Conrad Black: Paul Desmarais was always a builder, never merely a speculator

Financial Post/FilesPaul Desmarais' career as a financier and industrialist, spanning six decades and three continents, was self-made, uncontroversial, and an almost unbroken series of astute investments.

Paul G. Desmarais, who has just
died at 86, was one of the remarkable and inspiring figures of Canadian history. This may seem an extravagant claim for such a private person, the dimensions of whose career are little appreciated publicly, especially outside Quebec, but it is nothing less than the truth.
Though his father was the leading Franco-Ontarian lawyer in Sudbury, his immense career as a financier and industrialist, spanning six decades and three continents, was self-made, uncontroversial, and an almost unbroken series of astute investments followed by the application of superior management. He was not long regarded as a mere conglomerateur and never derided as an asset-stripper. While he sometimes sold assets he bought, he was always a builder and never merely a speculator, and in Power Corporation of Canada, a bedraggled hodge-podge when he took control of it in the mid-sixties, he leaves a superb, well-balanced and managed corporation strong in every field and place where it is active, with control firmly in the hands of his capable and experienced sons.
There were some disappointments, of course, as in his acquisition of 15% of Canadian Pacific, after which he was blocked by an obdurate management that knew how to put the wagons in a circle to protect their own positions, but fumbled the business until it disintegrated into divergent units. Paul Desmarais was by far the most successful Canadian businessman in France, and the EU generally, and was an honoured and almost legendary figure in Paris and Brussels. He was also a pioneer in commercial relations between Canada and China, starting from when he led a special exploratory business group to that country at the request of prime minister Pierre Trudeau in 1977. He returned often and was an esteemed emissary of this country to successive regimes in China, from the immediate aftermath of the Maoist era to the present. In his relationships, as in all things, he built methodically and imaginatively, selected goals carefully and realistically, was never over-hasty, and never stayed too long with a losing proposition, rare as those were.