Murray McCann has spent more than fifty years building companies, and nearly as long giving away what they earned. In 2021, the Government of Alberta named him to the Alberta Order of Excellence, an honour that recognizes a career built less on the deals he closed than on the hospices, memorials and tiny home villages he helped fund with the proceeds. His official Alberta Order of Excellence profile traces a story that started in Ottawa and ended up wholly devoted to Alberta.
A Boyhood Lesson in Giving
James Murray McCann was born in Ottawa on December 31, 1938, the second of six children. His family moved to Calgary when he was 13, drawn by the growing oil industry, and a few years later his father died unexpectedly, leaving his mother to raise five children still at home. She started a small business that soon thrived, an example of resourcefulness Murray never forgot. He also remembers a bitterly cold February day when his father took off the overcoat the family had given him for Christmas and handed it to a shivering stranger on the street. Murray has said no act of unconditional love has affected him more than the one he witnessed that winter afternoon.
From the Seminary to Thirty-Two Companies
After high school, Murray enrolled at a seminary in Edmonton intending to become a priest, but soon realized the calling was not his. On his mother’s suggestion he articled at an accounting firm, earned his Chartered Accountant designation, and worked as a corporate tax assessor before moving into the oil patch as a comptroller. At 28, with five children at home, he launched his own accounting firm. A merger three years later gave him the capital to buy his first operating company, the start of a run that would see him add, grow and eventually sell 32 more businesses across Canada, the United States, China, India and Malaysia. Those companies, spanning plumbing and heating, mining, oil and gas and building materials, today employ more than 2,500 people.
Field of Crosses and Homes for Heroes
In 2008, Murray was moved by a small memorial of 23 white crosses in Menlo, Georgia, honouring the town’s fallen soldiers. The following year, the first Field of Crosses stood along Calgary’s Memorial Drive, each cross bearing the name, rank, age and date of death of a service member from southern Alberta. More than 20,000 people now visit the display each November, walking among over 3,600 crosses, and Murray eventually donated the memorial to the public as a registered charity. After learning that thousands of veterans across Canada were living without housing, he founded the Homes For Heroes Foundation, which pairs tiny home villages with support services from The Mustard Seed. The first village opened in Calgary in 2019, with another following in Edmonton in 2021.
A Career Measured in Community
Murray’s giving reaches well beyond those two projects. He donated the former Basilian Fathers’ Residence overlooking downtown Calgary to become Rosedale Hospice, funded a school and orphanage in Zambia through his family foundation, and has supported Betty’s Run for ALS for more than 25 years. His contributions were recognized with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012, a Meritorious Service Medal in 2016, Calgary’s Citizen of the Year honour in 2017 and an honorary Bachelor of Nursing degree from Mount Royal University in 2018. Through it all, he has credited Alberta’s entrepreneurial spirit as the engine behind everything he built and everything he gave away.
Murray’s giving has also reached well past Alberta’s borders. As a patron of the arts of the Vatican Museum, he has helped fund the restoration of historic works while encouraging the institution to build a modern web presence. In Zambia, his family foundation partnered with World Vision to build a student residence and vocational centre in Namuso, later funding a girls’ residence dedicated to his late wife Myrna and covering staff salaries at the school and orphanage for a decade. Closer to home, he purchased the former Basilian Fathers’ Residence overlooking downtown Calgary in 1995 and donated it to become Rosedale Hospice, where more than 2,000 patients have since received end-of-life care. Murray and his wife Carol have seven children, 19 grandchildren and one great-granddaughter, dividing their time between Calgary and Rome, Georgia.
What would it look like if more of us treated giving back as seriously as we treat building something in the first place?
