Past Recipients

Politician and lawyer Edward Blake was the second premier of Ontario and, later, the leader of Liberal Party of Canada. Recruited into politics by George Brown, he won the 1871 provincial election, establishing a Liberal dynasty that ruled Ontario for more than 30 years. He later became leader of the federal Liberal Party, and eventually resigned to sit in the British House of Commons as an Irish Nationalist Member of Parliament. Upon his retirement, Blake returned to Canada to serve the University of Toronto as senator and chancellor.

Leading public intellectual and historian Michael Bliss provides insight into the politics and events that shape Canadian life. He is the award-winning author of 14 books on business, politics and medicine for both scholarly and popular audiences. He retired from U of T’s Department of History in 2006 after a 38-year career. During his tenure, he earned the elite rank of University Professor, an honour conferred upon less than two per cent of tenured faculty.

Investment magnate Mark Bonham cut his teeth at UC and the London School of Economics. The founder of BPI Mutual Funds and Strategic Value Corporation, he is an expert in analyzing the equities of individual companies. He is also an avid supporter of Casey House, the Inside-Out Film Festival and the University of Toronto. In 2006, he endowed the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at University College, a hub for leading-edge teaching, research and advocacy in sexuality. He is a recipient of U of T’s Arbor Award.

Lawyer, author and civil libertarian Alan Borovoy is one of Canada’s most vociferous defenders of human rights. For more than four decades, he acted as general counsel and chief spokesperson for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Borovoy has been a visiting professor at Dalhousie, Toronto, Windsor and York universities and currently holds four honorary doctorates. He has been recognized with the Award for the Advancement of Intellectual Freedom in Canada and an inscription in the Honour Roll of the Aboriginal People's Treaty Number 3.

Lawyer Leonard Braithwaite is the first Black Canadian to be elected to a provincial legislature. Born in Toronto to West Indian immigrants and raised during the Great Depression, Braithwaite served overseas with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. In 1963, he was elected to the Ontario Legislature as a Liberal member, where he served as critic of labour and welfare, advocated for the admission of female pages and helped revoke a regulation that had allowed for racial segregation in schools. He has been recognized with numerous awards, including U of T’s Chancellor’s Award and the Black Alumni Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Lawyer and real estate tycoon Rudolph Bratty has built communities across the Greater Toronto Area. He is the founder of Bratty & Partners LLP, a law firm specializing in real estate, development,and planning. As chair and chief executive officer of The Remington Group, he is also a real estate developer whose projects have changed the landscape of the city. Bratty has been honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Building Industry and Land Development Association, as well as a star on the Italian Walk of Fame on College Street in Toronto’s Little Italy.

Religious historian Wilfred Cantwell Smith was an early and influential proponent of interfaith dialogue. An expert in oriental languages, he founded the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University and the Department of Comparative Religion at Dalhousie. He was best known for arguing that the term religion, before the seventeenth century, meant a quality of piety common among the faithful from various traditions, and that its modern definition as a set of beliefs arose from conceptual slippage.

Harvard astronomy professor David Charbonneau searches for Earth-like planets that can sustain life beyond our solar system. He the recipient of the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, the Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences and the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, honouring an outstanding young scientist or engineer. In 2007, he was named Scientist of the Year by Discover Magazine. Currently, he is working on NASA- and National Science Foundation-funded projects that aim to detect distant planets capable of supporting life.

The former president and chief executive officer of TD Bank Financial Group, Ed Clark is one the most influential figures in the financial industry in Canada. Under his leadership, TD Canada Trust grew into the nation’s second-biggest bank by assets. For his extraordinary vision, Clark has been honoured with the Egale Leadership Award for support of LGBT communities, as well as the Catalyst Canada Honour for women’s advancement. Clark was named Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year in 2010, followed by the Ivey Business Leader Award in 2011 and an appearance on Barron’s prestigious annual list of the world’s top 30 CEOs in 2012.

Austin Clarke, who died in 2016, was a celebrated author of novels and essays on the Canadian immigrant experience. A prolific author of 11 novels, six short story collections and five books of nonfiction, he was the recipient of the Roger’s Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize, the Toronto Book Award and the W.O. Mitchell Award for support of young writers. In 2002 he won both the Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for The Polished Hoe. Beyond writing, he served as Cultural Attaché of Barbados, manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados and on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.

Economics consultant, journalist and broadcaster Dian Cohen has helped Canadians make sense of the economy and personal finance for more than four decades. She began her career as a syndicated columnist writing about money matters in the 1970s and parlayed her success into a radio and television career with CTV and CBC. She is the author of a number of books on economics for popular audiences, and her writing has been recognized with the National Business Writing Award and the Literary Guild Award. She has also been named to the Order of Canada.

Lawyer and corporate titan Marshall Cohen has led some of Canada’s most recognizable brands, including The Molson Companies Ltd, Barrick Gold Corporation, TD Ameritrade, and AIG, among others. He has lent his expertise to a number of non-profits, including the C.D. Howe Institute, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Mount Sinai Hospital. Currently, Cohen is retired counsel at Cassels Brock, a business law firm in Toronto.