Winter 2020 was a time of terrible unknowns. As the world staggered under the first pandemic in living memory, nobody could be sure that Montreal’s hospitals and beleaguered healthcare heroes could bear the burden – or that its scientists could move fast enough to help develop the antidote.
Nobody knew if the centre would hold.
At that time, there was a man whose name wasn’t in the papers regularly, and whose face was not on the news. A lawyer in his 80s, who was helping to give away $100 million on behalf of a reclusive widow who had recently died. He was – and still is – a man who loved Montreal, who always stepped up to support his city at the very moment when others felt helpless to act.
McGill alumnus Paul Marchand, BCL’66, LLM’85, has served as president of the Doggone Foundation since it was established in 2012 by Montrealer Elspeth McConnell to donate the family fortune within 10 years of her death. Marchand has used the funds to help strengthen McGill University’s research, educational and clinical muscle just in time to respond to the pandemic. Those who know him well say that the brilliant timing of these enormous contributions to his city and university was due to his talent for listening, and his belief in the power of investing in people.
Just two years earlier, Marchand listened when an infectious diseases expert told him that antibiotics and vaccines were failing to keep pace with new pathogens – and that a global pandemic was inevitable. He listened when healthcare leaders warned that Montreal’s new McGill University Health Centre hospital might never be built without a fast injection of private cash.
And when the world was deep into the crisis, Paul Marchand listened and understood that nurses are the heart of any health system, and that they needed more educational opportunities and reasons to stay in the field.
In each case – working closely with foundation director Susan Avon – he helped to create an institution or program with profound benefits to healthcare and medicine.
From left: Susan Avon, Paul Marchand, Chris Buddle, Anita Gagnon and Laura Winer.
Investing in People
“I think what Paul understands, and what I hope other people understand more and more, is the importance of investing in people, not just in buildings or equipment,” said Dr. Marcel Behr, MSc’95, PGME’95, Director of the McGill Interdisciplinary Initiative in Infection and Immunity (MI4), a joint initiative of McGill and the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), which was launched in 2018 with a $15 million gift from the Doggone Foundation. “You can always buy a machine that does X, Y and Z. It’s harder to find people who can run it. Paul understood that we were building infrastructure, but it wasn’t equipment and it wasn’t bricks and mortar. It was the people who could support large-scale research programs.”
MI4 is renowned for its contributions to COVID research that resulted in new tests and testing strategies, clinical trials of many potential treatments and efforts to create a vaccine. The initiative was born out of a plea by McGill’s Dr. Donald Sheppard, PGME’99, who approached Marchand in 2018 with a dire warning. As Marchand remembers it, Sheppard told him, “the question is not whether a global pandemic will occur; the only question is when.”
Sheppard, along with Behr and Dr. Marie Hudson, BCL/LLB’88, MDCM’96, PGME’02, had a vision to prepare for the inevitable by uniting the many infection and immunity researchers working largely alone – a common problem in academia. Doggone was already a long-time donor to other medical causes at McGill and its hospitals, and Marchand was a devoted alumnus of the Faculty of Law, having represented the Class of 1966 for half a century. He responded with critical seed money for the ambitious plan.
Thanks to the work enabled by this grant, “when COVID hit, we already knew the [key] people,” said Behr. “We already had working relationships with them, and we were already in a position to say, ‘hey, these are the things I can do with you, and that you can do with this other person’ because we had that preparation time.”
Plans were already in the works for an MI4 ‘hot zone’, where dangerous pathogens could be studied safely in the lab. As a result of this head start, MI4 pivoted quickly, hiring a few dedicated people to grow the virus and pass along the RNA to engineers to develop a new diagnostic test. Given that MI4 is a joint project between McGill and the MUHC, researchers were able to use the cell culture to try out different drugs for effectiveness – helping hospital-based physicians make better treatment choices.
“This was empowering for the hospital because it meant we were not going to randomly treat patients with anything that came along,” Behr said. “We were able to have very conservative treatment protocols. You can do the trial [in the lab] and find out what does and doesn’t work, and not put hundreds of thousands of patients in the line of untested remedies.”
In the absence of Doggone Foundation support, adds Behr, “we may have had somebody working here, somebody working there, and it could have been chaotic.”
Translating scientific advances from bench to bedside is challenging at the best of times. To this day, Marchand believes the most important contribution the Doggone Foundation made to the pandemic was its $10 million cash injection to help put the Glen site of the MUHC back on track for its opening in 2015.
“In 2014, people were leaving Montreal, including doctors and scientists, and things looked really bad; the Glen site was not yet finished and we were not too sure it was ever going to open,” recalls Marchand. “There were so many donors, but we came through in the end to help get it done when it looked like it might fall to the wayside like many other hospital projects in Montreal.”
Strengthening nursing resources in Quebec
As noted by Behr, Marchand understood that infrastructure includes not just buildings but people. One group of people he was eager to support was the nursing profession. In recent years, Marchand and Avon have directed $1.8 million to McGill’s Ingram School of Nursing, which kickstarted Quebec’s first-ever online Bachelor of Nursing program.
The program allows nurses with a CEGEP diploma to take the next step in their training while remaining in their home communities – stemming the flow of nurses leaving other parts of the province for Montreal to advance their education.
This fulfills both the social and the academic contract of a university, said Assistant Professor Oxana Kapoustina, BSc’07, DipEnvironment’07, MSc’10, MSc(A)’12, who co-runs the Bachelor of Nursing program with Assistant Professor Mélanie Gauthier.
“This program does both by providing access to a good academic education for nurses and [reinforcing] the social contract by increasing access to skilled nursing in the regions,” says Kapoustina, who is responsible for the online delivery of the program. “Without the Foundation’s donation, this would not have happened.”
The inaugural class of 72 students launched in 2021, and admissions have since doubled. Many have been inspired to continue their studies to become nurse practitioners, where they will benefit from Marchand’s vision in new ways. The state-of-the-art Satoko Shibata Clinical Nursing Laboratories is one example. Starting in 2018, the Doggone Foundation supported the transformation of the old ISoN Learning Laboratories into this high-tech environment featuring enlarged lab units, multiple simulation rooms, 24 beds, an ICU, and 18 high-definition cameras.
Elspeth McConnell died in 2017. The foundation she named after her two dogs is expected to sunset in 2025, after all the funds are spent on projects in and around Montreal and British Columbia, including medicine, the arts, education and social welfare.
“I am proud to have been a part of the Doggone Foundation; happy to have been a friend to Elspeth McConnell, even late in life,” Marchand wrote in a recent article. “Through her example, Doggone has always been ahead of the curve by giving more of what we have, by giving it sooner, by giving to the greatest needs.”
Montreal’s story of the pandemic is full of heroes, of lives saved because of nimble science and healthcare institutions that may have staggered but never fell. Many who were on the front lines will also remember Marchand, McConnell, and Avon – people whose long vision and unwavering love of their city helped to ensure that the centre held.