The Philanthropists is a new Financial Post series profiling business leaders who are helping to build Canada by giving back.

There’s a tray of food in front of Hal Jackman — a quiche, cooked to perfection, with a glass of red wine to wash it down. Next to the tray is a walker that he uses to get around since his legs hurt like hell and have for about five years.

At 93, he is “an old guy now,” he said, and not so different from any other old guy in terms of the wear and tear associated with age, but he is completely different in some ways.

Granted, the

billionaire

tycoon from a Toronto establishment family who exponentially grew their fortune during his time as the boss of investment and insurance holding company E-L Financial Corp. Ltd., may not welcome as many movers-and-shakers as he once did to the spacious home in Rosedale he bought for $220,000 in 1972, but he is still Hal Jackman and capable of making headlines.

For example, he gifted $80 million in early September to the University of Toronto’s Henry N.R. Jackman Faculty of Law — $35 million of which was earmarked for scholarships — to help “propel the faculty … into a new era of global impact.”

That followed an earlier gift of $11 million that Jackman, a U of T grad, as were his father and grandfather, gave to the same faculty. There were also a pair of $15-million gifts that went toward establishing the school’s Jackman Humanities Institute a while back.

Throw in donations he has made to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canadian Opera Company, National Ballet of Canada and pretty much every museum in Toronto, along with myriad other organizations typically connected in some way to the arts or education, and his lifetime of giving rings in at approximately $200 million to date.

“Everybody should be a philanthropist, if they can be, in some way,” he said. “We can’t just rely on government to fund these things.”

Jackman once aspired to be in government, and he was thrice a Progressive Conservative candidate in his home riding of Rosedale but lost each time. He said campaigning was both fun and ultimately self-serving since his time on the hustings earmarked him as a young up-and-comer on the business scene of the 1960s and early 1970s.

“Most of the financial planners and decision-makers lived in the neighbourhood, so they got to know who the hell I was,” he said.

In other words, there is an upside to every downside, and Jackman is nothing if not strategic in his thinking.

He is a social liberal — his mother and sister championed women’s rights — with right-of-centre business sensibilities. He believes that when government steps in to fund a cause, it’s because it’s looking to buy some votes, but when an individual is the one writing the cheque, it’s because they believe in whomever or whatever they are making the cheque out to.

“Private philanthropy is good for the soul, and it is good to be generous, but when government is generous, it doesn’t make me feel good at all,” he said.

It turns out the philanthropist has much to say about a lot of things, including dynastic wealth, succession plans at E-L Financial, executives who get paid far too much and what he might have done with his life had he not followed his father’s footsteps into the family enterprise.

His mother’s family was Methodist, and charity was simply part of their gig, as was avoiding showy displays of wealth. Jackman clearly absorbed the messaging since he used to drive around in a second-hand Ford station wagon.

If he does have an expensive personal indulgence, it is for tailored suits from London’s Savile Row. However, said suits effectively pay for themselves, since he wears them — including the blue blazer he wore for lunch on a late October afternoon — for several years after purchase.

Being penny-wise in his personal spending habits, but generous with his philanthropy is a Jackman hallmark and a good jumping-off point to discuss one of his longstanding pet peeves:

executive compensation

.

“Despite the consensus among Canadians that executive salaries are too high, the gap just seems to keep getting worse,” he said. “If you ask a bank chairman why the CEO gets paid $20 million, they will look at you and say, ‘If we don’t pay our people high figures, they will leave,’ and I have never felt that was a very good reason.”

Jackman’s salary in his final year as E-L Financial CEO in 2003 was $180,000, before he passed the torch to his youngest son, Duncan, who makes just a shade more than $1 million for running a company with a $5.6-billion market capitalization and nearly 1,300 employees.

His beef about salaries comes with a recognition that he never “did without,” and that whatever he did not bring home in his paycheque, he could look forward to in terms of dividends as E-L’s largest shareholder, assuming the company performed well.

“Ultimately, it is the shareholders’ money,” he said. “I always thought having a high salary just to have a high salary wasn’t a justification for having it.”

Jackman and his wife, Maruja, an academic, have been married for 61 years. They have two boys, three girls, plus a bunch of grandchildren ranging in age from eight to 22 years old. His eldest daughter, Victoria, who runs the Hal Jackman Foundation, said there is no obvious fourth-generation Jackman to run E-L Financial on the horizon, at least not yet.

Her father’s take is that it would be nice to have another Jackman running the show, but it is not something that keeps him awake at night.

“Sooner or later, the family is going to lose interest, or someone is going to come along and offer a big price to buy the thing, or else maybe the family becomes intent on buying an island in the Azores, or a place in Lyford Cay, which is a place for people who want to spend a lot of money and get pleasure out of it, although that is not what pleasures me,” he said.

One of Jackman’s great pleasures, however, is on his front lawn: a maple tree with its leaves brilliant and red on a fall afternoon. He does not own an island, cottage or even a pile of bricks in the south of France, but he does have a 600-acre farm just north of Toronto that is filled with trails, maples and the east branch of the Humber River.

Trudging through his woods was once a joy, but the farm nourishes him in other ways. It’s where his library is housed, something that required an extension being built onto the farmhouse to accommodate it.

Jackman reads voraciously — the book of the moment being a 700-page tome on Charlemagne — and he recommends every Canadian should read these three titles: Lament for a Nation by George Grant, Nation Maker by Richard Gwyn and Two Solitudes by Hugh MacLennan.

He has not gotten around to getting a PhD in history as he imagined he would in retirement, but you don’t need one to understand that Canadian history is a useful tool for contextualizing present-day life with United States President

Donald Trump

.

“Trump doesn’t scare me the way he seems to terrify other people,” he said. “He says things he should not say, and he does some stupid things, but

tariffs

are not unique. In fact, they were one of the reasons for Confederation.”

Jackman points out that Sir John A. Macdonald’s National Policy slapped high tariffs on American imports to encourage the growth of Canadian industry and for citizens to buy Canadian 150 years before “

Buy Canada

” was even a thing.

Macdonald got the job done, but Jackman would prefer to withhold judgment on our current prime minister until further notice. He said it is “too early” to tell whether

Mark Carney

is another Macdonald or not, but the end goal should be to work toward global free trade.

“I am an old guy now, so Trump is not my problem to solve,” he said.

Jackman, as a young guy, did not have a clear grasp of what he wanted to do when he grew up. What he enjoyed at university, aside from history, political science and pulling the odd prank, was appearing in stage plays. He vividly remembers every role, including being Marc Antony in a production of Cleopatra.

Had he not become a businessperson, he might have been a stage actor. His adult children will tell you the performances did not stop during their childhoods. Their father would recite passages from his Shakespearian days to them as kids, an embarrassing dad thing they did not fully appreciate at the time.

Now the time has come for his guest to go, but not empty-handed. Jackman has a weakness for homemade oatmeal cookies and a housekeeper who bakes prolifically and makes sure that his visitor leaves the house with two giant cookies, though not before the host offers a parting thought about parting with one’s money.

“If you have money, then you should give it away, or, at least, give some of it away,” he said.

  • For sale: The unremarkable yellow house behind billionaire Jimmy Pattison’s empire
  • Mr. Philanthropy: Here’s why billionaire Peter Gilgan can’t stop giving away his money

• Email: joconnor@postmedia.com