In 1994, a geologist who had spent his working life in Alberta oil and gas took on the job of co-chairing a fundraising campaign with a target of $50 million for health care in Calgary. The campaign closed in 1997. Harley Hotchkiss, born in Tillsonburg, Ontario in 1927 and trained in geology at Michigan State University, had by then already helped buy a National Hockey League franchise and bring it to Calgary. The money he raised and the money he gave came out of petroleum. What both bought was permanent.
Key facts
- The Government of Alberta’s Alberta Order of Excellence citation for Harley Hotchkiss records that he co-chaired the Partners in Health Campaign from 1994 to 1997, a $50-million fundraising project supporting health-related initiatives in the Calgary area.
- The Hotchkiss Brain Institute states that the institute launched in October 2004 at the University of Calgary under founding director Dr. Samuel Weiss.
- The Hotchkiss Brain Institute’s twentieth anniversary record states that Harley and Rebecca Hotchkiss committed $39 million to a University of Calgary endowment fund in 2009.
- The Office of the Secretary to the Governor General records that Harley Norman Hotchkiss was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada on 23 October 1997 and promoted to Companion on 25 May 2009.
- The University of Lethbridge announced on 13 March 2013 a $1-million legacy gift from Harley Hotchkiss endowing brain research at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience.
What the Partners in Health campaign did between 1994 and 1997
The Government of Alberta’s citation for his Alberta Order of Excellence describes the work as “a $50-million fundraising project to support health-related initiatives in the Calgary area.” That sentence is easy to read past. Three years of labour sit inside it. A campaign of that size is not a cheque written once and photographed; it is a long sequence of conversations in which a man who has already committed his own money asks other people to commit theirs, and then asks a second time when the first answer is no.
By our arithmetic from his July 1927 birth date, Hotchkiss turned 67 during the campaign’s first year and 70 during its last. He was not building a reputation at that age. He already had one, and he spent it.
The same citation records a $5-million commitment by the Flames owners toward the International Hockey Centre for Excellence in Calgary. That is the pattern in miniature. Ownership of a sports club was treated as an obligation that produced a building, rather than as an asset that produced a return.
Why an endowment outlasts a name on a building
The Hotchkiss Brain Institute launched in October 2004 under founding director Dr. Samuel Weiss. Five years later, in 2009, Harley and Rebecca Hotchkiss committed $39 million to its endowment fund.
An endowment is a machine for spending only the return. The capital stays where it is. A commitment of $39 million in 2009 does not become $39 million of salaries in 2010; it becomes a smaller annual sum that arrives every year afterward without anyone having to decide again. That is the difference between a gift and an institution. A gift is an event. An endowment is a standing instruction to the future.
Records disagree on the size of the original 2004 gift, and they should not be blended. A laboratory trade publication reporting the 2009 endowment put the founding contribution at $10 million. Alberta Health Services, writing in 2011, recorded a personal donation of $15 million to what was then the Calgary Brain Institute. The University of Calgary, marking Rebecca Hotchkiss’s death, put the couple’s total lifetime contribution to research and education at the university at more than $47 million. Three institutions measured three different things across different spans of years. Anyone who averages them is inventing a number.
What this pattern asks of Alberta money now
From a geology degree in 1951 to a $39-million endowment commitment in 2009 is 58 years by our count. The franchise purchase in 1980 and the institute’s launch in 2004 sit 24 years apart, again by our count. Nothing in that sequence was fast. A man found hydrocarbons and sold them. He bought into a hockey team. He spent three years asking his neighbours for money. His name went onto a research institute only at the point where the endowment standing behind it was large enough to outlive him.
Alberta discusses its resource wealth almost entirely as a question of how much the province is permitted to keep. That is a real question and it has a real answer. It is also the smaller of the two questions. The larger one is what the money becomes after it is kept, and whether anything built with it will still be standing when the field that paid for it is depleted and capped.
This province has no shortage of people who have made serious money in oil and gas. What it has fewer of are institutions carrying a family name for a reason other than a naming agreement with a term and an expiry date. A name on a stadium is rented. A name on an endowed research institute has capital behind it that answers to a purpose rather than to a marketing department.
In March 2013, nearly two years after his death, the University of Lethbridge announced a $1-million legacy gift from Hotchkiss endowing brain research at its Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience, along with a speaker series carrying his name. The instruction was written while he was alive. The money arrived when he was not. That is the whole argument in one transaction, and it is the part most easily forgotten, because the people who benefit from an endowment rarely learn whose signature set it running.
He died at his home in Calgary on 22 June 2011, at 83. The Order of Canada had made him an Officer in October 1997 and promoted him to Companion in May 2009. The Hockey Hall of Fame took him in as a builder in 2006, which is the correct word and was meant more literally than the category usually intends.
Alberta does not need more people who make money here. It needs more people who arrange, in advance and in writing, for that money to keep working after they have stopped.
Institutions are not built by people who expect to see them finished.
