Arthur Mauro remembered – ‘He was a real bridge for people’

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This article was published 07/08/2023 (804 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Described as a “giant of a person,” Winnipeg philanthropist, businessman, lawyer and human rights advocate Arthur Mauro has died at 96.

The child of Italian immigrants was born in Port Arthur, now Thunder Bay, in 1927, and moved to Winnipeg in 1946 to study at St. Paul’s College at the University of Manitoba.

“He saw that Winnipeg had a real diversity of people,” Lloyd Axworthy, former president of the University of Winnipeg, Canadian foreign affairs minister and friend of Mauro said in an interview. He said Mauro saw Winnipeg as a “place of entry for new groups that come from around the world. He understood that and thought we could do better.”

In 1950, he ran for student council and encountered the kind of discrimination he would devote his life to confronting and defeating.

“When I entered the race for president of the University Student Council,” he told his alma mater, “I was advised that a Catholic could never be elected.” He prevailed.

After graduation, Mauro practiced transportation law before moving into business, eventually landing at Investors Group in 1976, becoming president there in 1981 and CEO in 1985. He was chancellor of U of M from 1991-2000 and at Lakehead University in his hometown of Thunder Bay from 2009-2012. Along the way, he was made a member of (1987) and then officer of the Order of Canada (1993) and in 2004, was named to the Order of Manitoba. In 2014, he was named to the Manitoba Business Hall of Fame.

Axworthy described Mauro as a polymath to be envied.

“He was a giant of a person… business, politics, ideas. He was always involved.”

During his time with the Manitoba Business Council, Axworthy recounts, Mauro was pivotal in seeing initiatives to support outreach to Indigenous communities.

“He was a real bridge for people in the community to advocate for human rights to the business community, to government. He was a bridge builder on that issue,” Axworthy said.

“I think that it was very much rooted in growing up in Winnipeg in an Italian family, recognizing that discrimination and barriers exist.”

Mauro maintained his passion for human rights throughout his life, in particular by promoting interfaith dialogue between Christians, Jews and Muslims at St. Paul’s College.

“I think he looked at the world, the Middle East conflict, the conflict in Northern Ireland — he was worried about the world and he was worried about communities not interacting with each other,” said Chris Adams, rector of St. Paul’s College.

In 2017, Mauro’s family trust, the Mauro Family Foundation, donated $5 million to the U of M, which was used to establish the Mauro Chair in Human Rights and Justice, part of the university’s Master of Human Rights program.

Mauro was also the founding benefactor of his namesake institution, the Arthur V. Mauro Institute for Peace and Justice, which offers master’s and doctoral degrees in peace and conflict studies. He was active with the institute from its inception in 2004 until the end of his life.

“He was the catalyst,” Adams said, “without him that institute would not have been created.”

Axworthy said that Mauro’s understanding of the need to create institutions to promote human rights in Winnipeg was unique and that a great void will be left without that vision and leadership.

“You always remember, listening to him talk about making Winnipeg a human rights city,” Axworthy said, “with (Canadian Museum for Human Rights), the centre at the University of Manitoba… he really was interested.

“He understood that we had to have institutions and places to make that happen, it wasn’t going to happen simply by wishing it to be,” Axworthy said, “he tried to build institutions and strengthen institutions that existed.”

graham.mcdonald@freepress.mb.ca