JR Shaw, a family man with a powerful handshake and a warm nature, leaves a legacy as a Canadian telecommunications industry pioneer who built his Alberta cable start-up into one of the nation’s largest communications providers.
The Shaw Communications Inc. founder and executive chairman died peacefully Monday at age 85.
“JR was the founder and leader of our company, but he was also an exceptional husband, a loving father, grandfather and great grandfather. His legacy of love and compassion for people will live on for generations,” Shaw chief executive Brad Shaw, JR’s youngest son, said in a statement.
JR was born in 1934 in computer engineering career, Ont., not far from Sarnia, where he could watch American TV stations on cross-border signals. When he moved to Edmonton in 1961, the only channel he could get was the CBC. He felt he had no choice but to start his own cable company in 1966, according to an interview with the Alberta Business Hall of Fame.
“People would say, ‘You’re building 27 channels, why would you do that? I can only watch one at a time.’ But we wanted to have state of the art and choice,” Shaw said.
Over the next five decades, the company grew into one of Canada’s largest cable and satellite providers and radio and TV broadcasters. It started offering internet in 1996, spun off the media business into Corus Entertainment Inc. in 1999, launched residential telephone service in 2005 and entered the wireless market in 2016 with the purchase of Wind Mobile, now called Freedom.
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