BLUNT MESSAGE FROM GARBER
Says language wars bad for business
Bluntness is something rarely served at Quebec business luncheons, which is why Mitch Garber’s address Monday to the Canadian Club of Montreal was such a blast.
The former panellist/entrepreneur from the Quebec version of Dragons’ Den came out scorching, with Quebec’s language tension, high-school dropout rate and attitude toward wealth and success among his targets.
The 52-year-old Montreal native, currently chief executive officer of gaming company Caesars Acquisition Company and chairman of Cirque du Soleil (since its majority sale last year), said he liked the quality of life and values in Quebec enough to move back here from abroad and pay the high taxes, but there is much to do to make the province a better place.
The high dropout rate — ahead of only the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunavut in Canada — “is a good place to start,” he said.
“Lack of good education is at the core of everything that could and does go wrong in a young child’s life,” he said. “We need to promote an agenda that puts Quebec in the top third in Canada in graduation rates.”
The province also could do its young people a favour by teaching about money, finance and entrepreneurship in elementary and high school, he said. That way, they’ll “know how to navigate the real world.”
Quebec’s linguistic “solitudes” — anglophones who continue to resist learning French or embracing French culture, and francophones who make no effort to learn the world’s main language of business and the Internet — are holding back the province and themselves, said Garber, who delivered his speech to an audience of about 350 in both English and French.
He said “the resistance by members of my own Jewish and anglo communities to learn, live and speak French is short-sighted and embarrassing. We are poorer for not knowing Martin Matte and Robert Charlebois.”
Forty years of language war also has been bad for business, he said. “(Former premier) René Lévesque was right to claim back the French language and French culture dominance in Quebec, but at some point, we need to recalibrate. Let’s have it dominant, but produce bilingual workers. The language war has to end. There shouldn’t be a war.”
For Garber, co-chairman this year of the Centraide fundraising drive, the wariness, suspicion and/ or indifference of many Quebecers toward the province’s successful entrepreneurs also is a sore point.
The “lingering religious belief people should not talk about money and financial success ... is complete bullshit,” he said.
The province actually has a rich entrepreneurial culture, he noted. A global achiever like Alimentation Couche-Tard co-founder Alain Bouchard should be as familiar to Quebecers as Montreal Canadiens goalie Carey Price, he said. “He is arguably better at what he does than Carey Price is, and Carey Price is bloody good.”
He also mentioned other Quebec success stories: Power Corp., Saputo, CGI, Stingray Digital Group, Transcontinental.
“We should celebrate our business and philanthropic heroes,” Garber said.
He didn’t lump Pierre Karl Péladeau in the same category, publicly questioning the “blind belief” in the business acumen of the former Parti Québécois leader and Québecor executive, a topic that appears to be “still taboo in Quebec.”
Garber said that for every Quebec business that gets acquired, three acquisitions are made by Quebec businesses, but that’s not the way some opportunistic politicians present it, making it seem provincial gems are being gobbled up by outside interests when companies like Rona or St. Hubert or Cirque du Soleil get sold, he said.
The right to sell is fundamental in entrepreneurship, he said, and creating political complications or blowback for those who want to do it does no service to the investment climate in the province.