The Inspirational Giver

Michael G. DeGroote Hon. ’09 left a towering legacy of generosity at Hillfield Strathallan College

By Berton Woodward

ON A WARM EARLY SEPTEMBER DAY IN 2001, HSC Headmaster Bill Boyer had just finished leading the outdoor celebration of the College’s 100th anniversary. Now he was strolling across the campus with his honoured guest, Michael G. DeGroote, one of Hamilton’s—and Canada’s—most generous philanthropists and HSC’s largest donor. In 2003, the former transport titan would famously give McMaster University $105 million for a School of Medicine, following up on his DeGroote School of Business. And the HSC Patron had already supported the College with a $500,000 gift for the Michael G. DeGroote Gymnasium and many smaller donations.

The two men settled down in Boyer’s office and discussed the latest College campaign. DeGroote readily pledged a new gift for the school his grandchildren were attending. Though not targeted, it was his biggest yet: $1 million. But he had a challenge for HSC: it must be matched by other donors. Recalls Boyer: “He said, ‘I’m not going to be the only benefactor to the school. You need to ramp up your fundraising efforts and ask others in the community to join me.’”

And so it began. In style and substance, you can trace from that moment the series of events that led DeGroote to give HSC the record total donation for an independent school in Canada of $19.5 million, allowing it to build a stellar new Senior School building in 2012 as well as the Athletic Complex in 2014, plus extras along the way. When he died last September at 89, Michael DeGroote Hon. ’09 was remembered as a great businessman, a strong family man, and—poignantly for someone who never came close to finishing high school—a magnificent supporter of education.

“His legacy should really be as a man who chose to inspire others by going first in philanthropic endeavours and using the talents that he had as a business person to better the world around them,” says HSC Patron Jeff Paikin ’80, who was chair of the HSC board for much of the period. “He wanted to leave the place a lot better than he found it, and what a tremendous legacy that is.”

Head of College Marc Ayotte met frequently with DeGroote after coming to HSC in 2010. “He wanted our kids at HSC to be the leaders of tomorrow—the doctors at his school of medicine or the business leaders at the grad school who were going to solve problems and create wealth so that they could become the next wave of philanthropists. He understood that people couldn’t give on the level that he gave. He just wanted participation—he didn’t want to be the only one. So he always wanted his gift to inspire our students and inspire their parents to give more to their communities.”

DeGroote’s son and HSC Patron Gary DeGroote ’74 agrees. “He made his mark in Hamilton and he wanted to give back to his community. He wanted to do the business school and then the community centre and certainly the medical school, and all the things that go with that. And also HSC—he wanted to go right from the three-year-olds to the 20-year-olds, to give them the best possible base for life they could have. He believed independent schools were more accountable and more hands-on with students, with the right teachers and the right community.”

His gift to HSC was transformative. Statistically, it added 134,000 square feet to the College’s total footprint and allowed the Senior School enrolment to rise to 530 now from the low 400s then. But far more importantly, it allowed HSC to become the College it wanted to be.

“Demand for the school has never been higher,” says Ayotte, “and I think it’s because of this magnificent building, which I would put up against any high school or athletic facility in any independent school in Canada. Our science labs are now state of the art, off the charts. All the 21st -century soft skills that we know are super-important—having collaborative spaces, to be able to have Model UNs, kids working on their presentation skills—we didn’t have space for that before. Our program was always amazing. We now have a facility to match the excellence of our program, and that’s what he did for us.”

It’s not as if Michael DeGroote was not already a very good friend of the College. He made his first donation of $5,000 to HSC in 1980, around the time the last of his four children— Gary ’74, Joni ’75, Tim ’78 and Michael Jr. ’79—were finishing at the school (followed later by many grandchildren and greatchildren). He continued to give in various amounts throughout the 1980s and ’90s, sometimes in six figures.

Boyer, who was Headmaster until 2002, tells the story of how, when the naming opportunity arose in 1996 for the school gym, DeGroote called him and pledged $100,000. Invited to the campus, he asked on his tour, “Is this the best use of $100,000?” Yes, said Boyer. “But he said, ‘Well you know what? Let’s make it $300,000,’” recalls Boyer. A few weeks later, the College sent the announcement press release to DeGroote for pre-approval. “And he called and said, ‘It’s been a very good year. Let’s make it $500,000.’ And so I made a mental note to myself to try and touch base with him every few weeks just to see whether it was an even better year than he initially thought!”

When new Headmaster Tom Matthews arrived in 2003, it was clear to him that the College needed a serious—and very large—fundraising campaign. He presented an ambitious new campus master plan to the board, with an eventual target of $40 million. “There was a real shortage of teaching space and the need to build an entirely new Senior School,” says Matthews.

When he brought in Adrienne Davidson in early 2005 as the first director of college advancement, the $1 million matching challenge was still underway. “It took two years,” says Davidson. “My commitment to Mike was that if we do this, we’re about to embark on a once-in-a-generation, if not several generations, campaign that the school has never done before. Will you be there for us? He said he would if we met the challenge, and so we did. We met the million dollars.”

Then came the climactic moment—a meeting at DeGroote’s suite in the Four Seasons Hotel in midtown Toronto in 2009. Present were Davidson, Matthews and the late Bill Young ’35, an HSC Patron and honorary campaign chair who was able to tell DeGroote that he and his wife Joyce ’43 were giving to the campaign. “Mike had great admiration for Bill Young,” says Davidson. Behind the scenes, Gary DeGroote, who was also part of the fundraising team, had spoken to his father. “His answer to me was, ‘let’s get it done,’” says Gary, “and I put him on to the people he needed to deal with to get it done.”

In the Four Seasons, the HSC trio laid out their hope that DeGroote could become a lead donor in the campaign. “I remember Mike asking Bill what amount we were considering and we made the request for $10 million,” says Matthews. “He didn’t agree on the spot, but he did say that he would support the campaign. And I always kind of love that occasion, because when we left the room, Bill and Mike hugged one another for quite a period of time. It was very emotional—both men had tears in their eyes. I think it was just kind of their shared life experience, and their shared commitment to the school. They both were incredibly loyal to Hamilton because they felt that their success, everything, flowed from the city.”

But there was still the matter of what this lead gift would be. Davidson remembers telling DeGroote at the Four Seasons about major school gifts. “The next day, Mike called me in my car and asked me to repeat what I had said about wanting him to be the single largest donor to an independent school in Canada. He said, ‘So what’s the biggest gift that has ever been given?’ And I said, ‘Well, today it is $10 million.’ And he said, ‘OK, I’m going to give you 10 and a half.’ I almost drove off the road. So that’s how the first transformational gift for HSC came about, but it most certainly wasn’t the last.”

Davidson notes, as others have, that for DeGroote, the donation was not about him. “His gift and that call to me the next day were not because he wanted the glory of being the largest donor to a school,” she says. “It was to do with wanting to inspire others to give, because out of all my donors, he is one of the handful that have truly inspired me with a philanthropy philosophy. He wanted to make a difference and inspire others, and he truly did so in that region of Canada. It’s remarkable what Mike did for the southwestern Ontario area, for hospitals and schools and universities and so on.”

Ron Foxcroft, a former NCAA basketball referee and entrepreneur who had also been in the trucking business when DeGroote was building his signature transport company, Laidlaw Inc., in the 1980s, chaired the campaign. After DeGroote sold Laidlaw in 1988, he based himself in Bermuda and Naples, Florida. Matthews and Davidson would fly to Naples at times to update DeGroote on the progress—and, implicitly, possible additional financial needs—of the school and athletic complex project. Foxcroft would join the group for these sessions when DeGroote came to Toronto.

“I remember Michael would say to us, ‘I know why you’re here. Let’s talk about world affairs,’” says Foxcroft. “And we would talk about everything that was happening in the world but it would always circle back to him asking us, ‘What impact?’ He was big on impact. What impact can I make to the educational system of Hillfield Strathallan? And we would talk about that, almost every meeting, and this went on for maybe two years.”

Ayotte joined those visits in 2010 when he took over as Head of College. “I’ll never forget the first time, because I was so nervous to meet a guy like him,” Ayotte says. “And, you know, he was just such a regular guy, and so concerned about making me comfortable and wanting to welcome me to the school. We sort of hit it off right away, which was great. He had a gruff exterior and seemed like a really gruff guy, but he wasn’t—he was all heart.”

Ayotte also has a special memory of a critical time for the project, when the College was set to take out a loan for the remaining funding for the athletic complex. The plan was for DeGroote to cover the interest payment, and this gift would be announced at the opening of the Senior School in 2012. “Literally a week before the opening, after we’d worked for months on this,” says Ayotte, “he called me on the weekend and said, ‘This is too complicated. I’m just going to give you $5 million and that should be enough.’ And me being pretty new, but also feeling like I had a good relationship with Mike, and also having my head so finely tuned on the numbers we actually needed to pull this off, my first reaction was to say, ‘Mike, I’m so sorry. That’s just not enough.’ And he’s like, ‘OK, well, crunch the numbers and call me back on Monday.’”

So Ayotte and the director of finance did crunch the numbers. “I was just about to call him on the Monday morning to say, I think it’s $5.75 million that we need, like bare minimum. And he called me before I could pick up the phone and said, ‘I’m gonna do six and that’s it!’ And I said, ‘That’s awesome, that’s more than enough.’ But my heart was in my stomach because I had just told the guy who I love and respect that $5 million is not enough. But he was just such a great guy that I felt I could be really honest with him.”