THE RICH LIST

Cryptocurrency

Changpeng Zhao, known in the tech world as CZ, jumped to the top of our list this year on the strength of his cryptocurrency coin Build and Build, or BNB. The coin is used to trade, pay fees and access perks on Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange,­ which Zhao founded in 2017; he now has an estimated 90 per cent stake in the company. BNB’s value nearly doubled in the past year, reaching more than $1,600 in October.

Despite his windfall, Zhao has faced significant legal challenges: he pleaded guilty in 2023 to failing to maintain an effective anti–money laundering program, stepped down as CEO of Binance and served a few months in prison. Now, with a president eager to make the U.S. the crypto capital of the world, Binance seems to be in the administration’s good books. It reportedly created the basic code to power the USD1 stablecoin for the Trump family’s crypto venture, and the SEC dropped a lawsuit against Binance in May. In recent months, Zhao, who lives in Dubai, mounted a high-profile pardon campaign, publicly flattering Donald Trump’s crypto policies. In mid-October, the president granted the pardon.

Media and information distribution

The Thomsons’ financial success has come from constant business reinvention. This year is no different, as the family’s media and software company Thomson Reuters invested hundreds of millions of dollars to integrate AI into its services. Despite ongoing revenue growth, Thomson Reuters’s share price had dropped by October, bringing the family’s net worth down a notch.

The Thomsons have a nearly 70 per cent stake in the firm through their holding company, which is owned by the grandchildren of the company’s late founder, Roy Thomson. Chair David Thomson made headlines in August when he offered $15 million for the Hudson’s Bay founding royal charter, besting the Weston clan’s (No. 3) $12.5-million bid. Thomson said he would donate the historic document to the Archives of Manitoba.

Clockwise from top left: Peter Thomson, Linda Campbell,

David Thomson and Taylor Thomson

Grocery and real estate

Galen G. Weston stepped down as president of Loblaw Companies Ltd. in 2023, but he’s still chair of the grocery giant’s board and controlling shareholder through Wittington Investments, Ltd., the family holding company. As Canadians fume over food prices, Loblaw’s stock has more than tripled since the pandemic; revenue grew 5.2 per cent in the second quarter of 2025, with earnings per share up 11.6 per cent. In 2024, Loblaw and its parent company, George Weston Ltd., agreed to pay $500 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over a 14-year, industry-wide conspiracy that artificially increased the price of packaged bread.

As of September, Canadian bread buyers can claim compensation from the settlement. Meanwhile, the venture-capital arm of the family holding company, Wittington Ventures, launched three investment funds this year, including one targeted at companies that make consumer products and services.

E-commerce

Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke stoked controversy this year by ordering employees to justify hiring humans instead of using AI. The directive was part of a six-point memo in which he also laid out his expectation that every employee use AI—and be evaluated on their use of AI—in their jobs.

In August, the company’s stock shot up after Shopify posted 31 per cent revenue growth in the second quarter. The bump helped Shopify unseat RBC as the most valuable Canadian company, worth $275 billion. And it’s still growing: this year, the company landed Starbucks, Michael Kors and Canada Goose as new clients and continued expanding its AI-powered merchant tools. Lütke spends his spare time behind the wheel as a race car driver. 

E-commerce and sports

Taiwan-born Joseph Tsai holds a 1.4 per cent stake in Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant he co-founded—but his current interests are in AI. Alibaba spent a decade building large language models, but when rival Chinese firm DeepSeek disrupted the industry in January with a low-cost, high-performing LLM, Tsai’s engineers skipped their Chinese New Year holidays to catch up. Within weeks the company launched Qwen 2.5-Max, a powerful multilingual and multipurpose LLM.

Now Alibaba is all in, open-sourcing Qwen, powering AI on iPhones in China and pouring US$53 billion into cloud and AI infrastructure over the next three years. Beyond tech, Tsai, who owns the Brooklyn Nets, backed the launch of the Asian University Basketball League this summer.

Information technology

Vancouver-born computer scientist David Cheriton earned his fortune from an early $100,000 investment in Google and holdings in Arista Networks, an American computer networking company he co-founded in 2004. Today, Arista provides the ethernet systems that power some of the world’s largest AI clusters.

In his current day job, Cheriton serves as chief data centre scientist at Juniper Networks, a networking infrastructure company he joined after it acquired his data centre automation startup, Apstra, in 2021. In July, Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquired Juniper for US$14 billion, creating a networking giant poised to capitalize on the rapid growth of AI. At 74, Cheriton has spent much of his life in the U.S. and is a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. 

Forestry, oil and construction

The current generation is revitalizing the century-old Irving empire with massive infrastructure bets. Construction began this year on a $1.5-billion modernization of Irving Pulp & Paper’s Saint John mill. A new recovery boiler will be able to produce 145 megawatts of renewable energy while dramatically increasing production efficiency.

Meanwhile, Irving Oil is pouring $100 million into upgrading its Saint John refinery—Canada’s largest—to boost efficiency for gasoline and diesel production. When the company tried to rezone land it owns for temporary parking during the upgrade, residents and city council pushed back. Irving withdrew the application this spring—a rare example of local resistance changing the family’s plans.

Pictured: Jim Irving

Food processing

McCain Foods’ first-ever global marketing campaign launched earlier this year, aimed at bringing the concept of regenerative farming to the masses. It includes an augmented-reality game where players make fries using sustainable farming techniques to earn rewards. The education push is part of the company’s “farm of the future” initiative, which commits to having 50 per cent of the land that grows McCain potatoes engaged in regenerative agriculture practices by 2030; this could help reduce CO₂ emissions from potato farming, storage and freight by 25 per cent per tonne. The initiative could be a massive win for climate change, as the $14-billion family-run company, founded in Florenceville, New Brunswick, in 1957, processes a quarter of the world’s fries. 

Pictured: Scott McCain

Investing

Ling Tang was a pre-IPO investor in the mobile technology company AppLovin, which went public in 2021 with a US$25-billion valuation. The company’s AI-powered software helps app developers and brands deliver targeted mobile ads, measure user activity and gather user data. Tang holds about 17.2 million shares through Angel Pride Holdings Ltd., which amount to roughly 5.8 per cent of the company.

AppLovin’s shares have skyrocketed more than 700 per cent since the beginning of 2024, launching Tang onto our list. In early October, AppLovin stock prices started to tumble, falling nearly 20 per cent by mid-October to about US$590, after reports that the SEC is probing the company’s data-collection and ad-targeting practices. Tang keeps a notoriously low profile—which is why the billionaire is the only person on our list without a photograph. 

Financial services

Power Corporation of Canada shares rose steadily in value over the past year as the firm, chaired by Paul Desmarais Jr. (above), was buoyed by the strong performance of its holdings in Great-West Lifeco and IGM Financial. Meanwhile, Power Sustainable, the climate-focused alternative asset manager subsidiary chaired by third-generation family member Olivier Desmarais, launched a $330-million fund focused on mid-sized businesses working to reduce carbon emissions.

Olivier’s cousin, Paul Desmarais III, oversees Sagard, an alternative asset management firm focused on venture capital and private equity. Through it, Power Corp. owns a $2.7-billion stake in the rapidly growing fintech firm Wealthsimple.

Car dealerships, forestry, grocery and advertising

Jim Pattison’s conglomerate, the Jim Pattison Group—B.C.’s largest private company—pulls in $16 billion annually from more than 20 divisions, with diverse business lines that include Pattison Outdoor Advertising, Ripley Entertainment, Great Wolf Lodge, Guinness World Records and canned seafood company Ocean Brands. JPG finalized its acquisition of California-based Save Mart Companies early this year, adding 194 U.S. grocery stores to its food, beverage and pharmacy vertical. JPG is suing Metro Vancouver for alleged negligence after maintenance work on sewage infrastructure damaged one of its fish-processing plants last September. Pattison additionally has significant holdings in West Fraser Timber, Westshore Terminals and Canfor. 

Media and communications

In July, Rogers Communications spent $4.7 billion to buy rival BCE’s 37.5 per cent stake in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, putting Rogers’s ownership share of the sports giant at 75 per cent. It’s widely believed the company, steered by executive chair Edward Rogers, will snatch the rest from fellow billionaire Larry Tanenbaum’s Kilmer Group when it has the chance next year.

Edward is intent on sports dominance: along with the MLSE deal, he signed an $11-billion deal to extend the company’s exclusive contract with the NHL to 2038. It’s another show of strength for Edward, who became executive chair of the Rogers board in 2024. Sisters Melinda and Martha resigned from the board in early 2024 but retain ownership in the company, thanks to the Rogers Control Trust their father, Ted, set up before his death in 2008.

Clockwise from top left: Melinda Rogers-Hixon, Martha Rogers, Suzanne Rogers, Edward Rogers

Agriculture, transportation, oil and financial services

In August, Thor Richardson (right) took over from his father, Hartley (left), to become the eighth president of James Richardson & Sons, the Winnipeg-based grain, energy and transportation empire founded in 1867. Hartley, who held the position for 32 years, is staying on as CEO to smooth over the transition.

The company, meanwhile, is diversifying and expanding. Its agribusiness arm, Richardson International, is entering the U.S. with a planned US$375-million acquisition of the Ronzoni pasta business, including three production facilities. The company also received $5 million in federal funding for upgrades at its North Shore railyard in North Vancouver, a huge grain terminal that moves six million metric tonnes of grain per year. 

Investing

Shares of Brookfield Corporation briefly hovered above $100 in September, an all-time high for the gigantic global investment firm led by Bruce Flatt. The company has since issued a three-for-two stock split, bringing the share price down and making it more accessible for individual investors. Flatt, who took over as board chair of Brookfield’s sister company, Brookfield Asset Management, from Mark Carney when he left to run for office, owes much of his wealth to his shares in both operations.

These days, Brookfield Asset Management is investing heavily in AI projects, shelling out $30 billion for data centres in France. Last year, the firm entered into an agreement with Microsoft to provide 10.5 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity for its AI data centres.

Retail

Alain Bouchard’s audacious 2024 bid to acquire Seven & i Holdings, the Japanese owner of 7-Eleven, would have transformed his Alimentation Couche-Tard into the world’s largest convenience-store chain. After a year of stalled talks, the mega-merger collapsed in July. That didn’t slow him down: the company he spent 45 years building is now Canada’s dominant convenience retailer, operating more than 17,000 locations across 29 countries, employing nearly 150,000 people and generating US$72.9 billion in revenue annually.

In July, Couche-Tard closed a US$1.6-billion acquisition of GetGo Café + Market, a Pittsburgh-based convenience chain with 270 locations. The company also opened 97 new stores in 2025 and has more than 60 North American locations in the pipeline.

Real estate and entertainment

The Apostolopoulos family’s grandiose plans to build a mini Las Vegas in Ontario’s Durham region got a big zoning win this year when their parcel of land near the Pickering Casino Resort was reclassified as a major tourist destination. The change clears the way for LaunchPad Golf, a year-round driving range and entertainment company, to build its flagship Canadian facility on the site, dubbed Durham Live.

A Porsche test track, which allows customers to get behind the wheel of a Porsche and cruise around a two-kilometre track, opened on the site in June. The track joins the casino, a hotel, a shopping district and a 2,500-square-foot performance venue; future planned amenities include a waterpark and film studios. In addition to Durham Live, brothers Steve (above), Peter and Jim control a vast portfolio of commercial properties through Triple Group of Companies, founded by their late father, Andreas.

Home construction

One of Canada’s largest homebuilders is getting into the pre-fab business. Peter Gilgan, whose Mattamy Homes has built 140,000 homes across Canada and the U.S., just launched his new venture, Stelumar Advanced Manufacturing, designed to address the housing shortage by making modular parts for houses and condos in a fully automated facility.

The condo market crash could get in the way of his plans, though. In October, Mattamy and its development partner, QuadReal, cancelled their planned $6-billion conversion of Toronto’s Cloverdale Mall, meant to have more than 5,000 condos and rental apartments, after pre-selling less than 10 per cent of available units. 

Cryptocurrency

In early 2025, Stuart Hoegner stepped down as general counsel for cryptocurrency issuer Tether and its sister company, crypto exchange Bitfinex. Tether issues the world’s largest stablecoin and most-traded cryptocurrency, USDT, pegged one-for-one to the U.S. dollar. Hoegner is reported to own an estimated 13 per cent of Tether, which posted a US$13-billion profit in 2024.

Now, the coin is being delisted or restricted on European exchanges, after the company refused to comply with the European Union’s new Markets in Crypto-Assets regulations, which imposed new rules and governance on crypto assets. Despite this, Tether is now said to be raising up to US$20 billion in a funding round, which would value the company on par with OpenAI.  

Technology

Garrett Camp co-founded Uber in 2009. Sixteen years later, the company he built is one of the biggest tech juggernauts in the world. In the second quarter of 2025, Uber posted US$12.7 billion in revenue, up 18 per cent year over year, with net earnings hitting US$1.4 billion. Day to day, Camp focuses on Expa, his startup studio, which has launched more than 20 companies since 2013—among them First, an online prenuptial service, and Aero, which helps regular folks snag seats on private jets.

Camp has also pledged to give away half of his wealth through Camp.org, his non-profit foundation, which funds tech-driven solutions to social problems. Its highest-profile project was TrueMedia.org, a free deepfake-detection tool used worldwide during the 2024 U.S. elections and now open-sourced. Camp.org also runs Every.org, a free fundraising platform that has supported more than 7,000 non-profits.

Steel

Zekelman Industries, led by Barry Zekelman (above), is the largest independent steel pipe producer in North America. In 2024, Zekelman added steel production to his roster by buying a five per cent stake in Sault Ste. Marie–based Algoma Steel. His timing couldn’t have been worse: just a few months later, Donald Trump’s tariffs decimated Canada’s steel industry and, in September, Zekelman sold off nearly 40 per cent of his holdings.

Despite all this, he has publicly supported Trump’s tariffs and his efforts to protect America’s domestic steel industry (Zekelman Industries is based in the U.S.). He says that Canada should similarly protect its own industry from cheaper foreign imports. 

Food production

Last year, Lino Saputo Jr. (right) stepped down as president and CEO of his family’s cheese business, ceding the reins to long-time executive Carl Colizza but staying on as executive chair. The company’s internal succession plan paid off, as it posted record earnings in August, sending its share price up by 10 per cent. This bump is especially good news for Lino Jr.’s father, Lino Sr. (left), who holds the largest stake in the company, at 39.5 per cent.

The business is Trump-proof: while the president has threatened to come after Canada’s dairy supply-management system, Colizza says Saputo’s global scope means it could easily adapt. Outside of cheese, the family owns a sprawling real estate portfolio in Toronto and Montreal. 

Finance, technology, real estate, communications

Richard Li, the 58-year-old younger son of Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-Shing, gained early business experience working in Toronto’s investment banking sector. In July, after years of delayed and aborted IPO attempts, Li took his insurance company, FWD Group, public on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The company is now valued at nearly $9.9 billion—lower than Li’s original target, but still an impressive debut.

Li holds his stake in FWD through his private investment outfit Pacific Century Group, which has significant additional investments across Asia in finance, technology, real estate and media and communications, including a 22 per cent stake in the Hong Kong telecom PCCW. 

Retail

Lululemon’s slow growth sent its shares tumbling nearly 50 per cent this year, prompting former chair Chip Wilson to take out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal in October. In it, he criticized Lululemon’s current leadership and likened the firm’s trajectory to a plane crash. His advice: focus on the product and brand rather than chase Wall Street approval with consistent quarterly projections. Lucky for Wilson, his own fortune is well-padded: he also owns an 18 per cent stake in Finland-based Amer Sports, maker of Arc’teryx and Salomon.

The company’s share price doubled over the past year, pegging Wilson’s share at roughly $5 billion. This fall, Wilson was fined $600 for signs he put up at his $83-million Vancouver estate during the 2024 B.C. election campaign, one of which called the B.C. NDP “communists.”

Venture capital

Moscow-born Leonid Boguslavsky has backed more than 200 companies worldwide through his early-stage venture capital firm, RTP Global. The company’s portfolio is increasingly geared toward AI, including software monitoring firm Datadog, delivery platform Delivery Hero and business communications player RingCentral. Other investments include firms in a wide range of industries: agriculture, health care, logistics, education, media and fintech.

As a late-career project, Boguslavsky, who started competing in Ironmans at 62, launched Supertri, a professional triathlon league that runs fast-paced, spectator-friendly, short-loop courses. The event made its Canadian debut this year, launching at the annual Toronto Triathlon Festival race. 

Financial services

In July, two private equity firms, Birch Hill Equity Partners and Brookfield Asset Management, agreed to buy the non-bank mortgage lender First National Financial for $2.9 billion. When the deal goes through, Stephen Smith, who co-founded First National in 1988, will get a large cash payment and hold on to about 19 per cent of the company.

Earlier this year, Smith merged two of his other assets—lending empire Fairstone Bank and Home Trust, a federally funded trust for homeowners—to create the country’s biggest alternative lender. He also holds a sizable stake in the online-only Equitable Bank.

Wine and beverages

This fall, the manufacturing arm of Anthony von Mandl’s alcohol empire, Mark Anthony Brewing, halted operations at its facility in Hillside, New Jersey. The production pause at the site, which makes popular beverages like White Claw and Mike’s Hard Lemonade, is a sign that even von Mandl isn’t impervious to the slowdowns in the alcohol industry, caused by a younger generation that is drinking less.

The Vancouver-born entrepreneur built his career on booze: he is credited with transforming the Okanagan into the internationally renowned wine-making region it is today and owns a slew of Canadian wineries, including Mission Hill and CedarCreek. Earlier this year he bought Surrey, B.C.’s Central City Brewers & Distillers out of creditor protection.

Hospitality

In July, construction began on a $100-million Sutton Place hotel at the Kelowna airport—the latest addition to Northland Properties’s line of Sutton Place hotels in Toronto, Vancouver, Halifax and Revelstoke Mountain Resort. Meanwhile, upgrades to the company’s Grouse Mountain Resort (known for its gruelling Grouse Grind trail) include a mountain bike park, a mountain coaster and a gondola that can shuttle a thousand people up the hill per hour.

All in, the hospitality and real estate company, run by Tom Gaglardi (above), owns 175 restaurants, including Moxies, Denny’s and Shark Club, and 63 hotels across Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Ireland. In 2011, the Gaglardis bought the struggling Dallas Stars NHL team; it’s now a US$2-billion enterprise.

Sports and entertainment

Earlier this year, Daryl Katz’s sports and entertainment company, OEG Inc., reached a memorandum of understanding with the city of Edmonton and the province of Alberta to expand the ICE entertainment district. Its first phase was a $2.5-billion, 25-acre dining, shopping and entertainment district in downtown Edmonton that surrounds Rogers Place, the arena where the Edmonton Oilers—also owned by Katz—play. This next phase will add 140,000 square feet of event space, plus a housing development with green space and 2,500 units.

Born and raised in Edmonton, Katz earned his fortune from his revival of the Rexall drugstore brand, which he built into one of Canada’s largest pharmacy groups before selling it for $2.9 billion in 2016.

Technology and film

In early April, just weeks after Donald Trump dismantled USAID, Jeff Skoll spoke at his foundation’s Skoll World Forum, an annual ideas-fest for NGOs. Skoll, who launched his Skoll Foundation with money he made from taking eBay public in 1998, was unequivocal: the U.S. cuts are callous and inhumane, and the situation is an emergency. In response, the Skoll Foundation pledged $25 million in grants, a 30 per cent increase from last year’s allocation.

In addition to chairing his foundation, Skoll oversees Capricorn Investment Group, an investment platform dedicated to supporting commercial solutions to global challenges. In 2024, he shut down his socially conscious film company, Participant Media, known for producing Wonder, The Help and Green Book. 

Retail and investing

When Ryan Cohen joined GameStop’s board as an activist investor in 2021, he became the accidental messiah of Reddit day traders who believed his interest was a sign the struggling video-game retailer could turn its luck around. The ensuing short squeeze caused the company’s stock to balloon by over 100 times its value and turned “meme stock” into a household term.

Now Cohen is CEO, and GameStop has shifted focus from video games to high-margin items like trading cards and collectibles, which made up 29 per cent of sales in the first quarter of 2025. But GameStop shares are still highly volatile, reacting less to business fundamentals and more to Cohen’s unorthodox gambles—like investing more than $500 million into Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation earlier this year. 

Hospitality and real estate

Mark Scheinberg hosted a buzzy boat party this summer, sailing for two days from Rome to Malta with dozens of celebrity guests including Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Hudson, Kendall Jenner, Tom Brady and Martha Stewart. The vessel? The Luminara, the 790-foot super-yacht that Scheinberg partly owns. He acquired his share of the boat, part of the Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection, through his firm, Mohari Hospitality, which he launched with funds from selling PokerStars, the online poker goliath he started with his father.

His company also holds stakes in Toronto’s 1 Hotel, a Four Seasons in Madrid and the Peninsula Papagayo Resort in Costa Rica. Rumour has it actress Sydney Sweeney chartered Scheinberg’s personal yacht, Synthesis, this summer for US$900,000 a week.

Software

This summer, Mark Leonard resigned from his post as president and CEO of his $83-billion software-management company, Constellation Software, citing health reasons. Leonard had spent three decades building the business through a methodical buying spree of obscure software firms, including health-care IT platforms and management systems for auto-repair shops.

Constellation now hauls in billions each quarter and trades at nosebleed prices on the TSX, sometimes above $5,000 (though that number tumbled to $4,000 following his departure). Constellation veteran Mark Miller now runs the 30-year company while Leonard’s son Damien is making moves of his own with Pinetree Capital, valued at more than $100 million.

Real estate

As one of Canada’s largest industrial landlords, Carlo Fidani’s Orlando Corporation holds more than 46 million square feet of retail, industrial and office space throughout the Greater Toronto Area. Orlando is transforming another swath of land in the region—this time, 113 hectares north of Milton zoned for industrial use, called the Halton Business Community.

Fidani also co-owns Canadian Tire Motorsport Park in Clarington, Ontario, sharing the paddock with his son, Orey, a professional driver. In September, Orlando announced it would match up to $25 million of community donations for Toronto Metropolitan University’s new medical school, which opened in Brampton this fall. 

Food processing

Michael Latifi’s Sofina Foods was in the news this year for all the wrong reasons. At least five people have died, and another 100 were sickened, from legionnaires’ disease investigators linked to bacteria found in a cooling tower at one of the company’s meat-processing facilities in London, Ontario. In response, victims have filed a proposed $86-million class-action lawsuit. This comes on the heels of a tragic accident in 2023, when an Edmonton employee died trapped in a 92° C smokehouse; in June, the company was ordered to pay a $330,000 fine, on top of reparations it had made to the family.

Despite all this, the 30-year-old meat empire continues to expand. In May, it agreed to acquire Exceldor Cooperative, a poultry producer in Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba whose brands include Butterball and Saha Halal, adding to the company’s portfolio of household names like Lilydale, Mastro and Janes. Then in June, it struck a deal to buy Northern Ireland–based Finnebrogue, a major manufacturer of pork and plant-based foods.

Grocery

Most of the Sobey family’s wealth comes from shares in Empire Company, the Nova Scotia–­based parent of grocery conglomerate Sobeys Inc., which in turn owns approximately 1,600 stores, including Sobeys, Freshco, Safeway and Farm Boy stores. Empire also has significant real estate holdings, including a 41.5 per cent interest in Crombie REIT. There currently aren’t any Sobeys in Empire’s C-suite, but five of founder J.W. Sobey’s great-grandsons sit on the board.

Meanwhile, Empire reported its strongest-ever earnings per share in the first quarter of 2025, as Canadian food prices rose, on average, at twice the rate of inflation. In September, negotiations stalled between the company and employees at a distribution warehouse in Alberta. Sobeys locked out the workers, who then went to the picket lines. 

Pictured: Paul Sobey

Natural resources

In late 2024, Murray Edwards led Canadian Natural Resources Limited, or CNRL, through a US$6.5-billion deal to acquire Chevron Canada’s Alberta oil assets. The purchase included Chevron’s stake in the Athabasca oilsands project, bringing CNRL’s ownership share to 90 per cent. It also included Chevron’s 70 per cent of the Duvernay shale formation, which has a production capacity of approximately 40,000 barrels of oil and gas a day. The deal solidifies CNRL as one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world.

Along with his stake in CNRL, Edwards has major holdings in Vancouver-based Imperial Metals, oil driller Ensign Energy and aerospace manufacturer Magellan. He’s also a co-owner of Calgary Sports and Entertainment, which includes the Calgary Flames.

Real estate and hospitality

In 2017, the Lalji family’s Larco Investments acquired Toronto’s iconic Dominion Public Building, located next to Union Station, with plans to build two towers on top of the iconic structure. It originally planned to include 22 floors of hotel space but, this year, a market assessment determined the hotel wouldn’t be viable—and so the company pivoted to building only residential units.

The Vancouver-based family’s vast hospitality and retail holdings also include Ottawa’s Fairmont Château Laurier and West Vancouver’s Park Royal Shopping Centre, as well as Sheraton, Marriott and Hilton hotel properties. In April, Larco lost an eight-year legal battle against tenants in Vancouver over the state of their building’s garbage disposal area.

Pictured: Amin Lalji

Pharmacy

The Coutu family still has a seat at the table at Metro Inc., the grocery and pharmacy giant that acquired the Jean Coutu Group in 2018 for $4.5 billion. The family held a roughly eight per cent stake at the time; now, founder Jean Coutu’s (right) sons, Michel and François (left), sit on Metro’s board, while his grandson Jean-Michel leads Metro’s pharmacy division. Coutu’s daughter, Marie-Josée, runs the Marcelle and Jean Coutu Foundation, which supports projects in Quebec and in developing countries.

Jean Coutu, now 98, studied medicine and pharmacy before opening his first discount pharmacy in Montreal in 1969—planting the seeds for one of Canada’s most recognizable retail empires. Today, there are 416 Jean Coutu Pharmacy locations in Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick. 

Investing

Legendary dealmaker Jack Cockwell owes his wealth to the steady double-digit returns of Brookfield Corporation, the investment firm born out of a merger he orchestrated almost 30 years ago. While he hasn’t been involved in management since 2002 when Bruce Flatt (No. 14) took over as CEO, the 83-year-old Cockwell still sits on the company’s board. He donated $1,750 this year—the maximum amount—to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal leadership campaign. (Carney stepped down from his role as chair at Brookfield’s sister firm, Brookfield Asset Management, to run for office.)

In late 2024, Cockwell made a $10-million donation to Toronto Metropolitan University so it could purchase more downtown real estate, bringing his contributions to the university to more than $75 million. 

Retail

Jacques D’Amours watched from the sidelines as Alimentation Couche-Tard, the company he co-founded (along with Alain Bouchard, No. 15, and two others), launched—and then rescinded—a bid to take over Japan-based Seven & i Holdings. The acquisition of 7-Eleven’s parent company would have made Alimentation Couche-Tard the biggest convenience store chain in the world.

Over 34 years, D’Amours rose in the ranks from technical services manager to vice-president of sales and operations before stepping back from day-to-day management. He retired from the board in 2023; at the time he held six per cent of Alimentation Couche-Tard, making him the firm’s second-largest individual shareholder. His daughter, Marie-Ève D’Amours, joined the company’s board in 2023.