The far-reaching legacy of Murray Koffler
Murray Koffler has been a philanthropic dynamo, both in his persuasive abilities to recruit others in good causes, and in the startling variety of those causes.
Self-described as “just a simple pharmacist,” he is best known as the founder of Shoppers Drug Mart. But he has successfully tackled the issue of youth substance abuse, strengthened Toronto as a leader in creativity and arts appreciation and pushed the need to fund advanced medical research at home and abroad, even as he nurtured Shoppers as North America’s most consistently wellrun major drugstore chain.
Despite founding Shoppers and co-founding another world-class commercial enterprise, Four Seasons Hotels Inc., Koffler has never been among the superrich, not remotely in the league of the Thomsons and Westons.
The hallmark of Murray Bernard Koffler, now 91, has been the leveraging of the relatively modest fortune of himself and his wife, Dr. Marvelle Seligman Koffler, to recruit other deep-pocketed folks into helping finance the ideas for social progress that have so often interrupted his sleep.
These include Koffler’s prescient spearheading of the Council on Drug Abuse (CODA) in 1969, aimed especially at youth. And he acted early in getting Canadian business leaders behind a new Canadian Council for Native Business, when the stereotype of First Peoples was as supplicants, not frustrated would-be entrepreneurs routinely turned down for financing.
In 1977, when the Toronto art scene was dominated by the Art Gallery of Ontario and a few private galleries, the Kofflers donated a $1million grubstake to create the Koffler Centre for the Arts. Its mission was to raise awareness of both traditional and avant-garde art throughout the GTA.
Thirty-eight years later, the Koffler Centre’s activities are more ambitious than ever. They include exhibitions at the centre’s second home, opened in 2011, at the new Artscape Youthspace at Queen St. W. and Shaw St. in the heart of the Toronto arts district, along with touring exhibitions, high school outreach and lecture series.
As a University of Toronto pharmacy grad, Koffler combined his training with his pharmacist father’s business smarts to develop a new concept in retail.
Shoppers Drug Mart was a pioneer as a mass merchant of food, cosmetics, stationery and over-the counter medications, made possible by Koffler’s introduction of self-service. That way — and this was a novelty in the 1950s and 1960s — pharmacists would be freed up to process more prescriptions, while so-called “front of store” sales of non-prescription goods would come to account for today’s 50 to 55 per cent of total store sales.
That concept made Shoppers, which Koffler transformed from the two drugstores he inherited from his father, into one of the top 10 retail pharmacy enterprises on the continent.
In the 1980s, he determined that U of T should have programs that combined pharmacist instruction with business management — the same combination of skills that enabled him to build Canada’s biggest retail pharmacy chain.
The Koffler Institute of Pharmacy Management was the first program in North America to combine those disciplines. It helped inspire Jeff Skoll, the Canadian billionaire cofounder of eBay Inc., to launch and largely fund a similar program that combines computer engineering with MBA instruction, creating yet another world centre of excellence at a Canadian university.
A groundbreaking advance, to be sure, the Koffler Institute is also impressive for the number of donors Koffler attracted to make it possible. In addition to funding from the Koffler Family Foundation, contributions came from more than 640 additional donors, including Shoppers’ competitors and Canada’s Big Five banks.
At Israel’s renowned Weizmann Institute of Science, there is a novel mechanism for pursuing advances in nuclear medicine, dubbed the “Koffler Accelerator.” It was made possible by a $2-million donation from the Kofflers, and strengthened the institute’s world leadership in that field.
The Kofflers’ commitment to a Jewish state is a core value. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War that threatened Israel’s existence, the impromptu Toronto fundraising drive run by Murray Koffler raised more financial assistance for Israel, on a per-capita basis, than any other worldwide. That has contributed to the status of Koffler as a leader in a Toronto Jewish community that is among the world’s most vibrant.
Yet in the multicultural Toronto that the Kofflers helped build, people of all backgrounds are treated at the Murray Koffler Urologic Wellness Centre and the Marvelle Koffler Breast Centre at Mount Sinai Hospital. Open to all are the library, lecture and concert facilities of the Koffler Student Centre at U of T (the former Toronto Central Reference library). So is study at the Koffler Science Reserve, a U of T biological research facility on the Kofflers’ former Jokers Hill thoroughbred horse centre north of Toronto that they donated to the university.
Business historian Peter C. Newman said Koffler’s “ideas flow so fast sometimes that he is the only man I know who interrupts himself.” Koffler’s gift has been not that “he knows everybody,” but that “he gets them all to want to do things.”
Novelist Tom Wolfe coined the term “single-combat warrior” for the astronauts he chronicled in The Right Stuff (1979). These sometimes mythical figures are revered by humanity, the Davids who singlehandedly slay Goliaths. But in truth, the advances credited to the likes of Tommy Douglas and June Callwood were collaborative efforts.
To be the catalyst, the spark, for those joint ventures among thousands of us is a gift. What accounts for Murray Koffler’s widespread regard as a mensch is that there came a point early when Koffler stopped applying at Shoppers alone his ability to rally others. He began advocating for social improvements while still building his business. And about three decades ago, Koffler started devoting himself full time to philanthropic challenges.
Koffler’s legacy is one of galvanizing others, and a rebuke to those who would wait — and wait and wait — for the arrival of the knight in shining armour. dolive@thestar.ca