Stephen A. Jarislowsky

Stephen A. Jarislowsky died on 8 October 2026 at the age of 101. His family and the Jarislowsky Foundation announced the death in Montreal that afternoon and asked that their privacy be respected. No cause of death was made public.

He is survived by his wife, Gail; his son Michael; his daughter Alexandra, who worked in the investment business at Jarislowsky Fraser; and his daughter Marika, who serves on the board of the Jarislowsky Foundation. Another son, Stephen, died in 2014 at the age of 63. Tributes followed from former governor general David Johnston and from business and university colleagues across Canada.

Stephen A. Jarislowsky was born in Berlin on 9 September 1925 to Jewish parents, Kaethe (nee Gassmann) and Alfred Jarislowsky, an industrialist and merchant banker. His father died of scarlet fever when Stephen was four. The children were sent to live near relatives in Amsterdam and later moved to Paris with their mother, who remarried a Frenchman.

After Germany invaded France in 1940 the family fled again. Jarislowsky reached the United States in 1941, attended school in North Carolina, and studied mechanical engineering at Cornell University. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1944, he was sent to occupied Japan in 1945 for counter-intelligence work. He later studied at the University of Chicago and completed an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1949.

Jarislowsky joined Alcan Aluminum, which posted him to Montreal for three years. After a short return to the United States he settled permanently in Montreal and in 1955 founded Jarislowsky, Fraser and Company. The firm began as an investment research boutique, then moved into advice and pension fund management in the 1960s. It became one of Canada's leading independent asset managers, with roughly Can$40 billion under management when Bank of Nova Scotia bought it in 2018 for $950 million.

Jarislowsky described his approach as conservative and long term. He was equally known for public fights over corporate governance: criticising excessive executive pay, opposing deals he thought unfair to ordinary shareholders, and insisting that directors serve all investors rather than management cronies. In 2002 he and Claude Lamoureux founded the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance. He stepped back as chief executive in 2012 but remained chairman and kept personal client accounts into his nineties.

Jarislowsky married Gail and lived for more than fifty years in the same house in Westmount, Montreal. He collected art, supported music and museums, and said he still washed the dishes every night. Forbes estimated his net worth in the billions; he told interviewers he had never wanted yachts or private jets and that people of means should fund excellence rather than the ordinary.

He and Gail endowed research chairs and institutes across Canada. He was closely associated with Concordia, McGill and many other universities, and with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. His public politics included strong opposition to Quebec separatism in the 1990s and a lasting emphasis on democratic institutions shaped by his childhood under Nazism.

Jarislowsky left two linked legacies: a major Canadian investment firm built on long-term stewardship, and a philanthropic network of more than fifty endowed chairs and programmes in governance, medicine, science, the arts and the environment. The Canadian Coalition for Good Governance remains a standing voice for institutional investors.

He was a Companion of the Order of Canada and a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec, and held honorary degrees from twenty universities. Obituarists often called him Canada's Warren Buffett, but colleagues more often stressed his insistence that trust and ethics in business were practical duties, not slogans.