$10 million donation from George and Sylvia Melville will help build new digestive health center

Mikaela Wheatley was 13 when doctors told her she had Crohn’s disease. Over the next two years she missed months of school, lived with chronic pain, and had five surgeries, much of that care at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver.

“It was really hard because at some points there was no light at the end of the tunnel,” she says now. She is in remission and back to riding horses, which she loves. Her grandparents watched all of it. Now they are giving to make sure fewer families go through the same thing.

George and Sylvia Melville, the B.C. philanthropists whose fortune comes from building Boston Pizza into a North American chain, have given $10 million to St. Paul’s Foundation for the new Digestive Health Center of British Columbia.

The center will bring the province’s digestive care, research, and training together in one place on the Jim Pattison Medical Campus in Vancouver’s False Creek Flats.

It is one of the largest donations yet to the campus, the biggest hospital redevelopment in the province’s history.

“We’re hopeful our donation will change and save lives across the province,” George Melville said.

“It was difficult to watch our granddaughter struggling, and we know the new Digestive Health Center will help many more patients who need top-tier care, both in Metro Vancouver and across the province.

Small-town British Columbia is where we’ve lived most of our lives, and to have this available to everybody is a huge win.”

That last point matters to him. Melville grew up in Penticton and finished high school there. In 1968 he joined Peat Marwick Mitchell & Co. as an articling student, and he earned his chartered accountant designation through correspondence courses instead of attending university.

One of his early clients was Jim Treliving, a former RCMP officer who held the B.C. development rights for a small pizza franchise from Edmonton. Melville said later that the restaurant business “wasn’t on my radar.” The two men worked together for more than 46 years.

They grew Boston Pizza from a handful of B.C. restaurants to more than 400 across North America, and their T&M Group reached more than $1 billion in annual sales.

Today Melville chairs Melville Global Investments, which has owned stakes in Mr. Lube and Naramata Benchland Properties, among other holdings.

The Melvilles have given steadily for decades, focusing on health, education, and community causes.

Kwantlen Polytechnic University renamed its business school the Melville School of Business in 2021 after an $8 million gift; George had served as the university’s chancellor. They also paid for the George & Sylvia Melville Hospice Home at Peace Arch Hospital in White Rock.

Their giving has reached Surrey Memorial Hospital, Union Gospel Mission, Covenant House, and the Rick Hansen Foundation. When George was appointed to the Order of British Columbia in 2018, he had already given more than $30 million to B.C. organizations.

The family’s ties to St. Paul’s go back to 1999.

Their first major gift there, $2.5 million in 2020, went to the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center of BC.

That same clinic later became one of the founding partners of the Digestive Health Center.

The need is large. According to St. Paul’s Foundation, digestive diseases affect one in four Canadians, yet B.C. has only 123 gastroenterologists and six colorectal surgeons for more than five million people.

The result is long waits, scattered care, and a lot of travel.

For many patients, embarrassment and stigma make it even harder to talk about their symptoms, let alone get them diagnosed.

The Digestive Health Center is designed to fix the scattered-care problem first. It began as an idea in 2021 and became a non-profit in 2023. It currently runs out of three separate sites: St. Paul’s Hospital, the IBD Center of BC, and Pacific Gastroenterology Associates.

On the new campus, those teams will share one building and offer six services that are now split up: therapeutic endoscopy, colon cancer screening, colorectal surgery, IBD care, liver disease, and specialized nutrition, including the BC Home Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition Program. The foundation says tests and treatments that now take five to 10 visits could take as few as one or two.

The center will have multiple endoscopy suites, space for surgery, and data-driven tools meant to catch disease earlier.

“We will be a provincial resource of specialized expertise in digestive health,” said Dr. Greg Rosenfeld, the center’s chair and a co-founder of the IBD Center.

“We can assess complex cases, develop treatment plans, and work collaboratively with physicians and other health care providers across BC.” Training is central to the plan.

Advanced fellowships in IBD, therapeutic endoscopy, and colorectal surgery are meant to produce the specialists the province lacks and to draw trainees from across Canada and abroad.

The center will be housed in the Clinical Support and Research Centre, a research and clinical tower joined to the new hospital by a sky bridge. When the province approved it in late 2023, it estimated the capital cost at about $638 million.

The province is covering roughly $332 million, Providence Health Care about $215 million, and St. Paul’s Foundation $88 million. In April 2026, Ottawa added $48 million through its Strategic Response Fund for a clinical trials unit, a simulation center, and a health data platform.

The foundation called it the federal government’s first direct contribution to a health care capital project in B.C. Excavation started in the second half of 2025.

The building is scheduled to open in 2029, two years after the new St. Paul’s Hospital.

The hospital itself is close to finished.

The $2.174 billion, 548-bed building is set to open in early 2027, replacing the aging hospital on Burrard Street. Jim Pattison’s $75 million lead gift gave the campus its name, and Teck Resources gave $10 million for the emergency department.

Melville’s gift takes the same donor-driven approach into the campus’s next building, where research and clinical care will share space.

At the announcement, three generations of the family stood together: George and Sylvia, their daughter Lia and son-in-law Jeff Wheatley, and Mikaela, whose illness led to the gift.

“I know my grandparents’ donation will help provide others with the hope that they, too, can reclaim their health and recover,” she said.

For a family that built its fortune in small B.C. towns, the gift is also about who gets access. Their aim is for a teenager in Penticton or on Vancouver Island to get the kind of coordinated care that helped Mikaela gets her life back.