Eleanor and Wayne Chiu arrived in Canada from Hong Kong in 1982 and built one of Calgary’s largest home building companies together. In 2022 the Southern Alberta Business Hall of Fame inducted the couple jointly, recognizing a marriage that has doubled as a business partnership for four decades.
Building Trico Together
Wayne Chiu founded Trico Homes and leads the Trico Group of Companies as its Founder and CEO. A Mechanical Engineering graduate from the University of Manitoba and a qualified master builder, he remains active in strategic land development and investment. Eleanor, a Fellow Chartered Professional Accountant, served as the group’s CFO, and together they grew Trico into one of Calgary’s top five builders. Under their leadership, Trico has achieved Platinum status as a Best Managed Company, earned recognition as a Best Place to Work in Canada, and became a B-Corp certified company in North America, a designation that measures a company’s social and environmental performance alongside its profitability.
The Trico Charitable Foundation
In 2008, Eleanor and Wayne founded the Trico Charitable Foundation to combine their interest in entrepreneurship with an awareness of the need for creative solutions to sustain the non-profit sector. The Foundation has become the couple’s shared vehicle for the idea both of them describe as doing well by doing good, applying business thinking to problems that charities and non-profits are often left to solve with far fewer resources than a company like Trico has at hand.
Education, Inclusion, and Newcomer Support
Eleanor has served on the Board of Governors of Mount Royal University for more than six years and continues on its Dean’s Advisory Committee, alongside board work with the Trico Charitable Foundation, the Telus Community Board in Calgary, Sharc Energy System, and Openhouse.AI. As immigrants themselves, both Eleanor and Wayne have made newcomer support a consistent theme of their giving. Eleanor is a founding board member and financial supporter of Windmill Microlending, formerly the Immigrant Access Fund, which provides microloans to immigrants and refugees pursuing Canadian licensing or training, and Trico’s own workforce includes people from more than 26 different ethnic origins. In 2014, Bow Valley College named the Chiu School of Business in recognition of the family’s support, and in 2016 the couple received the CASE Benefactor Award from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Wayne’s giving also helped establish Mount Royal University’s Roderick H. Mah Centre for Continuous Learning, supported SAIT’s Trades and Technology Complex, and backed the University of Calgary’s Chiu Family and AstraZeneca Chair in Cardiovascular Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.
Recognition for Two Careers Built Side by Side
Wayne was named a Member of the Order of Canada and an appointee of the Alberta Order of Excellence, and received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee and Alberta Centennial medals, an Immigrant of Distinction Award, the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and recognition as one of Canada’s Most Admired CEOs. Eleanor was named a Fellow by the Chartered Professional Accountants for her contribution to the profession and the community, and received the Calgary Influential Women in Business Award. In 2018, the couple jointly received the Senior Executive of the Year Award from the Canadian Institute of Diversity and Inclusion. Their 2022 induction into the Southern Alberta Business Hall of Fame stands as a joint honour for what has been, from the start, a shared career.
A Story the Hall of Fame Rarely Gets to Tell Twice
Most Southern Alberta Business Hall of Fame laureates are honoured as individuals. Eleanor and Wayne Chiu are one of the few couples inducted together, and the joint recognition fits a career that has genuinely been built as a partnership from the start, from raising Trico into one of Calgary’s top builders to founding the Trico Charitable Foundation as a shared project rather than a personal legacy for either of them alone. Their story also carries a particular resonance in Calgary, a city built in large part by immigrants who arrived with little and stayed to build companies, foundations, and university buildings that carry their names decades later.
What stands out across both of their individual records is how consistently the same causes reappear, newcomer support, post-secondary education, and the idea that a for-profit company can build charitable capacity into its own operations rather than treating giving as an afterthought. That consistency, sustained across two careers and more than forty years since they arrived in Canada, is a large part of why the Southern Alberta Business Hall of Fame chose to honour Eleanor and Wayne Chiu together rather than apart.
What does it look like when a marriage, a business partnership, and a shared charitable mission all grow together for four decades in Calgary?
