Who’s David Thomson? A peek into the mysterious, ‘reluctant’ head of Canada’s richest family

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David Kenneth Roy Thomson didn’t have much choice in his elevation to public head of his family’s vast business kingdom. He was anointed the third-generation standard-bearer by his grandfather Roy, who had launched the Thomson empire and multi-billion-dollar fortune in the 1930s with radio stations and newspapers in northern Ontario.

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The son of a Toronto barber, Roy bought press and radio holdings across North America before pushing into Britain. By the mid-1960s, the Thomson Organisation was an international corporation with interests spanning publishing, printing and television.

The family has retreated from many of its original holdings, such as newspapers, but with new investments has consistently remained the richest family in Canada — by a very wide margin. According to the 2021 Forbes global list of billionaires, the family boasts a net worth of $41.8 billion, up from $20 billion in 2013, and ranks 33rd on the global list. Joseph Chung-Hsin Tsai, a Taiwanese-Hong Kong-Canadian businessman, is the second richest Canadian on the Forbes list with $12.6 billion in net worth.

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David Thomson sits atop the family empire. He co-chairs Woodbridge Co. Ltd., the Thomson family investment company and controlling shareholder of Thomson Reuters, the publicly traded news and business information company, where Thomson is also chair. Thomson investments include, according to Forbes, part-ownership of the Winnipeg Jets, a piece of the Montreal Canadiens, a stake in telecom giant Bell Canada, vast real estate, and ownership of the Globe and Mail, where Thomson also serves as chair.

Thomson, as the first-born son of the third generation, followed the path of his father, Ken, who’d taken over the family mantle after Roy’s death in 1976. David took over after Ken died at his office on David’s birthday in 2006. Shortly after, David made the biggest deal in the company’s history, buying Reuters for US$17 billion and adding the global newswire to his financial data business.

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That path to the head of the family was carefully mapped out by Roy, who worked to ensure the Thomson “boys” would long be connected to the business he started, whether that role interested them or not. “David, my grandson, will have to take his part in the running of the Organisation, and David’s son, too,” Roy wrote in his 1975 memoir. “For the business is all tied up in trusts for those future Thomsons, so that death duties will not tear it apart. These Thomson boys that come after Ken are not going to be able, even if they want to, to shrug off those responsibilities. The conditions of the trusts ensure that control of the business will remain in Thomson hands for 80 years.”

Thus David Thomson inherited part of a family fortune, his grandfather’s hereditary British peerage (Baron Thomson of Fleet), and the responsibility of being the public face of the family, even if the family’s investments were guided by professional managers.

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In the years since taking over from his father, Thomson, 63, has made his public role very private indeed. He’s the best-known of the notoriously private Thomson family, and yet little is known about him. Aside from his extreme wealth, he’s probably most widely known for his world-class art collection (he’s owned works by Picasso, J.M.W. Turner and reportedly holds the world’s premier private collection of English painter John Constable), as well as the gossipy details of his divorces and separations.

Peter C. Newman called Thomson “the reluctant heir.” “The most private of men, David cultivates a mysterious presence. He has never given a press conference, been on TV, or said anything in public,” Newman wrote in Titans, the third volume in his series of books profiling the “Canadian Establishment.” When Titans was published, in 1998, Thomson had only granted one interview — to Newman, when he was writing a history of the Hudson’s Bay Company, then owned by the family. Thomson’s reclusive approach has not changed in the two decades since. Not surprisingly, he did not return a voice message, left at his Woodbridge office, requesting an interview for this story.

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Thomson is tall and lean, with sandy hair, and eyes described — depending on the writer — as “frigid blue” and “a shade of Arctic blue.” He reportedly wears knee-length cargo shorts year-round, including to his Toronto office. Ask Thomson the meaning of life or the time of day, Newman observed, and you’d get the same look of deep thought. “David’s conversation is an improbable mixture of introspective genius and postindustrial babble,” Newman wrote. “There is never any small talk.” He added: “The professional managers who run the Thomson organization regard him as ‘a bit of a flake,’ but they have no choice.”

Thomson grew up in a world of affluence: he lived with his two younger siblings (Lynne and Peter, the co-chair of Woodbridge) in a Georgian mansion in the Rosedale area of Toronto, and was chauffeured to Upper Canada College, the elite Toronto private school. According to a lengthy 2006 profile in Maclean’s — with the headline “Canada’s Rich, Troubled Thomson Family,” Thomson was a “shy, sensitive boy, suspicious of others’ motives.” “There is always something that people want, and I have not figured out why,” he told James FitzGerald in Old Boys: The Powerful Legacy of Upper Canada College.

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Thomson attended the University of Cambridge and later spent ten years working at the Hudson’s Bay Company, including stints at a fur-trading post in Prince Albert, Sask., and selling socks at the company’s downtown Toronto department store.

Despite his apparent desire to avoid public attention, Thomson’s private life has generated juicy headlines, such as in January 2018 when a Daily Mail story announced: “Billionaire peer who is expecting his sixth baby at 60… with a VERY glamorous Sotheby’s art expert in her 40s.”

That story reported his coming second child with Severine Nackers, who works for art auction house Sotheby’s. Thomson also has two daughters from his first marriage to Mary Lou La Prairie. The couple separated on their eighth wedding anniversary, in October 1996, and divorced a year later.

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Thomson reportedly signed an application for divorce from his second wife, Laurie Ludwick, on March 10, 2006 — the same day their son was born.

According to the Maclean’s profile: “A server arrived at the new mother’s door with the papers three hours after she returned home from hospital.” As Thomson’s first-born son, he’ll presumably be the next of the Thomson “boys” to stand atop the family empire. Thomson was later engaged to Canadian actress Kelly Rowan, but the couple split up before the birth of their daughter.

Back in 1998, Newman noted that Thomson’s vast wealth and bevy of opportunity meant “that nothing could stop him except himself”. Newman wondered if Thomson could “survive his own intensity,” and pointed to the quote Thomson chose to accompany his photo in the 1975 Upper Canada College yearbook as a possible sign of self-awareness on that point. The quote: “We are never so much victims of another as we are the victims of ourselves.”

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