Paul Desmarais - Career

Career

After having graduated from University of Ottawa and McGill University, Desmarais began his career at a Montreal accounting firm called Courtois, Fredette et cie, before working at a bankrupt short-line railroad and bus line, Sudbury Bus Lines, established by his grandfather. He then acquired additional bus lines in the Ottawa area and Quebec City (including Quebec Autobus and Provincial Transport). The company was sold to him for a symbolic 1 CAD, because it was almost bankrupt. By 1968 the holding company which Desmarais had acquired three years earlier, Trans-Canada Corporation Fund (TCCF), owned the bus line Provincial Transport, an interest in Toronto-based Imperial Life Assurance and Gesca Ltée, (which had an interest in the Montreal paper La Presse). That year TCCF made a share-exchange offer with the Power Corporation of Canada, headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, whereby Paul Desmarais became Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

Read more about this topic:  Paul Desmarais

Famous quotes containing the word career:

    “Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.
    Lawrence Kutner (20th century)

    Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.
    Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)

    The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.
    Jessie Bernard (20th century)