Stephen R. Grant

About Stephen R. Grant

In 2024 the Waterloo Region Law Association gave Stephen R. Grant its Coulter A. Osborne Award, which honours a member whose integrity, comity and beneficence in practice and in public life reflect well on the profession and the association. Stephen is counsel at Bennett Grant LLP in Kitchener, and for more than forty years mutual insurers across Ontario, and in other parts of Canada, have relied on Stephen for advice on how their boards are governed, on the regulation that applies to them and on amalgamations between insurers.

Children's charities have been a constant alongside that career. Stephen helped found Camp McGovern, a registered charity running an overnight summer camp for less fortunate children, and has stayed on its board ever since. There were also more than 25 years as a Big Brother, plus 21 years on the board of Big Brothers Big Sisters that included three terms as its president.

Stephen grew up in Kitchener-Waterloo, went to Waterloo Collegiate Institute and studied political science at the University of Waterloo before law school at the University of Windsor. Articles at the Kitchener firm Artindale, Whitfield came next, and after the 1983 call to the bar Stephen stayed on there as an associate. Late in 1984 Stephen joined the firm that's now Bennett Grant, which was practising as Lochead, Sills back then, and moved to a solicitor's practice from that point on. In those earlier years Stephen also gave guest lectures at both of the area's universities on business law topics, franchising and commercial financing among them.

Beyond insurers, the practice takes in charities and non-share capital corporations, along with estate planning and the administration of estates. The insurance work reaches into policy, too: Stephen sits on advisory committees to the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario on issues that touch insurers, and has helped amend statutes in Ontario and other provinces that apply to them.