In late August 2024, volunteers and university leaders at McMaster planted 99 native trees on land bordering Cootes Paradise to mark Stephen Jarislowsky's 99th birthday, one tree for every year of a life that had already funded two research chairs on that campus alone. Jarislowsky died on October 8, 2026, in Montreal at the age of 101, the German-born investor who built Jarislowsky Fraser into one of Canada's largest independent asset managers and then spent much of his final three decades directing his fortune, and his opinions, into the country's universities.

He was born in Berlin in 1925 to Alfred Jarislowsky, an industrialist and merchant banker, and Kaethe Jarislowsky. His father died of scarlet fever when Stephen was four, and he and his siblings were sent to live with relatives in Amsterdam. The family reached the United States in 1941. At sixteen he enrolled at Cornell University to study mechanical engineering, and in 1944 he was drafted into the United States Army, becoming an American citizen in the process. After training and Japanese-language study he served as a counterintelligence officer in occupied Japan, investigating black-market activity in Tokyo, and returned to the United States in late 1946. He then earned a master's degree in Far Eastern studies at the University of Chicago and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1949.

He moved to Canada to work for the Aluminum Company of Canada, first in Kingston, Ontario, then in Montreal, where he rose to assistant director of finance at the company's head office. In 1954 he started a small business publishing analytical reports on companies for brokerage firms, and the following year he founded Jarislowsky, Fraser Limited, an investment research firm, with about $100 of his own money and $50 from a partner. Under his direction the firm diversified into pension and foundation management over the following decades. Fifty years after its founding it managed more than $47 billion in assets, and Jarislowsky remained its board chairman and chief executive as late as 2013. He stepped back from day-to-day leadership in 2012, and in 2018 the firm, by then overseeing roughly $40 billion in assets, was sold to the Bank of Nova Scotia in a deal that made the combined business Canada's third-largest active asset manager.

Jarislowsky used the firm's scale to press Canadian boardrooms he considered complacent. In 1986 he fought the Billes family's plan to sell voting control of Canadian Tire to a group of dealers without extending the same premium to other shareholders, calling the proposed deal "grossly abusive," and he clashed for years with Conrad Black over management fees and privatization moves at Hollinger Inc. and Southam Inc. He also kept the firm largely out of technology stocks during the late-1990s boom, even as some clients complained, explaining his skepticism bluntly: "Technology is just about new ways to communicate, nothing else. People still eat. They still drive cars. They still fornicate. What's new?" In 2002 he co-founded the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance, which grew into one of the country's most influential shareholder advocacy groups, and he helped establish Quebec's Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations.

Canada recognized that advocacy at its highest levels. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 1989, promoted to Officer in 1993, and named a Companion, the order's top rank, on October 22, 2008, with the Governor General's citation noting his renown as a portfolio manager and philanthropist and his championing of business ethics; he was invested in that rank the following year. Quebec named him a Knight of its National Order in 2002 and promoted him to Grand Officer in 2007. He also received honorary degrees from 20 Canadian universities.

He legally established the Jarislowsky Foundation in 1991 to support literacy, the fine arts and university research. By the time of his death the foundation had endowed more than 50 chairs at Canadian universities and other institutions, his family said, spanning fields from medicine and Canadian art to democracy, governance and the environment.

The chairs tended to chase questions he considered urgent rather than safe. In 2020, at 94, he gave the philosophy department at McGill University $2 million, matched by the university to reach $4 million, to create the Stephen Jarislowsky Chair in Technology and Human Nature. "There is an urgent need for all of us to consider the implications of technology for individuals and society," he said when the gift was announced, adding that he was pleased to support McGill's work in "teaching, mentoring and research in this field."

Two years later he turned to a different worry: the training of Canada's political class. In 2022 he committed $10 million, $2 million each, to create Jarislowsky Chairs in Trust and Political Leadership at five Canadian universities, arguing that the country's leaders needed grounding in foreign affairs, economics, finance and ethics that no dedicated program then provided. "If you look at the experience of people who go into politics in Canada, it's unbelievable," he told University Affairs in 2023, adding that Canada could not expect to hold its own against Russia or China without better-trained leadership. He linked the project to the political extremism he had witnessed as a child in Europe: "People need to understand historical experiences in order to prevent repeating them," he said when the gift was announced.

At McMaster, where the foundation had already funded a chair in environment and health and, later, one in pandemic prevention and research, the university marked his 99th birthday with the tree planting near Cootes Paradise, a tribute built around his own causes rather than a ceremonial plaque.

At home his habits stayed modest for a man of his wealth. He married his second wife, Gail, in 1968, and the couple spent decades in the same Westmount house they bought in 1972. "We have no plane. We have no yacht. I drive my car; I don't have a chauffeur. I do the dishes every evening myself," he told Forbes. Away from the office he collected Chinese jade and paintings by Canadian and French Impressionist artists. He was survived by Gail and their three children.

Colleagues in Canadian business history saw him as more than a financier. Business historian Joe Martin, president emeritus of the Canadian Business History Association, called him "the Leonardo da Vinci of the Canadian business world, a true polymath" in a tribute published after his death.

Jarislowsky's name now sits on chairs studying technology at McGill, pandemics and the environment at McMaster, political leadership at five other universities, and dozens more fields besides, each built to keep asking the questions he thought mattered long after any single gift was spent. The firm he started with next to nothing carries his name into its own eighth decade under new ownership, and the 99 trees planted near Cootes Paradise will outlast everyone who attended the ceremony.