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Wallace and Margaret McCain at the Scarborough opening reception, 1969
having done that, he was determined to give away his own personal
wealth. In the last decade of his life, he spent probably 50 per cent of
his time fund raising. He tapped a lot of people. He knew how to do
it, and nobody could say no. Wallace filled the room.”
Adds Purdy Crawford, another close friend and former Mount
Allison Chancellor and Chairman of the Board of Regents — “It’s
hard to express how warm and great Wallace was. My wife and I, and
many others, went on trips and cruises with him and Margie. Every
time he talked about Mount Allison, he warmed up.”
His legacy certainly reflects this affection. In addition to supporting
the Wallace McCain Student Centre, he served as the founding
chair of the University’s national Advisory Council and
on several fund raising campaigns. He also lent his name
and money to the McCain Fellowship program. “These are
pretty innovative,” Campbell explains. “The hardest thing
a person with a PhD can do is build up a curriculum vitae
that makes him or her more hireable. These post-doctoral
fellowships are designed to do just that — provide people with a
Wallace and Dick McWhirter in Australia, 1968
Cedric Ritchie of the Bank of Nova Scotia inducts Harrison
and Wallace into the Canadian Business Hall of Fame, 1993
two-year opportunity to get some teaching experience, conduct
research, and connect with their peers.”
All of which merely confirms that, if hard work was next to
godliness for McCain, he was also keenly aware of the responsibilities
that wealth conferred upon him. Though he would never
describe himself as particularly lucky, he knew he had been fortunate
— something that frequently amused him in that goodnatured,
mischievous way of his.
Once, in the early 2000s, he delivered a speech to a group of
Toronto business elites. “It is obviously a great pleasure for me to
be here,” he said. “It is a pleasure to be recognized in this way, along
with my brother Harrison, by the country’s cream of the crop in
private enterprise. But most of all to have a rare opportunity to
address a question in public that I have, over the past 44 years of my
professional life, often asked myself in private: How the hell did I
get here?”
Born into neither wealth nor poverty in Florenceville, nB, Wallace
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