Canada’s hockey-playing garbage billionaire lures suitors for his empire

Just before midnight in Toronto, in an enclave of stately brick mansions, a sedan stopped on a deserted street, and a man dressed in dark clothing got out.

In one hand he held a mobile phone, in the other, a handgun. He raised both, fired the gun at one of the street’s biggest homes and fled. The scene was captured by a security camera.

The house belongs to Patrick Dovigi, one of Canada’s richest men. But he’s decidedly not old money.

The son of a restaurateur from the working-class city of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Dovigi came to Toronto as a teenage hockey goalie for an exclusive private school, was drafted by the Edmonton Oilers and eventually abandoned the sport for finance and then, garbage. He built GFL Environmental Inc. into North America’s fourth-largest waste company, becoming wealthy enough to collect Basquiats, trade superyachts and own trophy homes from Aspen to South Florida.

Now, he’s deep in negotiations that could lead to the biggest take-private deal in Canadian history.

GFL, which has an enterprise value around US$26 billion, has received proposals from two competing groups of potential buyers. One includes KKR & Co. Inc., Energy Capital Partners and Blackstone Inc.; the other boasts Brookfield Asset Management and IFM Investors. Both groups have proposed rolling Dovigi’s entire stake into the transaction and keeping him involved in the business, according to people familiar with the matter. While the companies are still negotiating the terms and structure of a potential transaction, a deal could be reached as early as next week, the people said. There’s no certainty the talks will lead to an agreement, and other suitors could also emerge.

The shooting outside Dovigi’s home, which happened in September of 2024, in some ways illustrates the unusual nature of the business Dovigi built — and the man himself.

He assembled GFL from a long string of acquisitions, often small, family-owned businesses in the waste industry. His blue-collar roots helped him bond with company founders whose backgrounds mirrored his own, convincing them to sell. He proved equally adept at persuading financiers to fund his plans. His ability to straddle those two, very different worlds has been key to his success.

But building his sprawling business brought Dovigi into competition with a host of smaller rivals. One of those, prosecutors allege, developed a fixation on him, even though Dovigi says the two men never met. That rival, a local construction boss, has been accused of hiring someone to fire at Dovigi’s house, although the charges have been stayed pending further evidence.

With the investigation ongoing, Dovigi, 47, won’t discuss the case. But in an interview, he credits his success to his comfort dealing with financiers and family-business founders alike.

“That is the world I grew up in, lived in — I can relate to those kind of people,” he said. “One of my big skills is I can relate to a driver, I can relate to an entrepreneur, and I have the skill set to kind of deal with Wall Street.”

For a chief executive worth an estimated US$3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Dovigi’s work habits can seem shockingly direct. He drives his own car, answers his own phone and schedules most of his own meetings. He greets employees by name and has an uncanny ability to recall personal stories and conversations from years earlier. GFL press releases carry his cell number and email address.

“With Patrick, it’s different — you deal with him himself,” said Jamie Edmiston, chief executive of yacht brokerage Edmiston, who has worked with Dovigi buying and selling yachts. “You don’t need 20 lawyers. He does what he says and says what he does.”

One of Dovigi’s two boats formerly belonged to Bill Gates. His art collection, meanwhile, includes pieces from Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha and more than a dozen by Jean-Michel Basquiat — making him one of the world’s leading collectors of the artist’s work, according to a dealer who specializes in Basquiat. But Dovigi did not come from money.

He grew up in the Italian-Canadian community of a steel-making town seven hours’ drive northwest of Toronto. A high-school hockey scholarship brought him to the city, and he initially thought he would pursue a career in the sport. He quit after the Oilers sent him down to their farm team, realizing that he wanted more control over his own fate, and enrolled in what is now Toronto Metropolitan University to study business instead.

In Canada, however, hockey can be more useful than business school.

Someone he used to play with helped him land a job at a Toronto merchant bank. When the bank asked him to recover a troubled loan to a local waste-transfer station caught illegally storing garbage, another hockey friend whose family owned a trucking company helped him clean up the mess. When Dovigi had the idea of buying a string of similar garbage businesses in the area, a guy with whom he used to play shinny — informal hockey — put him in touch with the man’s father, who happened to be the founder of an investment bank.

Dovigi’s initial plan was to roll these local businesses into a regional one, then sell it to one of the waste industry’s bigger companies. But when the 2008 financial crisis hit, the big companies — which all had sizable U.S. operations — pulled back from Canada. Rather than sell, he saw an opportunity to expand.

“These guys effectively retreated and gave me a blank canvas across Canada,” he said.

GFL, founded in 2007, grew quickly through hundreds of acquisitions across hauling, recycling and disposal. Winning the deals required more than offering a good price.

Many of the companies Dovigi pursued had been built over decades by founders and their families. GFL, he said, often agreed to conditions that were insignificant on a spreadsheet but important to sellers: keeping a son or daughter employed, retaining longtime workers or allowing the founder to stay involved. Dovigi made the pitches in person, face to face.

“I make it personal that they’re also dealing with me as a founder,” he said. “They’re not dealing with some executive that might be here for three years or five years.”

Dovigi’s empire extends beyond GFL. He also helped build two other multibillion-dollar businesses: GFL Environmental Services, which is partly owned by Apollo Global Management Inc. and BC Partners and is worth US$5.6 billion, and Green Infrastructure Partners, recapitalized last year at a valuation of US$3.1 billion.

Working in the hyper-local world of waste management meant brushing up against colorful characters. Two people associated with businesses Dovigi bought ended up serving jail time for crimes they committed before Dovigi’s acquisition — one for environmental violations, the other for paying bribes. But a series of troubling incidents beginning in 2024 suggested that someone was targeting GFL.

First, a dozen company trucks were set alight at yards across Ontario. Then came the shootings at the homes of Dovigi and another GFL executive the same night. Then gunfire at some of the company’s facilities and the homes of two more executives. No injuries were reported.

The incidents came at the start of a wave of mysterious shootings around Toronto that also targeted the U.S. Consulate and several synagogues. Authorities eventually uncovered a shooter-for-hire network behind them all, taking jobs for a range of clients, one of whom may have been a foreign terrorist. Middlemen used encrypted messaging apps to communicate with shooters, who were required to provide cellphone video proving they had completed their assignments and were paid about $1,000, according to a person familiar with the investigation who was not authorized to share the details publicly.

In April, Toronto police charged Ilan Philosophe, the founder of excavation company Astro Group, in connection with the shootings at Dovigi’s house and the home of another GFL executive. The charges — two counts of recklessly discharging a firearm and two counts of conspiracy to recklessly discharge a firearm —  were later stayed, meaning the prosecution was halted but can be restarted within a year. The investigation is continuing.

Philosophe’s lawyer did not respond to multiple emails from Bloomberg seeking comment. Messages left with Astro Group also were not returned.

Dovigi says he had never met Philosophe. Yet text messages Philosophe sent to GFL executives and obtained by Bloomberg show Philosophe appeared intensely interested in him.

Like Dovigi, Philosophe had built a business from the ground up, albeit at a much smaller scale. And his business competed with a GFL subsidiary for shoring and excavating jobs around Toronto. In the messages, amid insults and rap references, he mocked Dovigi as a “backup NHL goalie” while repeatedly contrasting the way the two men financed their businesses. Philosophe boasted that he owned all of his company, used “zero debt” and had succeeded without “financial engineering.”

Toronto police have separately charged Philosophe with sending harassing communications to an executive at GFL’s sister company, Green Infrastructure Partners. A court has barred him from contacting that executive and several others, including Dovigi.

GFL went public in 2020. Yet public ownership exposed the tension inherent in Dovigi’s model. Acquisitions built the company, but they also brought leverage, and investors have questioned the debt that fueled the relentless dealmaking. Shares currently trade around $43, roughly 17% below their 2025 peak.

The slump in stock price, however, helped attract interest from buyout firms convinced the business holds more value than the public market recognizes. GFL’s board has formed a special committee to consider the offers, and Dovigi isn’t a member of it. He has said he therefore can’t discuss the process.

But he has made clear he isn’t looking to cash out. Dovigi, who has a stake equivalent to about six per cent of GFL when his stock options are taken into account, intends to roll his shares into a transaction and continue building the company. Because of a dual-class share structure, he maintains just under 30 per cent of voting rights.

GFL’s acquisition apparatus remains highly dependent on him, his relationships with financiers, his ability to bond with family-business founders, his willingness to negotiate in person. He is, in other words, a key piece of what the company’s suitors are trying to buy. And he sees plenty of room for GFL to grow.

“If someone is going to sell their business, I potentially think I have a leg up, because I have 350 references today for people to call,” he said.