Michael Koerner chats with banquet attendees before accepting the Edmund C. Bovey Award for philanthropic leadership at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in 2006.Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail
Venture capitalist Michael Milan Koerner, one of Canada’s most inventive philanthropists, backed bold innovations in the arts, education and health sciences. His investments in “great people [and] great ideas” resulted in artistic masterpieces and medical breakthroughs. His passion for the causes he supported was legendary.
Mr. Koerner died on April 15 at the age of 97. The next generation continues the work of the family charitable foundation, in consultation with Mr. Koerner’s wife of 74 years, Sonja Novak Koerner.
The accolades were fond and effusive.
“Throughout his life, Michael approached philanthropy with an entrepreneurial spirit, seeking not only to give, but to maximize impact,” said Timothy Price, chair of the board at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. “He believed in identifying excellence, investing early and bringing others along. Nowhere was this philosophy more powerfully realized that at the Royal Conservatory.”
As a musician himself, Mr. Koerner delighted in his role as inaugural chancellor at the Conservatory and was enormously proud of its world-class concert venue, Koerner Hall, which he helped create, his family said.
“I just felt this had the potential of being a great hall,” Mr. Koerner said in a 2014 video produced by The Walrus. The architect is brilliant, he recalled telling the Conservatory when the concert hall was at the design stage, “but you [also] need a good acoustician.” So he and Ms. Koerner undertook to find one. They tracked down acoustician Bob Essert in Lucerne, Switzerland, and recruited him to collaborate with architect Marianne McKenna.
The design and acoustics were so spectacular, Mr. Koerner said, that cellist Yo-Yo Ma told him it was one of the best concert halls of its size he had ever played in. “That coming from Yo-Yo was quite a statement.”
Mr. Koerner was the inaugural chancellor of the Royal Conservatory of Music.Christina Gapic/ Royal Conservatory of Music/Supplied
In business, Mr. Koerner made his fortune as a venture capitalist. He applied those same entrepreneurial skills to philanthropy. “I try to locate great people, great ideas and take intelligent risks. … I also wanted to stay close to the projects that I was involved in,” he said in The Walrus video.
In the medical field, Mr. Koerner’s creative spark led to groundbreaking advances in mental health and hearing-loss research.
Mr. Koerner declined a request to participate in a building campaign at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto in 2010, but made a counterproposal: “Who is your best young research scientist and how can we help him or her?” This led to the establishment of a program to invest in new scientists studying mental illness. The first recipient of this support, psychiatrist Aristotle Voineskos, is now the hospital’s senior vice-president of research and science.
Similarly, at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, the Koerners donated the initial funding to establish Canada’s first hearing regeneration laboratory. This enabled the hospital to lure scientist Alain Dabdoub from his University of California lab in 2012. Internationally recognized for his advancements in the field of inner-ear research, Dr. Dabdoub was recently appointed as the inaugural Koerner Chair in Hearing and Balance Regeneration at the University of Toronto.
“Michael Koerner said one of the driving forces of his family’s philanthropy was to alleviate suffering. Michael and his wife, Sonja, recognized hearing loss as quiet suffering that can be isolating, cumulative and permanent,” said Kelly Cole, president and chief executive officer of Sunnybrook Foundation. “They saw an opportunity to change that and gave Sunnybrook the resources and scientific talent to pursue entirely new frontiers.”
Mr. Koerner supported musicians, artists and composers by commissioning their work. He and Ms. Koerner served on multiple different not-for-profit boards and had a close association with the Art Gallery of Ontario, where Mr. Koerner served as a long-standing trustee. Ms. Koerner had a close association with Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, where she served on the board for several years. In 2003, they established an artist-in-residence program at Queen’s University, giving fine art students direct access to some of Canada’s most celebrated artists. Rebecca Belmore, an interdisciplinary Anishinaabekwe artist, kicked off the initiative, which sponsors a different artist every year.
Growing up in Vancouver, young Michael was steeped in music and art. As a participant in the Royal Conservatory of Music’s national education program, he took lessons on an upright grand piano. His instructor’s artist friend, Lawren Harris, dropped in regularly to hear the recitals. In later life, Mr. Koerner and Mr. Harris discussed the pleasure and the power of expressing oneself through art.
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Michael Koerner was born in Prague on Aug. 26, 1928, the second son of lumber industrialist Walter Koerner and his wife Marianne Koerner (née Hikl), who were Jewish. They fled their homeland in 1937 in advance of Germany’s occupation of what was then Czechoslovakia, leaving all their assets behind. After two years in England, the extended Koerner family started anew in Vancouver, with Walter and his brothers applying their previously successful processing methods to establish themselves as major players in the British Columbia lumber industry. Ingenuity was in the Koerners’ DNA.
Michael went on to get a degree in chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949, followed by an MBA from Harvard University in 1952. While in Boston, Mr. Koerner courted and married Peruvian-born Sonja Novak, a graduate of Wellesley College. They subsequently moved to Toronto where they settled, stayed and raised daughters Alexandra, Jacqueline and Michelle.
In a short National Film Board documentary produced in 2015, Jaqueline said she and her sisters would sit on the stairs at night and listen to their father play the harpsichord before bedtime. He loved his keyboards.
“When we used to summer in Cape Cod,” she said, “we would take our bicycles and my father’s clavichord with us because, of course, one takes a clavichord on vacation.”
Mr. Koerner leaves his wife, Sonja, daughters Jacqueline and Michelle Koerner, his sons-in-law, 12 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his brother Nicholas and daughter Alexandra Koerner Yeo.
When the Koerners first moved to Toronto, he found a job that was well-paid but unstimulating, so he and some friends started a small side business that set him on the path to becoming an entrepreneur. In 1958, Mr. Koerner started his own venture capital firm, Canada Overseas Investments Ltd., which invested in what he called “innovative low-tech businesses” such as cable television and integrated mini steel mills.
As his venture capital business flourished, Mr. Koerner was also in demand as a corporate director. His chemical engineering degree and MBA were a good fit for the energy sector. In 1982, Mr. Koerner was appointed board chair of Suncor Inc., as part the transition toward majority Canadian ownership and control of the oil sands developer. He also served on the boards of CAE Inc., Finning International Inc., Pratt & Whitney, Bata Corp. and JPMorgan Chase Canada.
Mr. Koerner was named a member of the Order of Canada in 1984 for his philanthropic work and, in 2015, won the Governor-General’s award for voluntarism in the performing arts.
Mr. Koerner is pictured with artwork by the Canadian painter David Urban in 2006.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
After 25 years at the helm of Canada Overseas Investments, Mr. Koerner said his business had done well enough that he felt “there was something to give back to society, and I wanted to do that.” The Michael and Sonja Koerner Charitable Foundation was formed in 1986.
Mr. Koerner was a visionary, always looking at the big picture, Mr. Price said, adding that he could speak knowledgeably on almost any topic.
“He was a wonderful gentleman, extraordinary, I would say. There were not many people I could call a Renaissance man, but he certainly covered all the bases.”
At Sunnybrook and CAMH, Mr. Koerner’s early investments in hearing regeneration and mental health accelerated the pace of research and unlocked funding from other sources.
“I love the idea of venture philanthropy in the sense that … you really want to catalyze breakthroughs,” Dr. Voineskos said.
Mr. Koerner initially turned to CAMH because he was interested in supporting emerging research and fresh ideas, said Dr. Voineskos, who was still relatively unproven at the time. The support he received from the Koerner Foundation, supplemented by other grants, “allowed me to push ahead quickly and make some important contributions to what we know about the brain and some of the brain disorders that we deal with, things like schizophrenia and dementia,” Dr. Voineskos said.
In 2023, the family foundation followed up with a landmark donation to establish an educational program for researchers in training. The Koerner Centre for Research training now has more than 700 trainees a year from the undergraduate level to the postdoctoral level.
“It’s been game-changing for the organization in terms of the kind of talent we can bring and the talent we can grow … and I think it really speaks to the vision that Michael had,” Dr. Voineskos said.
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At Sunnybrook, Dr. Dabdoub says hearing loss and balance disorders are expected to double in the next two decades because of the aging population. Currently, there are no approved biological treatments. His work aims to change that by advancing diagnostics, regenerative therapies and treatment options.
Speaking to impact, Dr. Dabdoub said Michael Koerner’s support enabled researchers to take “intelligent risks,” build on current knowledge and move in new directions.
During the design stage of Koerner Hall, which opened in 2009, Mr. Koerner donated his extensive collection of antique musical instruments. He felt they should be accessible to the Conservatory’s performers and students, to be played and enjoyed.
Prior to the transfer of his instruments to the promenade and atrium, there were several meetings at the Koerner home to finalize the logistics of how to transport and display them.
The exhibition catalogue accompanying the collection included this recollection from the architect, Ms. McKenna: “At each meeting, Michael shed his more formal manner and took us on a narrative journey, sharing the tales of how he had found and acquired these remarkable objects, which ranged from the Han dynasty in circa 200 B.C. China, through medieval times, to the Renaissance in Italy, and 18th and 19th century London.
“On the day that the large instruments were delivered for installation in the atrium of the TELUS Centre, Michael was there. He climbed into the large cases which housed the large instruments and, as each piece was installed on its pedestal, he stepped up and played each one – an elegant gesture of farewell.”
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