My father had a private dental practice, but he worked one afternoon a week at the Montreal General Hospital’s dental clinic. That was his time to give back.
My high school’s motto was non nobis solum, which means “Not for ourselves alone,” which is something that’s guided my life.
The best people that I knew from my undergraduate years went into the Peace Corps. Kennedy’s dictum, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” I took that back to Canada after my degree at Princeton.
McGill was the defining experience of my father’s early life and it's something that I knew would be part of mine. Montreal was a wonderful city with all kinds of opportunities. There were political views on campus that ran the gamut.
When I started to practice law, there were Black people in Little Burgundy who had grown up in the Maritimes and had worked on the railroad. They were trying to get old age pension but didn't have birth certificates because no one had reported their birth. I must have done 50 or more of those cases.
There was no public legal aid when I started law, but the most junior lawyers were often asked to do pro bono work. This was early in my married life when I was a member of St. George’s Church whose congregation was partly suburban and partly Black parishioners from nearby Little Burgundy. My wife and I became Sunday school teachers and tried to help our parishioners at the same time as the Tyndale St-Georges Community Centre was flourishing in Little Burgundy. We were keen on the civil rights movement, which had come to Canada.
Planning and estates lawyer Bill Stewart took me under his wing at work. He died at a tragically young age of cancer. I was about 30 and the partners said if you think you can do it, go ahead. During my 47 years, I looked after families and got to know them very well. The subject would come up quite often about doing something for somebody else.
I helped several clients who wished to be philanthropic establish foundations such as Janet Hutchison, who endowed the Art Gallery of Ontario, and Barbara Whitley, who helped the Montreal General Hospital and McGill Ophthalmology. I also persuaded Sandy Mills to leave his estate to McGill, Bishop’s and Concordia.
Another client was Elspeth McConnell, who married into the powerful McConnell family. I knew she had art, but what I didn't realize is that she had kept it for 40 years in her basement. One painting she had loaned to the National Gallery, a Jackson Pollock, was valued at $10 million. She had over 30 paintings similar to that by modern artists. I said to her that I'd help her deal with the art, but I wanted her to look at giving to medicine. She agreed to set up a foundation.
Elspeth died in 2017 and that year I had a chance meeting with McGill’s Dr. Don Sheppard. He said doctors in his field were very worried about pandemics, infectious diseases, antibiotics and mutations. He said we're going to be in bad shape if we don’t do something about it.
Thanks to Paul Marchand’s stewardship, the Doggone Foundation gave a $15 million gift in 2018 to establish McGill’s MI4 (the McGill Interdisciplinary Initiative in Infection and Immunity), one of the largest groupings of experts focused on infectious and immune-mediated diseases in the world. It has taken a lead role in COVID-related research.
Earlier, Marchand established a Dentistry prize in honour of his father and mother – the Dr. Paul A. Marchand and Maurine McNeil Marchand Prize.