Jean Parisien

"While all this was going on Desmarais and Jean Parisien, the ac¬ countant who had helped him with Sudbury Bus Lines, formed Trans¬ portation Management Corporation Ltd., a partnership, with Desmarais as senior partner. Here Desmarais was setting up a new company, rather than buying an existing one. He was no longer content to buy what was available; he was now ready to bid for bus lines that weren’t being put up for sale. Transportation Management, a holding company, was going to be the umbrella under which he would build a transportation empire. The holding company structure would provide a system for manage¬ ment of tax and partnership matters while ensuring privacy, but would also provide centralized management for non-transportation elements of the empire Desmarais and Parisien were planning. Bus companies usually came with real estate — the land and buildings that housed administration, maintenance and operations; inter-urban bus lines had terminals with concession stands and restaurants. If Desmarais were to expand into a number of bussing operations, it would make more sense to run the bus companies as bus companies and have the holding company manage the real estate and properties, rather than have each bus company run its own real estate operation and duplicate man¬ agement jobs and costs."

"When David Kilgour resigned at the end of 1970, he was replaced by James Bums, who had been Great-West’s u.s. director of Mar¬ keting. A man who enjoyed Desmarais’s support and confidence, Bums orchestrated one of Desmarais’s prime intentions for Great- West — penetration and expansion into the huge, lucrative u.s. mar¬ ket. Desmarais’s other intention, amalgamation of Great-West Life and Imperial Life, never occurred as it was blocked by the federal insurance regulatory agency. It may seem that acquiring and integrating Great-West into Power would be enough to occupy one man’s attention and satisfy his am¬ bitions, especially considering that this was all occurring during the fundamental restructuring of Power. Such is not the case. Desmarais had Jean Parisien, trusty chief of staff, to depend upon to deal with the details of corporate architecture. Parisien, in turn, had inherited the staff of Power and had conducted his shuffling, bringing in some people from his support staff at Trans-Canada, moving out some of the Power staff that didn’t fit in to the new regime, and generally"