Honouring the needs of Indigenous communities – UM Today

November 13, 2024

Steven Low was born to a Jewish family in Poland in 1932. During World War Two, his mother hid him in a monastery, which saved his life but didn’t shield him from horrors of the Holocaust. After the war, he was reunited with his mother, and they came to Canada.

While attending McGill University on a chess scholarship, he joined Gairdner & Company as a Security Analyst. Within a year he was recruited by American mining entrepreneur Joseph Hirshhorn, joining the team that discovered “The Big Z”. A man of great vision and bold ideas, he ventured around the globe, from investing in copper mining in South America to brokering oil deals in the Middle East. Always ahead of the curve and ready to embrace new trends, he was a leading figure in bringing pharma, electronics and telecom to post-Soviet Russia. He had a gift of seeing opportunities and solutions to problems and the courage to take them.

His curiosity and love for exploration saw him work closely with First Nation groups across Ontario, during various phases throughout his life. In 2021, when the news broke regarding the discovery of unmarked graves at residential schools in Canada, he was heartbroken.