Paul Magder sacrificed his business to fight for something that’s now common place — the right to sell to customers on Sundays.

His sons Glen and Paul Jr. say their father — whose fur business collapsed under the weight of hefty fines, plunging it into bankruptcy in the mid-1990s, a hefty price for his spirited flouting of Sunday shopping laws — was bitter about how he was treated by the province but maintained the same conviction he had then, until his last breath.

Magder died Saturday. He was 83.

“He will be remembered as a bit of a maverick and somebody who paid a financial price for standing up for himself,” Glen said. “He was morally grounded.”

Glen said his father, who battled Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, suffered from declining health in the last few years.

In a 2009 interview with the Star an unapologetic Magder showed no signs of wavering from earlier challenge against the province.

“I’m not sorry about what I did,” Magder said. “But maybe I wouldn’t have even bothered. I had no idea the government could be so unfair.”

Magder began challenging the law in 1978, long before Sunday shopping was permitted in 1992.

The province pursued fines and contempt charges as Magder remained open for hundreds of Sundays, racking up $514,000 in fines.

“He refused to play the game they were forcing him into,” Paul Jr. said of his father, who opened Paul Magder Furs in the 1950s, on Spadina Avenue, after splitting from the fur shop operated by his father, (Paul Jr. and Glen’s grandfather) Morris. “He was never going to back down.”

The Retail Business Holidays Act allowed exceptions to the ban on Sunday shopping for tourist areas, gas stations and convenience stores, and Magder was incensed by the unfairness of it.

His battle went to the Supreme Court of Canada, which refused to hear the case for technical reasons. Legal bills and fines took a toll. The courts ruled against extending his bankruptcy protection, and the furrier closed his doors through the winter of 1993-94.

The store reopened as Glen & Paul Magder Furs in 1994.

Glen said the once bustling business which featured a retail, modification and repair operation never quite recovered, even after Magder reopened the rebranded shop.

Competition from the malls, declining U.S. tourism, higher property taxes and the efforts of animal rights groups took a toll.

“He had to start over,” Paul Jr. said.

After more than five decades of business, Magder walked away from the Spadina location in 2011, relocating into a shared space with another retailer on Dundas Street West. He closed the business for good in 2015.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The fight over Sunday shopping wasn’t Magder’s first act of defiance. In the 1950s he decided to plant a tree outside his store like he had seen along the boulevards in New York City. City staff removed it a few years later, Glen said.

“He thought you shouldn’t be prohibited from doing things if you weren’t harming yourself or anybody else,” Glen said. “He changed the province, in a way.”