Jim Pattison’s $75 million donation to St. Paul’s Hospital on Tuesday has the power to “stop you in your tracks,” says the president and the CEO of the Vancouver Foundation.
But it’s also part of donors' growing preference to not wait until they’re gone to make their benevolence known.
“They’re not waiting until it’s in their will,” says Kevin McCort. “If they worked hard for their money they want to enjoy giving it away.”
B.C. billionaire Jim Pattison donates $75m for medical centrehttps://t.co/mhdsEIje6G pic.twitter.com/mCELdNRIPw
— BusinessInVancouver (@BIVnews) March 28, 2017
In 2015, Stats Can says 371,000 Vancouverites made a charitable donation, up one per cent from the year before. The median gift was $450. When you consider that a total of $850 million was donated, that’s a lot of relatively small contributions with a few very big ones added in.
“From our experience we are regularly seeing people establish fairly big funds,” McCort says. Unlike the small donations, which come from people’s income, the larger donations come from the liquidity of assets.
“There’s a steady increase in the number of asset gifts and their value,” he says. “It’s pretty generational.”
Pattison’s donation on Tuesday is Canada’s largest donation made by a private individual to a single medical facility.
Pattison’s business dealings reach into many corners of the economy. Canadian Business puts the 88-year-old entrepreneur as number 10 on its richest Canadian list. He’s thought to be worth $5.74 billion.
Pattison says he donated the money to the Jim Pattison Medical Centre because St. Paul’s “has been putting people first in our community for more than 120 years.” The centre “will build on St. Paul’s Hospital’s history of serving British Columbians with excellence and compassion, and enable close collaboration among clinicians and researchers to collectively drive new standards in health care and treatment for all British Columbians.”
The new hospital is expected to cost $1.2 billion by the time it opens in 2023. The provincial government has committed $500 million. Providence Health Care will leverage some of its land — including the current St. Paul’s site — to cover the bulk of the remaining $700.
McCort says there’s an ongoing debate in the United States about naming rights on projects which will be primarily funded by taxpayers’ dollars. “It’s an interesting challenge to honour the gift but acknowledge that taxpayers are paying for [the facility.]”
The St. Paul’s Foundation says the centre will take over the entire 18.4-acre site on Station Street in the False Creek Flats. “The Jim Pattison Medical Centre will include St. Paul’s Hospital with its associated acute-and-critical-care programs; the provincial Heart Centre, Centre for Heart Lung Innovation, the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS and other centres of excellence in health care and research; primary care and specialized outpatient clinics; the PHC Research Institute; research facilities; and life sciences industry partners.”
