He and his parents were Jewish refugees of Czarist Russia's antisemitic pogroms,[3][page needed] who immigrated to Wapella in Saskatchewan' District of Assiniboia.

Yechiel was forced to work as a laborer for the Canadian Northern Railway, and after a short time moved to a better job in a sawmill.

Yechiel and his sons then started making a good living selling firewood and began a trade in frozen whitefish to earn a winter income.

[4] In 1903, the family bought a hotel business, and Samuel, noting that much of the profit was in alcoholic beverages, set up shop as a liquor distributor.

He founded the Distillers Corporation in Montreal in 1924, specializing in cheap whisky, and concurrently taking advantage of the U.S. prohibition on alcoholic beverages.

[1] Bronfman eventually built an empire based on the appeal of brand names developed previously by Seagram—including Calvert, Dewars, and Seven Crown—to higher-level consumers.

The first Bronfman lecture was delivered by John C. Bugher, director of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras' Nuclear Center, on his work supporting the US Atomic Energy Commission's biomedical research.