Saskatoon philanthropist Joe Remai remembered as a 'true community builder'

Aishwarya Dudha · CBC News

· Posted: Jun 19, 2025 4:11 PM EDT | Last Updated: 4 hours ago

Joseph Remai, 1 of Saskatoon's best-known real property developers and philanthropists, has died at the property of 89, his household confirms.

Remai, known arsenic "Joe," died connected June 12.

He grew up connected a workplace adjacent Carrot River, northeast of Saskatoon, 1 of 11 children calved to Hungarian immigrants. After getting an engineering degree, helium co-founded Remai Construction on with his member Frank successful the aboriginal 1960s. 

"Joe started with fundamentally nothing, and helium had bully fortune.… But I deliberation it was his thrust and determination that made him palmy and enabled him to enactment the community," said Barry Remai, 1 of his sons.

He started by gathering schools and hospitals and yet expanded to apartments, commercialized spaces and hotels crossed Saskatchewan. 

He lived with Parkinson's illness for implicit a decade, but complications from a changeable successful 2022 led to his declining health. Barry said his begetter was afloat of determination and energy, adjacent successful his 80s. 

"I retrieve I was astatine our bureau 1 time and I could perceive this thumping.… There was immoderate enactment that needed to beryllium done connected the extortion of our office, and he'd climbed the ladder, about, you know, 15, 20 feet up," said Barry.

"Nothing frightened him."

But beyond his enactment in construction, Joe Remai became a unit successful philanthropy successful health, education, and assemblage development. 

Premier Scott Moe, offering condolences to Remai's household successful a station connected societal media, called him "a existent assemblage builder" whose interaction volition beryllium felt acold and wide.

Just past year, Remai made a $25-million donation to Saskatchewan Polytechnic — the largest from an idiosyncratic successful the school's history, it said — for the Joseph A. Remai Saskatoon Campus. 

"We are highly grateful for Joe's transformative impact," Larry Rosia, Sask Polytech's president and CEO, said successful a statement.

"Joseph A. Remai Saskatoon Campus and volition payment the lives of our students, their families, and Saskatchewan communities good into the future."

Sask Polytech besides created the Joseph A. Remai Legacy Endowment Fund, which volition connection semipermanent pupil support.

"He believed successful education, successful amended wellness care, and successful gathering a stronger aboriginal for each of us," Moe said. "His bequest volition unrecorded connected successful the lives helium touched and the communities helium helped shape."

The Joseph Alfred Remai Family Foundation, founded successful 2012, has funded projects crossed Saskatchewan, donating implicit $12 cardinal implicit the years, according to its website.

"We're going to proceed to enactment the assemblage successful ways that we deliberation would benignant of honour Joe's archetypal imaginativeness for it. And I deliberation helium would beryllium precise blessed to spot that," Barry said. 

But what radical didn't spot is who Joe Remai was down the scenes, said Barry: a father, a mentor and a antheral who loved laughter. 

"He was conscionable a high-energy chap with a large consciousness of humour," Barry said. "We're going to miss him dearly. And helium had rather an interaction connected his household and everyone helium knew." 

A work is acceptable for June 27 successful Saskatoon, an online obituary says.