MONTREAL — The Commercial Establishments Business Hours Act, passed into law in Quebec just over a half century ago, is a seemingly humdrum piece of legislation that established when stores in the province could open their doors to customers. Namely, not before 8:30 a.m. and not after 6 p.m. from Monday to Wednesday; on Thursdays and Fridays closing time was extended until 9 p.m. On Saturdays, they had to shut by 5 p.m., and they were to remain closed on holidays including Christmas, Easter and la Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Fines for breaking the rules were as high as $1,000.

Notably, establishments selling sundries such as tobacco products, pastries and newspapers, and had no more than three employees, would be exempt. The first “dépanneur”—a term derived from a word for helping someone overcome temporary difficulties—opened in Montreal’s Rosemont neighbourhood the same year. 

It would be another decade before Alain Bouchard opened his own “dep,” in the suburb of Laval. By 1985, two years after Quebec’s language authority gave benediction to the word dépanneur, there were 34 Couche-Tard locations across the province. Over the next few decades, the chain hoovered up assets, among them Ontario-based Mac’s, Circle K in the U.S. and Statoil in Scandinavia, Poland, the Baltics and Russia. During the last financial year, Alimentation Couche-Tard had over US$17.5 billion in sales at more than 16,700 locations around the globe.

Bouchard is one of Canada’s richest people, at the helm of what could soon be the world’s biggest convenience store empire. Couche-Tard recently announced it had sent a “friendly proposal” to acquire Seven & i Holdings, the Tokyo-based owner of 7-Eleven. Should the deal go through, Quebec will become the de facto command centre for more than 100,000 convenience stores—the mother of all dépanneur chains.

Terms of the non-binding offer weren’t made public, though shares of the Slurpee-fuelled juggernaut shot up a diabetic 23 per cent at the mere prospect of a merger. Meanwhile, Couche-Tard’s own shares barely budged, suggesting the market has faith in the company’s ability to digest such a purchase, which some have estimated could be as much as US$86 billion.

It would be absurd to suggest Bouchard’s success is solely the result of a dusty, 54-year-old law. But if all a good entrepreneur needs is a spark, then the store-hours regulation was a brushfire. It afforded anyone with ambition and a wee bit of capital the government-blessed opportunity to sell life’s necessities, booze and cigarettes included, at a significant markup at all hours, holidays be damned. Consider the law’s legacy: there are about 5,300 dépanneurs in Quebec, accounting for nearly half of the country’s lot. There are more such businesses per capita in Quebec than in Texas, America’s convenience store capital. 

Bouchard also has had an enduring partner in the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. Quebec’s public pension fund manager first invested in Couche-Tard in 1996, and over the last three years the company has repurchased nearly 25 million of its own shares from the Caisse, to the tune of $1.7 billion. The Caisse remains one of the company’s major shareholders. 

If a measure of a company’s success is its ability to fend off foreign suitors—a bedrock belief of current Premier François Legault—then Couche-Tard has been a shining star. The Americans might have usurped the Boucherville, Que.-founded Rona hardware store chain, just as they gobbled up Cirque du Soleil. Yet Couche-Tard still controls a considerable chunk of the world’s convenience store market from a nondescript, Quebecer-owned pile in Laval’s industrial scrapes.

There are hurdles, though, between that Laval pile and the 7-Eleven prize in Japan. U.S. antitrust regulators are likely to sniff around the potential merger, if only because it would result in one of the biggest retail chains in the U.S. The current crop of U.S. antitrust regulators is known for zapping corporate monoliths down to size (bonjour, Google!), not for allowing them to form under its watch. Also, some Americans are troubled by the rather unlikely prospect of Couche-Tard’s Sloche replacing their beloved Slurpees. (As someone who has too often imbibed the former, I can only say: fair enough.)

But, oh, the synergies. Japan’s well-documented yen for convenience stores was itself born out of the country’s Large-Scale Retail Store Law, an eerily familiar regulation passed in 1974 that set business hours and holidays for large stores, with a notable exception for smaller ones. The modern-day Japanese konbini is similar to the dépanneur, with notable differences. Yes, it offers alcohol, energy drinks and vapes. But it’s also a place where you can buy clothing and fresh food, pay bills, print manuscripts and get concert tickets. 

In Japan, 7-Eleven stores “have become part of the everyday infrastructure of life,” said Marc Steinberg, a Concordia University film studies professor who is writing a book about Japanese konbini culture. Translation: Japan’s 7-Eleven model has shown you can cram more saleables into dépanneurs the world over. Quebec has already gifted the world with Big Poutine. Just wait for Big Dep.

Editor’s note: This column was updated to remove a typo on the estimated value of a deal to purchase Seven & i Holdings.

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.”