Lassonde donates $25M to York U’s engineering program

Pierre Lassonde, the current chairman of Franco-Nevada (FNV-T, FNV-N) and one of Canada’s most successful mining entrepreneurs, has once again stepped up in a big way as a major benefactor for a Canadian university.

At a ceremony on Nov. 1,  he and York University representatives announced a $25-million donation from Lassonde to expand York’s School of Engineering at its Keele campus in Toronto’s northern suburbs. The school will be renamed the Lassonde School of Engineering.

Traditionally an institution more focused on the humanities, York only has about 300 engineering students in specialized programs. It is now planning to spend $100 million, including Lassonde’s donation and $50 million from the Ontario government province, on a new faculty and building that could hold 2,000 students by 2020.

In making the donation, Lassonde has commented on the need for today’s engineers to receive a more rounded education than the narrow one he received as a young engineering student in Montreal 40 years ago. He wants today’s graduating engineers to be well versed in the worlds of finance, health, safety and civil society issue — to be, in the words of his late wife, a “renaissance engineer.”

In downtown Toronto, a major donation by Lassonde in the mid-1990s to the University of Toronto helped revive a mining engineering program at what is now called the Lassonde Institute for Engineering Geoscience. Lassonde has similarly made major donations in past years to the University of Utah, Polytechnique Montréal, the University of Western Ontario and Ryerson University.

York University is already home to the Schulich School of Business, which was the beneficiary of a $15-million donation in 1995 from Lassonde’s long-time business partner Seymour Schulich.

In the early 1980s, Lassonde and Schulich pioneered the use of royalty agreements in the mining industry in a manner similar to those already established in the oil and gas industry. One of their earliest royalty agreements was on Barrick Gold’s Goldstrike gold mine in Nevada, which has gushed enormous profits for Franco-Nevada’s shareholders ever since.

Schulich, meanwhile has stepped up his remarkable string of education-related donations with his recent establishment of a $100-million scholarship fund for students at 20 universities in Canada and Israel. Schulich has recently made several multimillion-dollar donations to Canadian universities, including a $25-million endowment to the School of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario and a $20-million donation to Dalhousie University’s law school, now called the Schulich School of Law.