Stephen A. Jarislowsky
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Stephen A. Jarislowsky is a Canadian billionaire investor and philanthropist, born Berlin, Germany, September 1925. He is married and has four children.
Step-son of a steel mill owner in Germany who was ousted by the Nazis for harbouring Jews, Jarislowsky emigrated to the United States in 1941 after attending public and high school in the Netherlands and France. In Asheville, North Carolina, he attended preparatory school, and then studied mechanical engineering at Cornell University. With the US entry into World War II, he served in the US Army. He finished basic training and studied Japanese at the University of Chicago before serving in counter-intelligence in Japan after the war.
He returned to the University of Chicago in 1946 and graduated with an MA in Asian Studies and Phi Beta Kappa Honours. This was followed by a Masters in Business Administration from Harvard Business School in 1949. For the next three years, he worked as an engineer for Alcan Aluminum in Montreal. He briefly returned to the United States, but by June 1955 he returned to Montreal where he started Jarislowsky, Fraser & Company Limited.
Called by publisher Jean Paré the Warren Buffett of Canada[1] , he is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer and former President of Jarislowsky, Fraser, which he built into one of the largest and most successful investment management firms in Canada, by 2005 managing assets of over C$54 billion [2].
He is a Director of the influential C.D. Howe Institute and has also been active in numerous other corporations besides his own including SNC-Lavalin, Canfor, Southam, Swiss Bank Corp., Velan Valve Inc., Abitibi and Goodfellow Lumber Inc. He has participated in educational, cultural and charitable activities, and with his wife Gail, to date has endowed eleven eponymous university chairs in Canada including those in Environment and Health (McMaster, established 2003); Families and Work (Guelph University, 2003); Religion in Conflict (Assumption University, Winnepeg); Public Sector Management (University of Ottawa, 2003); International Business Administration (Laval, 2000); Urology (McGill); Finance (University of Alberta, School of Business); Biotechnology (Saskatchewan, 2004); Technology and International Competition (École Polytechnique de Montréal); History (Concordia); and Public Sector Management (Ottawa, 2005). “All these chairs are concerned with excellence,” he is quoted as saying, "something Canadians have never really espoused". [3]
Cultural contributions include The Stephen A Jarislowsky Dance Studio in Vancouver, and the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, established in 2001 at Concordia University in Montreal.
He contributes frequently to television, radio, magazines and newspapers and is a frequent lecture speaker. In 2005 he published The Investment Zoo: Taming the Bulls and the Bears (co-written with Craig Toomey), which sold more than 15,000 copies in Quebec and pushed the French edition of The Da Vinci Code out of the top position on the bestseller list ISBN 2-89472-259-1.
Apart from his personal business pursuits, he is an outspoken defender of business ethics (and a critic of ethical breeches) ISBN 2-89472-259-1. In 2002 he co-founded (with Claude Lamoureux) the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance to further this cause, focusing on such contemporaries as Frank Stronach and Conrad Black for their alleged corporate excesses.
He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Knight of the National Order of Quebec. He has Honorary Doctorates of Law from a growing list of Canadian universities including Queen's University, University of Alberta, McMaster University, Université Laval, Concordia University, the University of Windsor, and the Université de Montréal [4].
