HISTORY THROUGH OUR EYES

Jan. 12, 1978: Sun Life moves head office

Jan. 12, 1978 found Quebecers still reeling from Sun Life Assurance Co.’s announcement Jan. 6 that it would be moving its head office from Montreal to Toronto. The Parti Québécois government had adopted Bill 101, the French Language Charter, the previous August, and the company said the new law would make it hard to operate, including by posing obstacles to the recruitment and retention of personnel. That day, we published a photograph, by the Montreal Gazette’s Tedd Church, of 81-year-old Wilfrid Jolicoeur holding four Sun Life policies he said he would cancel in protest. “Perfectly bilingual, Jolicoeur ... says he is opposed to the Quebec language law, Bill 101, ‘but the government hasn’t yet decided what it’s going to do about head offices. Sun Life should have phoned up Lévesque and asked him what he was going to do’,” we reported. At the time, Sun Life had only two francophone directors out of 21, and only about 200 francophone head office employees out of 1,800, our story said. The move was expected to cost $10 million, according to real estate company executive we quoted in an article in that day’s Business section. That amount included relocation costs for transferring upper management and some middle management staff, including compensation for the higher real-estate prices in Toronto, where the average cost of a home was $67,000 as opposed to $40,000 in Montreal, we wrote. Several other head offices were to follow.