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Early life
Peter MacLachlan Brown was born in Vancouver, like his father, Ralph, and grandfather before him. Peter Brown’s grandfather Brenton was a well-connected businessman and power broker of his time, head of the Crown Life Insurance Co., onetime president of the Vancouver Board of Trade, and a founder of the right-of-centre municipal NPA party. His grandson would one day follow in his footsteps.

Peter Brown attended the private Shawnigan Lake School and later St. George’s School, where he graduated in 1958, as did his brothers Ralph ’53, Alan ’54, and Robert ’68; and his sons James ’86 and Jason ’89. He studied at the University of British Columbia, entering at age 15 and “majoring in partying”, but left at age 20 to work for brokerage firm Greenshields; he worked at various points in Greenshields offices in Montreal, Toronto, and New York. It was during his time, he says, that he turned “from a wastrel into a workaholic.”

In 1967 he transferred to his hometown and the next year joined a boutique investment firm called  Hemsworth, Turton, and Company. A year later, owner Ted Turton recruited Brown as sales manager, and five years after that, Brown bought into the firm, now renamed Canarim Investment Corp.

Career
It was a rocky start. “Everyone said we’d fail,” he has said. Far from it, when noted Canadian historian Peter C. Newman included Brown in the second volume of his Canadian Establishment series, he described the Vancouver financier as “the single most important player on the Vancouver Stock Exchange, underwriting nearly three-quarters of its new issues — worth a projected $225 million in 1981 alone.”

Over time, Canarim expanded, opening offices across the Prairies. By 1993, the company, renamed Canaccord Capital, had grown to 400 staff, with investment advisors in six branches across Canada. In 2004, Canaccord went public, raising $70 million in its initial listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange; the year after that, the company also listed on the London Stock Exchange under the symbol CF.

By that time, Brown, now 64, had been at the head of Canaccord, renamed Canaccord Genuity, for almost four decades, and begun to consider succession. “I’d never given it much thought, to be honest,” he says. “It was my baby and I guess I sort of imagined I’d be there forever. But I realized I’d had enough. It’s a very hard, stressful, Type A business — the market’s changing every minute. So I went to Paul Reynolds, who’d worked for me for 24 years, and asked if he wanted to take over.” He resigned from Canaccord Genuity in 2014.

Community
Peter Brown has served on many boards, including as vice-chairman of Expo 86 and chair of the UBC board of governors, the Vancouver Stock Exchange , BC Place Corporation , and the BC Enterprise Corporation. He was appointed Lead Director and Member of the Finance Committee for the 2010 Winter Olympic & Paralympic Games.