People & Culture
De Pencier, a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and former co-owner of Canadian Geographic, died Oct. 6 at the age of 89 and is remembered as a “perpetual windmill of ideas”
“An irrepressible fountain of ideas.”
This is how Monte Hummel, President Emeritus of World Wildlife Fund Canada, described Michael de Pencier, the serial entrepreneur and environmental activist who helped kickstart several Canadian industries before he died of a stroke on October 6 at the age of 89.
It’s one thing to be an irrepressible fountain in your 20s, 30s and 40s. But in your late 80s? Michael was spinning ideas to the very end.
Last month, Michael sent me campaign advice for Kamala Harris, which followed his plan to grow more trees across Canada, which followed his plea to save old growth forests in B.C. I didn’t view this as odd because he’d been sending ideas out into the world for the 50 years I knew him and I’m sure for 20 more before that. But Michael wasn’t just a perpetual windmill of ideas. He was the man in the arena putting his ideas into action.
His best idea of all was to quit his Ph.D. studies in philosophy at the University of Michigan and, with no experience, raise some money from family and friends and venture into the magazine business. During the 1960s and 70s, he founded or purchased Toronto Life, Wedding Bells, Gardening Life, Canadian Business, Quill & Quire, Owl, Chickadee, the Where visitor guides and many more.
It’s a testament to the durability of his ideas that, at a time when magazines are in decline, all of these titles are alive today.
For a number of years, Michael was also part-owner of Canadian Geographic. The magazine was first published in May 1930, a year after the founding of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Both the Society and the magazine were created to popularize Canadian geography. By the mid-90s, the Society decided to outsource its magazine, and in 1995, Michael’s Key Publishers formed a joint venture with the RCGS to publish the magazine, with Key bringing its advertising and merchandising skills, and the RCGS its editorial and storytelling expertise. The partnership ended in 2006.
Michael was exemplary in all kinds of ways. And by ‘exemplary,’ I mean we can benefit from his example.
It wasn’t just the fact that he was an environmentalist at a time when getting people to stop throwing garbage out the car window was a great victory for the movement. Or a publisher when Canada didn’t really have a book publishing or magazine industry. Or a sustainable investor when that wasn’t even a phrase anyone used. He was a booster who believed in the power of a good idea, especially if it hadn’t been tried before.
When he was 67, he founded InvestEco Capital, Canada’s first investment management firm dedicated to supporting sustainable food and agricultural companies. As one of its directors, Andrew Heintzman, noted in a LinkedIn post on Michael’s passing: “…We started working together on a delightfully quirky (but also novel and important) idea to found an investment firm that would promote the goals of sustainability. Michael provided his vision, entrepreneurial hutzpah, strategic insights and bottomless enthusiasm and support for this project. Without that it would never have been possible. Not in a million years. And he believed in me, that I could help to move this project forward despite my obvious deficiencies in expertise in the financial sector.”
Let’s not forget that 20 years earlier, Michael became a leading Canadian book publisher by partnering to form Key Porter Books, Maple Tree Press and Greey de Pencier books. And an enduring retailer with the Yonge/Summerhill food stores and The Perfect Mix in Toronto.
Sustainable Canadian investments. Canadian magazines. Canadian books. Canadian retail. It’s hard to think of any riskier places to make your living. But Michael wasn’t risk-averse. He seemed risk-oblivious, and because he was lavish about people and cautious about money, it worked.
Indeed, he was a first-stage rocket for everything that caught his gaze. He helped kickstart the National Magazine Awards and the Toronto Arts Awards, and he injected new ideas and energy into Women’s College Hospital, OCAD University (then the Ontario College of Art), the Shaw Festival and the World Wildlife Fund, both of which he chaired. When he retired from the WWF, Monte Hummel declared that Michael had “exhausted him.”
In this tired and cynical age, Michael was that rarest of people: a straight-up optimist.
But there’s another quality Michael had that all of us can capitalize on today.
He would make time in his calendar and space in his brain not only to see you, but to hear you. I don’t know how he found the time, but he would see legions of people for coffee, including the sons, daughters, boyfriends, girlfriends and even vague and distant friends of his work colleagues and vast circle of personal friends.
The number of busy successful senior entrepreneurs who do this today is approximately zero. And yet, Michael seemed to have all the time in the world for me when I approached him in my 20s with an idea that I’ve forgotten now, but clearly wasn’t a world beater. No matter. He liked my enthusiasm.
So, decades later, when young people came to see me for coffee and career advice, I would send the promising ones on to Michael, certain that he would see them. He had enough interests, companies and connections, that he would occasionally offer them a job or contract on the spot. Clearly, he was a talent-spotter from an early age.
Being an enthusiast for life, he was naturally attracted to other enthusiasts and drew them into his ambit. His companies hummed with positive energy.
In this tired and cynical age, Michael was that rarest of people: a straight-up optimist.
His long-time CFO Michael Rea noted that “he operated from a moral base and was always interested in the long-term effect of what he was working on. Hence his pivot to planting trees in his later years.”
As his obituary in the Globe and Mail put it: “He woke up every day wanting to make the world a better place. With his death, we have lost a smooth skater, a sure paddler, a thoughtful mentor, an obsessive tree planter, a world-class reveler. He was a quiet, courageous, builder of vital, just and beautiful realms that will outlast him far into the future.”
A Celebration of Life will be held at 11 a.m. on November 5, 2024, at Koerner Hall, 273 Bloor Street West in Toronto.
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