$50 million latest gift from philanthropist Peter Gilgan creates a critical care tower at hospital
Peter Gilgan has spent nearly five decades building homes and the communities around them.
Most recently he brought that same instinct to Canada’s capital.
The Peter Gilgan Foundation has committed $50 million to The Ottawa Hospital, the largest philanthropic gift in Ottawa’s history.
The gift supports the hospital’s Campaign to Create Tomorrow and the construction of its new campus. In recognition, the hospital will name the Peter Gilgan Critical Care Tower, which will bring the Trauma Center, emergency services, and the intensive care unit together in one building designed for the region’s most critically ill patients.
“I’ve always believed that investing in healthcare is one of the most meaningful ways we can strengthen our communities,” Gilgan said.
“Ottawa is our nation’s capital, and it deserves healthcare that reflects the very best of what Canada can offer. The Ottawa Hospital’s new campus is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to set a new standard for patient care, and I’m proud to support that vision and help make it a reality.”
The announcement drew a large crowd to the hospital’s General Campus, along with Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones, who travelled from Toronto for the occasion.
Ford called it a special day for health care in Ottawa and offered a simple assessment of the man at the podium: “There’s no one in Canada that has given back more to health care.”
The tower will house far more than equipment.
It will bring together the physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, pharmacists, allied health professionals, social workers, and spiritual care providers who care for patients at their most vulnerable, and the families who wait beside them.
“It will bring together critical care teams, advanced technology, and the resources they need to care for some of the most critically ill patients in our region, in an environment designed around the complex needs of patients and their families,” said Cameron Love, president and CEO of The Ottawa Hospital.
For The Ottawa Hospital Foundation, the timing could hardly be better.
The Campaign to Create Tomorrow aims to raise $500 million toward the new hospital, and with this gift it now stands at $465 million, within reach of its goal.
More than 50,000 individuals and families have already given, many of them making the largest gifts of their lives.
“Peter has the vision to imagine what healthcare can become and the courage and commitment to help make that vision a reality,” said Tim Kluke, the foundation’s president and CEO.
Speaking to Gilgan directly at the ceremony, he added, “Your gift is an excellent example of that, and it will inspire others in our community to look and see what we can achieve when we all work together. Today, you’ve changed the Ottawa philanthropic landscape forever.”
Gilgan speaks about health care in plain, human terms.
“Give me air, give me some water, give me some food, give me some shelter, and give me my health,” he told the crowd.
“Those are kind of the priorities in life.”
He also sees in modern hospitals something larger: an engine through which a province and a country can advance through technology, and he has spent years working alongside hospital leaders to help them get there.
That conviction has a long history.
In 1978, Gilgan founded Mattamy Homes, which grew into North America’s largest privately owned homebuilder, with communities across Canada, including Ottawa, and the United States.
Today he leads Mattamy Asset Management, the parent company he created in 2018.
Not long after the business began to prosper, on Christmas Eve in 1980, he walked into Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital in Burlington, where three of his children had been born, took out his checkbook and wrote a $50,000 donation.
The figures have grown many times over since then, but the impulse has stayed the same: support the places where families begin, heal and find comfort.
He formalized that commitment in 2006 by creating the Peter Gilgan Foundation, a family foundation that now supports health care, children and families, Indigenous youth, climate action, and international development.
One of its first major hospital gifts came in 2010, when a $10 million pacesetting donation launched the campaign for the new Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital and created the Peter Gilgan Patient Care Center. Gilgan was initially an anonymous donor, later revealed as the man behind the largest gift in Oakville’s history.
In 2012, he gave $40 million to the Hospital for Sick Children to build the Peter Gilgan Center for Research and Learning, the largest single private gift to a pediatric hospital in Canada, and now home to Canada’s largest hospital-based child health research institute.
The same year, he committed $1 million to Wellspring to build the Birmingham Gilgan House, a gathering place for people living with cancer.
Around that time, a $15 million gift to Ryerson University, now Toronto Metropolitan University, transformed the former Maple Leaf Gardens into the Mattamy Athletic Centre, and a $6 million contribution helped create the Mattamy National Cycling Centre in Milton. Earlier still, he had given $1 million to the Oakville YMCA.
In 2014, he gave $30 million to St. Michael’s Hospital for the 17-story Peter Gilgan Patient Care Tower for critically ill patients, the largest gift in the hospital’s 122-year history.
That year he also gave $2 million to Women’s College Hospital for the Peter Gilgan Atrium, the centerpiece of its new building, and $1 million to South Muskoka Memorial Hospital to modernize its emergency department.
At Trillium Health Partners, $1.8 million given in 2013 and 2020 helped make the Mississauga Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit a reality.
In 2017, he returned to his roots.
Gilgan and his six siblings were born at St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto’s west end, and he gave $10 million in tribute to his parents and his childhood there.
That same year, a $12 million gift made with the Canadian Cancer Society established the Peter Gilgan Centre for Women’s Cancers at Women’s College Hospital, where biopsy results are now turned around within 24 to 48 hours.
In 2018, $1 million supported a new surgical robotics program at Princess Margaret Cancer Center.
Then came the gifts that redefined Canadian hospital philanthropy. In 2019, the foundation gave $100 million to SickKids, the largest single gift in the hospital’s history, to build the Peter Gilgan Family Patient Care Tower, which will care for more than 150,000 children each year.
In 2022, Gilgan surpassed that with $105 million to Trillium Health Partners, at the time the largest donation to a hospital in Canadian history, to build what will be Canada’s largest and most advanced hospital, the Peter Gilgan Mississauga Hospital, and to expand the Gilgan Family Queensway Health Centre.
Together, the two projects will add more than 600 hospital beds to the western Greater Toronto Area.
His giving has increasingly reached into discovery itself.
In 2023, he gave $8.5 million to University Health Network’s Krembil Research Institute to advance stem cell and regenerative medicine research and establish a Chair in Neuroregeneration Research, and $5 million to endow the Peter Gilgan Chair in Bladder Cancer Research at Princess Margaret.
In 2024, a $5 million gift to the Gairdner Foundation created the Peter Gilgan Canada Gairdner Momentum Awards, which honor outstanding health researchers in the middle of their careers.
In 2025, he went home again, giving $60 million to St. Joseph’s Health Center for a new Peter Gilgan Patient Care Tower that will expand emergency, surgical, and mental health care in the neighborhood where he grew up.
“This gift is deeply personal,” he said at the time.
“West Toronto is close to my heart.” His support for St. Joseph’s now exceeds $70 million, and for the Unity Health Toronto network, which includes St. Michael’s, more than $100 million.
Later that year, moved in part by his own family’s experiences with cancer, he gave $50 million to the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation to create the Peter Gilgan Centre for Early Cancer Detection Research, the largest single gift to early cancer detection in North America and the foundation of the largest program of its kind in the world.
His generosity extends well beyond hospital walls.
In 2024, the Peter Gilgan Foundation pledged $100 million over ten years to climate solutions as part of the Climate Champions initiative, joining eight other families and foundations in a $405 million commitment, the largest collective climate pledge in Canadian philanthropy.
This year the foundation also supported dedicated children and youth spaces at Hospice Mississauga’s new Welton Center for Hospice Palliative Care, where young people learn to carry grief. Its grant programs, which awarded $11.9 million this year alone, reach community organizations across Canada and abroad, and for more than two decades its Tour de Bleu cycling ride has rallied friends and partners to raise more than $59 million for health research.
Taken together, the record is remarkable.
With the Ottawa gift, the Peter Gilgan Foundation’s lifetime commitments to Canadian hospitals and health care now reach about $540 million.
With his $100 million climate pledge and major gifts to education, sport, and community life, Peter Gilgan’s documented philanthropy now exceeds $660 million, a figure that grows further each year with the foundation’s community grants.
Few Canadians in any generation have given on this scale, and none has given more to the country’s hospitals.
In Ottawa, that legacy will soon take the form of a tower where trauma teams receive patients in their first critical hours, where intensive care nurses keep watch through the night, and where families will find room to be near the people they love.
For a builder who once wrote a Christmas Eve cheque to the hospital where his children were born, it is a fitting addition to a life’s work measured in the places that care for us when we need it most.