Given Herb Doman’s place in B.C.’s business pantheon as a self-made lumber baron, one can be forgiven for thinking Doman Building Materials Group is a surviving part of the same Doman family empire.Amar Doman, 53, founder and CEO of Doman Building Materials and owner of the BC Lions, is indeed part of the famed Doman family. He is the nephew of Herb and Gordon Doman, and son of Ted Doman—brothers who together built Doman Industries on Vancouver Island into a billion-dollar lumber business.
The divisions include logging in Western Canada—along with road building, harvesting and trucking—Doman Lumber , Lignum Forest Products and Honsador Lumber, a lumber and building materials company with several operations in Hawaii and Oregon. Amar had already started building his own business empire at the age of 18, fresh out of high school. In a Polestar Podcast interview with Jason Boudreau of VELA Wealth, Amar said his mother, Jaswant Doman, loaned him $30,000 to buy his first lumber mill in 1988.
He went on to buy CanWel Building Materials from Canfor Corp. and Weldwood in 1999. The company was renamed Doman Building Materials in 2004, after Amar took the company public. “I still remain the sole shareholder of that business , but it was kind of a nod to my father,” Doman told Boudreau.