Former World Trade Centre honcho Fred MacGillivray retired 12 years ago, but there’s nothing “retiring” about him. Giving back to his Halifax community is his passion and purpose

At his place in Sarasota, Florida—a winter wonderland for scores of Canadian snowbirds—Fred MacGillivray (78), is juggling duties like the minimum-wage store clerk he once was. And much of it has to do with the volunteer work he does for organizations in his hometown of Halifax. “Much of this [I can do] online,” he said. “I’ll have at least two or three meetings a week with different organizations that way.”

That’s not to say he likes conducting business “that way,” exactly. It seems contrary to his self-proclaimed passion and purpose, which is to remind others—including former corporate leaders like himself—that they owe their attention to the less fortunate in their midst, up-close and personal. If you want to know why, he said, just look around. “Would you have ever believed—going back 30 or 40 years ago—that we’d now see hundreds of tents with 1,200 or more people living in them in the freezing wintertime in downtown Halifax?”

Right now, MacGillivray, who once ran some of Canada’s premier retail food companies and, later, Halifax’s World Trade and Convention Centre, is prepared to work remotely on the social problems that afflict his hometown, if it helps.

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