https://business.financialpost.com/news/the-odd-couple
There was a time when Charles Sirois shut himself from the public eye like an oyster hiding in a seabed.
Quebec’s high-tech wonderboy built up a telecommunications empire that made him rich after he sold phone company Teleglobe to Bell Canada in 2000. But when much of the rest of it came crashing down under a wall of debt in what has become known as the telecom nuclear winter, he retreated inward. No interviews. No splashy appearances. Just a sober post-mortem of what went wrong. And a rethink of how to make things right.
These days, the Sirois shell has opened again. Big time.
The venture capitalist and chairman of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce is the federalist face of the two-man political movement known as the Coalition pour l’avenir du Québec (Coalition for the future of Quebec). Together with François Legault, a founder of Air Transat and a former Parti Québécois cabinet minister — yes, a separatist — he is wooing disenchanted voters of all stripes with their ideas for wealth creation and change.
The men argue that the question of Quebec’s constitutional independence should be shoved aside for the time being. They say the immediate goal should be economic independence.
This is no flash-in-the-pan group. Polls suggest it would form the next government. And by getting involved so intimately, Mr. Sirois is doing a rare thing for a businessman: Sticking his neck out.
He plays Robin to Mr. Legault’s Batman. Both men authored the documents that now form the basis for their revolutionary gospel. Both men are heavily involved in presenting their positions to the public. But it’s Mr. Legault who does the big stunt work and takes most of the spotlight. Mr. Sirois has so far been the supportive sidekick.
On Wednesday evening, the sidekick pulled into a community hall in the Montreal west island suburb of Ste. Anne de Bellevue in his Porsche Cayenne for the latest in a series of public forums that has taken him from his native Chicoutimi to Sherbrooke. He took his coat off, flopped into a chair and greeted an interviewer, launching into a quick explanation of how one of Canada’s top bankers suddenly became one of Quebec’s most potent political players.
After an introductory phone call from Mr. Legault in August 2010, the two men met at Sirois’ offices on the 38th floor of Montreal’s IBM-Marathon tower, the city’s tallest skyscraper. Mr. Legault shared his political preoccupations. Mr. Sirois, 57, listened politely.
“François said ‘I think it’s time that we all play the same game’, ” Mr. Sirois recalled. “I said: ‘I know my game. What’s your game?’ ”
Though the two men were from opposite ends of the constitutional spectrum, it turned out they agreed on a lot of things. That Quebec’s public service has become a bloated ineffective mess paralyzed by a growing number of special interest groups. That the province is failing to reform its finances and promote productivity. That a collective cynicism and inertia has taken hold of its citizenry, killing risk-taking and real change.
On a sunny Saturday afternoon a few weeks later, Mr. Legault held a cocktail party at his home in the tony neighbourhood of Outremont to lay out his plan. Some 20 like-minded people were invited, including Mr. Sirois and Christiane Germain, the well-known boutique hotel businesswoman. Mr. Legault’s wife, Isabelle Brais, offered snacks she’d prepared. And then her husband made his recruiting pitch.
Two days later, details of the gathering were leaked to a reporter, who wrote up a story. Mr. Sirois was labelled a co-founder of a political-party-in-the-making, even though the group had barely begun. His name has been in the news ever since.
“We believe Quebec has been on pause for the last 20 years and the rest of the world is on fast-forward,” he told the Financial Post. It’s a line he’ll repeat later that evening in a speech to the polite and diverse crowd of 300, the kind of line honed by a politician on the election trail.
Except there is no election trail and there is no election. Only a room packed full of people disenchanted with the current Liberal-PQ duopoly in the provincial legislature.
It’s standing room only on this night in Ste. Anne. And though Mr. Sirois isn’t a politician and won’t run for office when a party forms officially as expected next month, he sure sounds like one.
“I’ll tell you honestly,” he says. “If Quebec stays poor, it’s not going to change much for me in my life. But it will change things enormously for my children and my grand-children. And that’s very important to me. That’s my motivation … Here in Quebec, businesspeople shut their mouths. But I’ve decided enough is enough.”
Corporate Canada in general tends to steer clear of direct political involvement and party politics, with rare exceptions. It’s hard to imagine too many people in Mr. Sirois’ position of power on Bay Street doing what he’s doing. Jacques Ménard, Bank of Montreal’s top banker in Quebec, is spearheading a grass-roots group to tackle the high-school dropout problem. But Mr. Sirois’ political engagement goes much further.
“[He doesn’t project] the button-down Canadian banker image that one thinks of. But I mean he’s based in Montreal, not Toronto,” says Karl Moore, a leadership expert at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management. “But it’s also, I think, that he’s just made enough money and has enough freedom that he can do whatever he wants.”
As Mr. Moore notes, Mr. Sirois has made his fortune. He did so by selling his stake in Teleglobe to Bell, netting an estimated $850-million. International wireless network developer TIW was sold to Vodafone for $3.5-billion, generating proceeds to Mr. Sirois of an estimated $225-million. And oh yeah, Fido? He founded that, too. When it was sold to Rogers, reports pegged his gain at $27-million.
He is the 12th richest person in the province, according to a recent wealth ranking by L’Actualité magazine. Approachable and jovial, he’s not a rich snob by any means. But he’s not embarassed by his wealth either.
Mr. Sirois says he spoke to CIBC’s corporate governance committee to advise them of his political involvement. The committee concluded he was acting on a personal basis and the members were comfortable with that. If they hadn’t been, he says he would have resigned from the CIBC board.
At heart, Charles Sirois is a successful entrepreneur now supporting other entrepreneurs. He has personally started 20 companies from scratch and is helping others do the same.
In Africa, he supplies money and mentoring to nascent capitalists through his Enablis network. In Canada, he assists promising technology businesses through his private capital firm Telesystem. Founded in 1984 to do telecom deals, the company has switched its sights into other promising technology firms, providing capital currently for 23 businesses from pig vaccine maker Prevtec to TV content producer Zone3. Its assets are worth $250-million.
“He’s everywhere,” says Telesystem colleague Robert Talbot. “He’s a doer. He likes to move things.”
Mr. Sirois has spoken his mind before, writing two books including one published in 2000 calling for a complete overhaul of the social welfare system. Mr. Legault, 54, says he read the books and found in them pieces of a kindred spirit.
Among Mr. Sirois’ remedies back then: Governments should nix the patchwork of current public assistance programs and instead give everyone a sum of money every year to manage as they want, a kind of a guaranteed minimum income; and governments should end subsidies to universities and instead boost loans to students to make them pay the real cost of their education.
Among the Sirois-Legault position papers now: Crack down on Montreal merchants who fail to speak to their customers in French; abolish school boards; lay off 4,000 workers at Hydro-Quebec; and legislate a firmer mandate for the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec so the pension fund manager does more to help local firms and stoke the economy, even if there might be better investments to be had outside the province.
These are not timid ideas. Not surprisingly, they’ve generated a significant share of opposition. Premier Jean Charest calls them “brutal and radical.” Students shouted down the two men this week over the tuition question.
But they’re also winning converts. Fundraising parties at $250-a-head are reportedly well attended. The movement claims to have 5,000 members.
The Caisse suggestion stands out particularly for one reason: It bankrolled much of Sirois’ run in the 1980s and 1990s, a sugar-daddy to Mr. Sirois’ sweet dreams of laying underground cables around the world to bring wireless phones to the developing world’s masses.
“He said he wanted to ‘liberate the world,’” said long-term friend François Duffar, the former president of communications firm Cossette. “He said ‘I want to cut the wire’ so people can talk everywhere.”
When things turned sour for the tech industry in 2000 and Mr. Sirois was hunting for more financing for his holdings, investors including the Caisse balked. He eventually lost control of or sold most of his telecom assets when creditors squeezed him out, surrendering $2-billion in net worth.
The general view is that Mr. Sirois joined a long line of home-grown entrepreneurs in receiving financial support from the Caisse and that he wants to make sure other people have the same chance he did. The pension fund had barely 11% of its $151.7-billion in net assets invested in Quebec last year. He’d like to see that number grow.
What happens next in the adventures of the dynamic duo seems clear. Mr. Legault plans to unveil a detailed action plan forming the basis of a political party platform on Nov.14. The coalition may merge with the conservative Action démocratique du Québec party. And a new party will be born.
Mr. Sirois won’t run as a candidate. He says he’s too rich to become a politician. Quebec voters are “suspicious” of people with assets, he once said, even if wealth creates a sort of independence that may actually build trust with the populace.
Mr. Sirois won’t run as a candidate. He says he’s too rich to become a politician. Quebec voters are “suspicious” of people with assets, he once said, even if wealth creates a sort of independence that may actually build trust with the populace.
Regardless, he says: “I have economic interests in the province up and down. I would be in permanent conflict on everything. I have a health-care business, I have a hotel businesses, everything.” He can’t break with those interests overnight.
The options then? He could be party president, he says. He could steer its economic policy making or fundraising.
No matter what he does, the challenge for him and for Mr. Legault is the same. No political leader or movement in years has arguably succeeded in articulating a credible vision of Quebec as a growing and prosperous society and winning support for the sacrifices needed to achieve that.
In many ways, coming out of his shell was the easy part for Mr. Sirois. Finding that magic pearl will be something else.
In many ways, coming out of his shell was the easy part for Mr. Sirois. Finding that magic pearl will be something else.
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