Currently, Vickers Manor, formerly known as McKellar Place and McKellar Hospital, is only about 15 per cent occupied, and some of the remaining tenants are among the most vulnerable residents who were placed there by social service agencies.Big North Capital
A private equity company that was born from the ashes of one of Ontario’s largest private-mortgage insolvencies has stepped in to rescue a senior-living facility in Thunder Bay that was in danger of having the heating and electricity cut off.
The declining conditions at Vickers Manor, formerly known as McKellar Place and McKellar Hospital, have been the subject of many local news stories and growing attention by city officials and politicians in the Northern Ontario city in recent months.
The 109-unit, six-storey building has seen an exodus of residents after dozens of fire code and health code violations were reported in the spring and summer, the latter resulted in the Thunder Bay District Health Unit seeking a court order for compliance from former owner Ongrasothy Masillamany and SMS Property Trust Inc.
The health complaints ranged from bed bugs and excessive heat to overflowing garbage. The fire code violations required repairs to multiple doors and emergency lights, installation of carbon monoxide detectors, in addition to keeping extinguishers and sprinklers inspected and in good working order.
“The priority right now is health and safety and fire code violations; money is in the bank and is being deployed to ensure the security and safety of residents,” said Sophia Pino, director of operations and people for Big North Capital, which backed the acquisition of the property from SMS.
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Currently, the building is only about 15 per cent occupied, and some of the remaining tenants are among the most vulnerable residents who were placed there by social service agencies Brain Injury Services in Northern Ontario (BISNO) and Community Services for Independence Northwest.
The record of SMS’s ownership of the Thunder Bay site has been chaotic according to those close to the situation.
Michelle Hamilton’s son, John, a quadriplegic patient who receives support from BISNO, is one of the residents still in the building after being placed there in 2014. While the home wasn’t perfect before, Ms. Hamilton said things took a turn for the worse once SMS purchased the property.
“It was bad; they got rid of a lot of good staff, fired a manager,” she said. “We used to have a nurse practitioner on the main floor. It just went downhill.”
In July, SMS shut down the building’s commercial kitchen, which provided the meals that are included in the tenant’s rental agreements. In response, volunteers ran a GoFundMe online campaign that raised more than $15,000 to keep (at that time) 29 residents fed.
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Earlier this year, the building was listed for sale for $18-million (later lowered to $1), but Big North took over the property after SMS defaulted on loan payments to lenders.
SMS itself originally purchased the property in a power of sale process, and just five months after the 2022 purchase it lost control of the building when a previous lender – Barrett Kudlow Capital Management Inc. – filed an application in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to appoint a receiver, saying it had lost faith in the company’s ability to manage the property.
“It appears that SMS has failed to pay many of its expenses since taking over the business, and has taken money from the business and deposited into other related businesses,” the 2022 court records state. However, by May, 2024, a refinancing settlement allowed Barrett Kudlow to exit, and the Court lifted the receivership order, returning control to SMS.
The building is one of the last remaining parts of a campus for the former McKeller Hospital, which was largely demolished after the 100-year-old hospital was decommissioned in 2004. In 2025, SMS rebranded the building Vickers Manor, erasing the property’s historic links.
However, some old troubles showed up even with the new name, with allegations of unpaid bills, maintenance complaints and code violations soon following.
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While the project to revive the battered senior-living centre is a new challenge for Big North, Ms. Pino noted that stepping in to clean up messes is how the company was formed. “To an extent, it’s one building; we had to deal with 100 separate properties … that was challenging,” she said.
Ms. Pino said some Big North staff are temporarily moving to Thunder Bay to spearhead the remediation efforts, with phase two designed to address non-critical maintenance and aesthetic needs – painting and cleaning – that had gone unmet under the old owners.
The unit owners of Big North, a private equity company, are largely pulled from a pool of private mortgage lenders who were caught in the 2024 collapse of former child actor Robbie Clark’s rental home business. That turned out to be one of the largest insolvencies in Canadian history involving almost exclusively private lenders, who had contributed more than $135-million worth of private mortgages and promissory notes to Mr. Clarke’s companies to help it purchase more than 400 homes spread across four Northern Ontario cities.
After a year-long legal fight over the insolvency of Mr. Clark’s businesses, Big North was formed to help engineer a credit-bidding process for many of those lenders to band together and take control of 185 properties worth about $44-million. Some of the properties didn’t have roofs; many were untenanted, but over the past two years Big North’s team has poured money into repairs and operations, paring down some of the portfolio and achieving almost full occupancy in the rental homes. It has since expanded into investing in agriculture and finance.
In the future, the company plans to investigate reopening another wing of the Vickers Manor building that’s currently locked off, which has potentially 50 more apartments.
“There’s so much space and potential to make this a thriving community,” said Ms. Pino, who said the company hopes to make the building welcome again for residents who felt they had to flee in recent months. “We’re really thankful for a number of volunteers; everyone has rallied together.”
Ms. Hamilton is hopeful things will improve, but she’s been burned before and is cautious.
“I’m optimistic, but I’m guarded; I have no trust,” she said. “What needs to happen is people need to have follow-through.”