‘Paying his rent for living on this Earth’
Murray Koffler, the founder of Shoppers Drug Mart, was on television in 1988, listening to a CBC interviewer describe him as a “sharp business type” turned philanthropist. Was there a moment, the interviewer asked, when he decided he had enough money, that it was time to give it all away?
He politely waved his hands. “I don’t see the picture that way at all,” he said. “First of all, I don’t consider myself sharp.”
Koffler died at his home on Sunday. He was 93.
For decades, Koffler’s patronage of the arts and medicine, of Israel and the Toronto Jewish community, has been a curiosity, subject of character studies in the Canadian press trying to grasp what was driving the business mo- gul behind the Shoppers and Four Seasons empires to dispense with his fortune.
In that CBC interview, he seemed to chafe at the suggestion that he fit the archetype of millionaire-cum-philanthropist. The money didn’t awaken a sense of duty. It was always there. The money just allowed him to do more.
“Murray is paying his rent for living on this Earth,” Sidney Liswood, then-president of the research centre at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, told Koffler’s biographer, Frank Rasky, in 1988.
Koffler’s name is on hospital wings, and on the student centre at the University of Toronto, where he helped found the Institute of Pharmacy Management. There is the Koffler Centre of the Arts in Toronto, the Murray Koffler Urologic Wellness Centre at Mount Sinai, and the Marvelle Koffler Breast Centre, named after his wife.
“Put your name up front,” Koffler says in his biography, Just a Simple Pharmacist: The Story of Murray Koffler. “Put your name where your activity is.” It wasn’t an ego trip, he said. It was to set an example.”
At 17, Koffler took over his family’s two Toronto pharmacies after his father died. He trained as a pharmacist and gradually built the Shoppers Drug Mart empire, using a then-controversial self-serve retail model and franchising out to independent pharmacists. “Before that,” he told Canadian Business magazine in 2003, “people would say, ‘ Give me a toothbrush,’ and I would hand them a toothbrush.”
“There was something about that generation,” said Elizabeth Wolfe, president of the Canadian Jewish News, whose father joined Koffler to buy the newspaper when it was floundering in the early ‘ 70s. “It’s hard to explain. It still happens today but not to the same extent where they really had a very, very strong connection and felt a very strong sense of obligation to give back to the community.”
In t he 1 980s, Koffler rounded up such business leaders as former prime minister Paul Martin ( before he entered politics) to start the Canadian Council For Aboriginal Business. And he approached Ron Jamieson, a Mohawk businessman who was then working on Bay Street.
When Koffler called with his idea, to create business opportunities for Indigenous people, Jamieson said he was skeptical. It wasn’t something that was “in the corporate psyche” at the time. “No one was doing this.”
But Koffler was. The council, in one program, created internship opportunities for Indigenous youth. “He’s not a guy to cut a cheque and then walk away from the issue and feel good,” Jamieson said.
In a statement Tuesday, Martin called Koffler “one of the most insightful and perceptive (people) I ever met in the context of issues facing Canada’s Indigenous People.”
Koffler is survived his wife of 67 years, his five children and more than a dozen grandchildren.