in a community that does not feel heard.

We ask everyone we feature to point us at a local business or organisation they rate. Setting aside the charities he already works with, Michael named two: Tommy’s and Autohouse Kingston. Both of them, he said, give back so much.

Tommy’s is the fifties-style diner at 377 Princess Street. Every summer they run a bike wash out front and the proceeds go to Partners in Mission Food Bank. They also hold an annual charity golf day, a Christmas hamper and dinner drive, and weeks where booking one particular table sends half your bill to a local shelter.

Autohouse Kingston is Bradie and Ken Johnston, on Bath Road. They are the ones from earlier in this story, who handed a man they had never met a cube van and a credit card.

Both are on his list for the same reason. They said yes to something that was not their problem.