
From left: Robert Friedland, Peter Nygård and Jim Balsillie (Mines & Money/Flickr; Chad Buchanan/Getty; Mark Lennihan/AP)
There are only so many spots on the list of Canada’s Richest People to go around, and with new entrants climbing the ranks, these long-standing stalwarts are off the leaderboards this year:
Robert Friedland
Net worth: $820 million
Friedland’s Ivanhoe Mines found itself in conflict with the Congolese government this year. Ivanhoe planned on selling a stake in its Kamoa copper mine, located in the African nation, to China’s Zijin Mining. But the company’s stock price plummeted when the government called for the deal to be suspended, while offering no clear explanation for its decision. The sale was finally approved in September.
Jim Balsillie
Net worth: $788 million
Jim Balsillie emerged this year as a vocal advocate for innovation policy in Canada. He’s guiding the creation of a lobby group to represent the country’s high-tech sector and he publicly denounced the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal as potentially the “worst thing in policy that Canada has ever done.”
Jodrey Family
Net worth: $782 million
Patriarch Roy Jodrey built an empire that included pulp and paper, trucking and control of High Liner Foods. Five years ago, three branches of the family undertook a rebalancing of their assets in an attempt to clarify what had become a tangled portfolio.
Peter Nygård
Net worth: $777 million
The Finnish-Canadian built his empire selling reasonably priced womenswear to middle America. In recent years, he’s become better known for a long-running feud with hedge fund manager Louis Bacon, who owns an adjacent mansion in the Bahamas. Earlier this year, Bacon filed a defamation suit against Nygård, accusing the fashion mogul of spreading “brazen lies” about him. This August, 105 of 135 allegations were thrown out of court.
David Baazov
Net worth: $736 million
Since Baazov’s blockbuster purchase of PokerStars for US$4.9 billion, Amaya has struggled with a string of challenges. Baazov faces an insider trading investigation related to the PokerStars takeover while his company recently cut its outlook for the year, blaming a strong U.S. dollar cutting into the purchasing power of its foreign client base.