$15 million latest gift toward $50 million to date: Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman’s enduring investment in Sinai Health

Toronto philanthropists Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman have deepened one of Canada’s most enduring donor relationships, giving $15 million to the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Emergency Medicine (SREMI) at Mount Sinai Hospital.

The gift pushes their lifetime investment in Sinai Health past $50 million, capping more than a decade of support for an institute they founded in 2013 and that has since become Canada’s leading center for emergency-medicine research.

“Emergency departments are the front door to our health care system,” the couple said in a joint statement. “Supporting SREMI means investing in solutions that will improve care for patients across Canada. That’s why we were inspired to make a continuation gift,” stated the philanthropists.

The gift is characteristic of a giving philosophy Schwartz—founder and CEO of Onex Corporation—and Reisman—founder and CEO of Indigo Books & Music—have practiced for nearly three decades: returning repeatedly to institutions they believe in and letting early bets compound into national impact.

In 2019, the pair gave $100 million to the University of Toronto, the largest gift in the university’s history, to build the Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus and its Institute for Technology and Society.

Reisman’s Indigo Love of Reading Foundation has donated millions of books to more than 3,000 under-resourced Canadian school libraries, while the couple’s support of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel—including science education centers and a theoretical physics institute bearing their name—earned them honorary doctorates in 2017.

With this latest commitment, Schwartz and Reisman continue a pattern that has defined their philanthropy: patient, sustained investment in health care, education, literacy, and research—turning a 2013 first gift into a $50-million legacy and a national institute’s founding vision into scalable, lasting change for patients across Canada.