Mathieu Gaudreault fishes for ouananiche, drives a Ski-Doo, and drinks “50” tablets. A typical Saguenéen, one might think. However, he was adopted in Rwanda and is today one of the rare Afro-descendant owners of a construction company in Quebec. Portrait of an atypical entrepreneur who is changing the face of his region.
Three “Mathieu”s rotated through Mathieu Gaudreault’s circle of childhood friends. You can guess what he was nicknamed. “Mathieu the Rwandan, I was still… not popular, but known,” he says at age 31, sitting at the foot of the monastery of the Sisters of Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Conseil, which overlooks the Saguenay Fjord.
It was these good sisters who rescued him from among the corpses during the Tutsi genocide. Miraculously repatriated at the age of a few months among the 2,000 or so Rwandans who found refuge in Quebec, “I was in the same gang than Corneille,” he specifies.
Alone in his world in Saguenay, he is still almost alone today among the owners of construction companies in Quebec who can claim African origins. With two companies in Montreal and Chicoutimi, he agreed to share his story to break stereotypes about his native region and demonstrate that this industry resistant to immigrants is progressing towards the integration of visible minorities.
“The first role model I had was Obama. But when I was young, the only role model I had was my father. My father was a police officer,” the businessman says.
He thus became the first black police officer in Quebec to master the Lac-Saint-Jean accent. Not wanting to draw too much attention to himself in the city where he grew up, he began his career in Montreal in the Saint-Michel district. You should have seen the surprise on the faces of the suspects when he would say to them, “Because you keep it simple like that?”
More than a handicap, this gap between the first impression and the second was useful to him in many ways in this first career. “Once, I was called to the scene of domestic violence in a Haitian family. When I intervened, the two stopped fighting immediately. They looked at me and said, ‘How do you talk?’ That stopped the violence right there. It was the first time that domestic violence was stopped because people were interested in the police officer…”
This uniqueness doesn’t erase the blunt, sometimes reductive comments from his fellow officers. The derogatory remarks of his childhood prepared him for this, he says. “Do I take it positively or negatively? You know what. It’s okay. We continue the same. My parents gave me enough love that I don’t define myself by that alone.”
Struck by the police disengagement at the turn of the pandemic and after eight years with the Montreal Police Department, he then developed a taste for entrepreneurship. It was in the construction industry, somewhat resistant to change, that he felt that his difference made… the difference. The reaction of customers or employees seeing the colour of his skin confirmed to him that his place was in construction. “That’s where I saw that I was capable of bringing hope to these people,” he firmly believes. “That’s not what I want to do. It’s what I have to do.”
Surprise everyone
Initially invested in demolition, he then landed roofing contracts. He is now preparing to launch his first entire housing projects. He is certainly not the only Afro-descendant in the construction industry in Montreal. But even someone as perfectly integrated as he is not immune to surprises.
“Usually, when I hire an employee of another nationality, it’s the employee who interviews me,” he says half-seriously. “The number of times I’ve had black employees who thought they had a Quebecer in front of them after a discussion on the phone. The number of times I’ve been told that they were going to talk to my boss… It’s me, the boss ! »
In Saguenay, people already know him, and it’s almost easier to do business there. He’s “Sylvain’s son, the policeman.” His Saguenay branch is growing quickly thanks to these contacts, and he can now claim more employees in the region than in the metropolis. “We have six employees, and that’s something that shows me how much more of the Saguenay I was raised in is; I now have employees from South America.”
Finding your community
Even in Saguenay in the 1990s, where visible minorities were extremely rare, Mathieu Gaudreault never claims to have felt hatred. Incomprehension? Certainly. But, “it was never hatred.”
People were rather “curious or clumsy.” For example, his grandfather, hearing the news of his move to Montreal, advised him to be wary of “races you don’t know.” This same somewhat clumsy kindness led him to invite his grandson to consult his doctor for a heart condition “that runs in the family.”
This “pure wool blueberry”, as he describes himself, finally found his place where no one expected him to. “I understood that my community is not the black community. It is the community of atypical people,” he summarizes.
Anomalies like him are, however, disappearing, in Saguenay as elsewhere in Quebec. As proof, an African grocery store opened last year in the heart of Chicoutimi, and heads of all colors circulate in the city center these days.
This story is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.