Late businesswoman gifts record donation to St. B hospital

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This article was published 17/06/2024 (485 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The estate of the businesswoman who previously made the biggest donation by an individual to a Canadian charity has now made the largest-ever gift to the St. Boniface Hospital Foundation.

The foundation announced the record $10-million donation Monday from Miriam Bergen, who died at age 66 in January 2022. Half of the money will go to the hospital’s new emergency department and half will go to its cardiac sciences program.

It’s not the first gift from the Bergen family — Miriam’s parents, Martin and Ruth Bergen, made a $3-million donation to the hospital to create the Bergen Cardiac Care Centre in 2006.

When patients are brought into the hospital for immediate surgery, there will now be direct access from the new emergency centre, which was created through Bergen’s donation to the Bergen Cardiac Care Centre her parents helped create.

Previously, Bergen had arranged for about $500 million in Appleton Holdings Ltd. shares to be donated from her estate to the Winnipeg Foundation. The owner and president of Appleton, a development company that owns and manages several large residential buildings, had no heir to pass on the company to.

Learning St. Boniface Hospital would be receiving a historic donation was emotional for foundation president and CEO Karen Fowler.

“I tear up again already when I think about it,” she said Monday. “It’s one thing to receive gifts from folks when they’re alive, when you can acknowledge those donations and recognize their generosity. Not being able to say thank you in person to Miriam was a little bit heartbreaking.”

Fowler said the foundation is working with the medical lead in St. Boniface’s cardiac department on the specifics of what the funds will be used for, which could include new equipment and enhancements to cardiac programming sciences.

The foundation learned it would be receiving the gift in November 2022, just before the Winnipeg Foundation’s announcement, and has been working with the executors of Bergen’s will since.

Prior to Monday, the largest single donation to St. Boniface Hospital was $7 million in 2015 from philanthropist Paul Albrechtsen toward cardiac research. The St. Boniface Hospital Albrechtsen Research Centre is named after him.

Fowler said the St. Boniface Hospital Foundation receives 10 to 20 donations from people who have left the foundation in their will yearly.

Bergen, who was known by her loved ones as a quiet person who stayed out of the spotlight, never let on she was planning such a large donation before her death.

Her cousin, Doris Gietz, said she was a sports lover who prioritized human connections — she described her as “more of a listener than a talker, but a very empathic listener.”

“There was even aspects of her quiet philanthropy that I wasn’t even aware of until after her passing, because she never talked about it,” Gietz said.

“But it wasn’t even just necessarily donations of any sort of monetary value, but it was just also the way that she would in her own quiet way connect with people.”

Gifts left in her will have continued to impact organizations across the province since her death. Concordia Foundation executive director Sue Barkman confirmed the hospital had received $2 million from Bergen’s estate last year, the largest single donation in recent memory.

Bergen had long been on the foundation’s board, as had her father, Barkman said. The funding has been applied to an endowment fund supporting arthroplasty research at Concordia Hospital.

“They were big proponents, the Bergens, and Miriam continued that, with anything around health care,” Gietz said.

St. Boniface Hospital is a hub for cardiac care in Manitoba. Heart disease is the second leading cause of death in Canada.

“The number of patients that we see here every year is certainly not decreasing, it continues to increase,” Fowler said. “The number of people that are impacted in the long run will be far more than I think Martin Bergen ever envisioned when he made that initial $3-million gift.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca