Greyhound

"While Desmarais was moving to Montreal, Transportation Man¬ agement was fulfilling its role. Smaller local and inter-city bus lines in rural Quebec, including those in Levis, Rouyn-Noranda and Sha- winigan, and those serving areas outside municipal Montreal, were bought and brought into Transportation Management. Paul Desmarais was now master of Quebec’s bus transportation industry. Desmarais’s taste for growth was fully developed now; he was on the verge of making the transition that would set him on the path to control of Power Corporation. But that wasn’t where he was con¬ sciously heading. Paul Desmarais was in transportation — that was his opportunity. His vision was to build his empire on transportation, to reach the heights of Canadian corporate position and power by conquering time and space in Canada and the United States. He would build a bus transport network that spanned North America by acquiring interstate bus lines in the United States, then expand from Ontario into Western Canada. But Desmarais quickly learned he was casting covetous eyes on Greyhound territory, and Greyhound wasn’t going to let him in. He had hit a big wall of competition, the entrenched interest of a large, wealthy, continental operation that had the economic power to break him if he were foolish enough to engage it in head-on competition."

"When buying small bus companies in Quebec and Ontario, Des¬ marais was the guerrilla, making small gains, avoiding direct con¬ frontation with big players in the bus business like Voyageur (until he bought it), Trailways, or Greyhound. He was also dealing with smaller companies and was closer to the actual day-to-day operations of his core business."

"Ontario and Quebec, he would have had to take the offensive against Greyhound, but he realized the costs of doing so would consume all he had laboriously accumulated since 1950. So he performed a flank¬ ing manoeuvre — not only on Greyhound, but on the entire business community — by diversifying, buying Gelco and through it Imperial Life Insurance. In this way, Desmarais, the boss of Quebec’s trans¬ portation business, became a new, small challenger on the Quebec corporate scene."