Businessman, environmentalist.
Born at Oak Lake on 29 April 1929, eldest son of Frederick Milton Strong (1907-1987) and Mary Fyfe (1907-1964), he attended Oakwood School before working at a trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Arctic. Subsequently, he held several corporate positions, including President of the Power Corporation of Canada in the 1960s and, from 1976, Chairman and CEO of Petro-Canada. He was active with the United Nations, including service as the founding Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme in Kenya, and he was Secretary-General at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment at Stockholm, and Secretary-General at the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro. In recognition of his community service, he received honorary doctorates from Brandon University (1968) and the University of Manitoba (1975), was inducted into the Order of Canada (1999) and Order of Manitoba (2005), and received the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal (2002) and Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012). He died on 27 November 2015.
See also:
Historic Sites of Manitoba: Leitch House (Poplar Avenue, Oak Lake, RM of Sifton)
Ox Trails to Blacktop by Oak Lake History Committee, 1982, page 352-#.
Obituary [Frederick Milton Strong], Winnipeg Free Press, 2 July 1987, page 45.
“The world mourns one of its greats: Maurice Strong dies, his legacy lives on,” United Nations Environment Programme.
“Canadian environmentalist Earth’s ‘first official custodian’,” Winnipeg Free Press, 30 September 2015.
Obituaries and burial transcriptions, Manitoba Genealogical Society.
This page was prepared by Gordon Goldsborough.
Page revised: 21 May 2019
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