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philanthropy

It took four words and four days to land one of the biggest donations in the history of Canada's largest hospital network.

It was May 13, 2010, and Peter Munk, the 84-year-old chair of Barrick Gold, had just completed a tour of his namesake cardiac centre at Toronto General Hospital. As medical director Barry Rubin explained the research frontiers he hoped to conquer in the coming decade, Mr. Munk had just one question.

"How can I help?"

Within four days, Dr. Rubin had an answer.

On Thursday, the two men will make the answer public: an $18-million donation to fund four new heart study centres aimed at attracting the calibre of medical brains Canada has often lost to the United States and Europe.

"Just to put this in perspective, we usually get one donor to fund one chair and everybody's happy," Dr. Rubin said. "This funds a total of four centres of excellence and five chairs. This is unprecedented."

The donation builds on the $6-million that Mr. Munk and his wife, Melanie, put down to help launch the centre in 1997 and the $35-million they contributed toward new diagnostic equipment in 2006.

Where Mr. Munk's previous donations to the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre have focused on erecting buildings and buying tools, this one is all about luring people.

Over the next 10 years, the centre will build four centres of excellence devoted to cardiac valve disease, multinational clinical trials, personalized molecular medicine and aortic diseases.

As an example of what the centre hopes to accomplish, Dr. Rubin points to Tirone David, a Toronto-based cardiac surgeon of such renown that he's had procedures named after him. Thanks to Mr. Munk's support for cutting-edge research, Dr. David will head up the cardiac valve disease unit rather than be lured away to the higher pay of an American health centre.

"Many of the star doctors in the United States, in Switzerland, in France have been taken away from us," Mr. Munk said. "With meaningful funds we can attract back to Canada the elite of the profession. We cannot pay what the Mayo Clinic … can, but we can give them an endowment that generates 'X' dollars a year to do research."

Mr. Munk said his approach to giving mirrors his approach to business. The founder and chair of Barrick Gold made his fortune zeroing in largely on a single commodity and select other core businesses. For his philanthropy, he has focused mainly on the cardiac centre and the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs.

"I reached a point in my career where I felt comfortable in my personal financial conditions and wanted to give money I made back to Canada," said Mr. Munk, who never misses a day of work at the company he founded, now valued at $50-billion with 25 gold mines across five continents. "Our country is blessed with 1,000 good causes, but I tried to focus on one, a little like I did in business."

Both his father and grandfather died of heart disease at Toronto General. After acquainting himself with staff and management at the hospital, he decided to make the hospital his biggest philanthropic priority.

"While our government is very generous, they simply provide standard funds to maintain a functioning hospital, as they should," he said. "For extracurricular activities, for attracting international talent, for conducting research, funds are scarce."

He only laughs at Dr. Rubin's attempt to credit him with the centre's success. "He is wrong," Mr. Munk said. "They may be great doctors, but this shows they are young and inexperienced. The credit goes 100 per cent to them."

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