Michael DeGroote

Michael George DeGroote (August 13, 1933 – September 12, 2022) was a Canadian businessman and philanthropist from Hamilton, Ontario, who resided in Bermuda. Aside from his business career, he was best known as a major private donor to local educational institutions including McMaster University, McMaster University Medical School, and Hillfield Strathallan College.

Early life DeGroote was born in West Flanders, Belgium, on August 13, 1933. He immigrated to Canada with his family in 1948, when he was 14 years old. He subsequently purchased a former army truck when he was 18 and used it to transport manure to those fields. He sold the team four years later, DeGroote also paid $23 million to the Ontario Securities Commission to settle a claim regarding insider trading of Laidlaw stock.

Though still residing in Bermuda, DeGroote was involved in a number of business ventures after his retirement, such as Republic Waste, AutoNation, NRX Global Inc and Century Business Services. His business dealings in the Dominican Republic was the subject of CBC's The Fifth Estate episode "The Mob and Michael DeGroote" which aired January 23, 2015. It found that members of the Montreal Mafia tried to take over the Dominican casinos co-owned by DeGroote by force. DeGroote maintained that he did not collude with organized crime that had become entangled in the financial squabble. He had earlier made a major donation to McMaster University in 1987, which funded the construction of a new business school. It was later renamed the Michael G. DeGroote School of Business in his honour in 1992. He was granted an honorary doctorate from McMaster that same year.

Almost a decade later, DeGroote donated $105 million to McMaster that funded a number of medical research centres as well as the Michael G. DeGroote Centre for Learning and Discovery (commonly abbreviated as MDCL to avoid confusion with the DeGroote School of Business). In addition, the McMaster School of Medicine was renamed to the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster in 2004. DeGroote consequently became the first benefactor in Canada to have a medical building renamed in his honour, having earlier been the first donor in Ontario to have a business school named after him. Five years later, at the McMaster University Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine graduation ceremony, DeGroote took the stage to announce a gift of $50 million to support increased focus on national and international health leadership, including developing stronger ties with McMaster's DeGroote School of Business as well as partnerships that focus on biomedical advances. Additionally, a new fund was created to seed new medical research within the Faculty of Health Sciences.