How is it when you work for a super minister? The president of Investissement Québec (IQ) International, Hubert Bolduc, is not complaining. Bernard Landry’s ex-press officer sees similarities between his former boss and Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon. Above all, he places the same hopes in his ability to transform the province’s economy in the long term.
The Minister of Economy, Innovation and Energy, Pierre Fitzgibbon, is at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with one mission in mind: to attract international green economy investors to Quebec . The “superminister” of the Legault government has ambitions for this sector that Bernard Landry, to whom we owe the creation of the Quebec video game sector, would not deny.
Hubert Bolduc is well placed to make the comparison: he was Bernard Landry’s press secretary when he was pulling the strings of economic Quebec. The organization he leads these days has greatly benefited from a major reform carried out in the summer of 2019 by Pierre Fitzgibbon to deal more actively with international investment and Quebec exports.
Hubert Bolduc sees parallels between the two eras. “Twenty years later, we are going to repeat the same exercise as with multimedia to create a green energy and clean transportation industry in Quebec. The electrification of transportation will be the next major growth sector for Quebec. »
Bernard Landry was a superminister long before Pierre Fitzgibbon. Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of State for the Economy and Finance, Minister of Revenue, Industry, Commerce, Science and Technology since 1996 under Lucien Bouchard, he took advantage of this latitude to encourage , at the turn of the millennium, the first video game publishers to settle permanently in the province. Quebec is today the third largest center of video game activities in the world.
“Mr. Landry has placed Quebec in an area where it was not present,” recalls the president of IQ International. “The entire visual effects industry was born out of this, given the close ties with video games. We could also see the same thing today with artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and possibly even quantum computing, which are quite interesting communicating vessels” of the digital economy.
From Sharm el-Sheikh to Bécancour
Under the impetus of Premier François Legault and Pierre Fitzgibbon, Investissement Québec has become much more actively involved in the growth of businesses in the province over the past four years. Its subsidiary, IQ International, has been given the mandate to help local businesses better export or forge more ties with business partners located outside the country.
IQ International has seen its team grow from 500 to 1200 people. The organization also inherited, three years ago, part of the operations of the Center de recherche industrielle du Québec. Within IQ, his role is more about support than financing, observes Hubert Bolduc. “We are a one-stop shop, a toolbox to help businesses in many ways. We can help them both increase their productivity and reduce their ecological footprint,” he says.
This statement should resonate strongly with Quebec business people, who will have to deal in the coming years with a labor shortage and climate targets that will make their activities more complex. Mr. Bolduc also believes that a good part of the solution lies in a general increase in productivity, an element that has historically penalized Quebec and Canadian companies compared to their American rivals, in particular.
To support the current government’s desire to make Quebec’s economy at least as efficient as Ontario’s, IQ International is therefore betting on the development of high value-added industries. “You can’t be good at everything, but Quebec has its cutting-edge sectors: in multimedia, aeronautics and even life sciences, there’s still a lot of room to grow,” says Hubert Bolduc.
The priority of the president of IQ International this week in Sharm el-Sheikh, however, will be to reach out to the representatives of the energy and clean technologies sectors who will be present in Egypt to talk about the climate. “At the previous COP, we realized how many companies there were from these sectors. We are going back there this year with some forty Quebec companies and we hope to bring back some good news. »
The leader of IQ International therefore hopes to be able to return from COP27 with some investment agreements, ideally in line with what is happening in Bécancour. The municipality of Centre-du-Québec has become the epicenter of the provincial strategy related to the electrification of transportation, the growth of the mining sector and the creation of an energy hub revolving around next-generation batteries.
Hubert Bolduc knows how to make life easier for his superministers…