Michael George DeGroote OC (August 13, 1933 – September 12, 2022) was a Canadian businessman and philanthropist from Hamilton, Ontario, who resided in Bermuda.
Under his direction, the company expanded past trucking by entering the solid waste and school bus industries.
[3][5] By the mid 1970s Laidlaw was a large and successful business, and DeGroote had personally become wealthy enough to purchase the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League in 1974.
[7] DeGroote also paid $23 million to the Ontario Securities Commission to settle a claim regarding insider trading of Laidlaw stock.
[9] His business dealings in the Dominican Republic was the subject of CBC's The Fifth Estate episode "The Mob and Michael DeGroote"[10] which aired January 23, 2015.
[13][14] DeGroote consequently became the first benefactor in Canada to have a medical building renamed in his honour, having earlier been the first donor in Ontario to have a business school named after him.
This added to existing funds for the planned campus restructuring and the new Senior School building which bore his name.