MONTREAL — The view is pretty good from Pierre Karl Péladeau’s office on the 13th floor of Quebecor’s headquarters in Montreal’s old financial district. The corporate outlook is perhaps even better. Quebecor remains an ever-churning online-newspaper-book-TV-movie content machine and the province’s reigning cultural clearinghouse—one underwritten by Videotron, its almost comically profitable internet and wireless outfit.

But as the man better known as PKP approaches his 61st birthday, he finds himself saddled with a pair of existential problems. First: Who among his family members, executive coterie and sizable brood could take over the reins of Quebecor, the company he has helmed (save for one notable interruption) since 1999? Second, and more existential still: What’s the future of this company his father Pierre Péladeau started in 1965 to become the most conspicuously fleur-de-lys-draped member of Quebec Inc.?

As with anything PKP-related, the answer to the first question is complicated. To be sure, he isn’t going anywhere in the near future. Though he chafed at his destiny during his youth, Péladeau has since come to revel in Quebecor’s businesses as much as his father before him. (Pierre, notably enough, died before he retired.) PKP is president and CEO not only of Quebecor, but of Videotron and Groupe TVA, a testament to this love, if not his controlling nature.

Still, succession is inevitable, and when the time comes he is decidedly short on heirs. His five children are all too young—his eldest, Marie, is 22; his youngest is still in diapers—while his brother Érik is older than him. Their sister Anne-Marie is certainly out of the running, as she successfully sued PKP and Érik, winning just over $36 million plus interest and costs after a decades-long feud.

Meanwhile, the executives with whom PKP surrounded himself, and who have been instrumental in wringing slot machine-like profits from the company, are no longer around. His longtime confidant Robert Dépatie, widely regarded as the brains behind Videotron’s success, stepped down as CEO of Quebecor in 2014, while his successor Pierre Dion decamped in 2017. Former Videotron head Jean-François Pruneau left the company last year. 

The answer to PKP’s succession conundrum might well be a fellow they used to call “Petit Jean.” Jean Péladeau is Pierre Karl’s half-brother, the only child born to Pierre Péladeau and Manon Blanchette. Born in 1991, Petit Jean—he is the youngest of his father’s seven children—“was practically the son of Quebecor and of Pierre Péladeau’s immediate entourage,” wrote Bernard Bujold, Pierre Péladeau’s assistant and eventual biographer, in 2003’s Pierre Péladeau cet inconnu. 

Like PKP, who moved around Quebecor in his formative years, the 31-year-old Jean has worked in various managerial positions within the company. (He became vice-president of “operational convergence” in August 2021.) “He is everywhere in the business,” a former Quebecor executive told me recently. 

This executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid the wrath PKP has been known to unleash over unwanted disclosures, believes Jean is in line to take over the company, an opinion shared by many in Quebecor’s orbit. “It’s pretty obvious that he’s been groomed for higher office,” Lise Ravary, a longtime Journal de Montréal columnist who has since left the Quebecor-owned tabloid, told me. (Neither Jean Péladeau nor PKP responded to my requests for comment.)

Unlike PKP, who rebelled against his oft-absent father, Jean was the subject of often doting attention from Pierre Péladeau. And Jean has an apparent aversion to the spotlight his older half-brother seems to crave. In 2014, PKP stepped down as Quebecor CEO to run for the separatist Parti Québécois. In 2015, he became its leader—a loud and splashy political flight of fancy that lasted less than a year. Today, he regularly posts pictures of himself on Instagram and berates his corporative enemies on Twitter. 

By contrast, Jean’s social media feeds are scrubbed nearly bare or set to private, and his mainstream-media exposure seems limited to the social pages of Quebecor-owned publications. (A rare indulgence is his Strava page, where he has tracked nearly 10,000 kilometres on his road bike this year alone.) 

At one point, Jean went so far as to obfuscate his last name to avoid the attention it draws. In 2011, 13 years after he left Quebecor, Bujold remembers going to a Videotron cellphone kiosk in a Montreal mall; there he found Jean, barely 20, anonymously tending to customers behind the counter, apparently to learn the ropes. Jean is his father’s doppelganger, and Bujold recognized him right away. “After the transaction, I looked at his signature on my copy, and he’d signed it ‘Jean P. Blanchette.’ And I said, ‘Hey! We know each other.’ Jean looked around; there were two or three other clerks on hand. ‘No, we don’t know each other,’ he said to me.” (Today, Jean goes by “Jean B. Peladeau.”)

The company Jean would take over, should he inherit it, would likely be in very good financial standing. Quebecor took in $4.55 billion in revenue in 2021, up 5.5 per cent from 2020. Some $3.7 billion of that flowed from telecommunications, underscoring Videotron’s crucial role in keeping the firm well in the black. And its likely acquisition of Freedom Mobile would give the company a national footprint, allowing Quebecor “to become a more competitive and able long-term player in the wireless industry,” according to a recent Scotiabank analysis of the country’s telecom industry. 

Perversely, though, that strong performance does not mean PKP can solve his succession question through the simple means of a sale. As the former Quebecor executive pointed out to me, the empire’s richest assets are also its least sellable. That’s because of the unique position it occupies on Canada’s corporate landscape. PKP has rightfully played up Videotron’s internet and wireless holdings as a bulwark against the country’s telecom oligarchy. Videotron’s presence has certainly been good for Quebec’s cellular rates, which are among the lowest in the country.

Quebecor is a poster child, then, for enhanced competition, meaning it would be tough, if not impossible, for it to sell to a member of said oligarchy—the most likely prospective buyers. Given CRTC-mandated competition constraints, former Competition Bureau advisor Keldon Bester told me recently, “there would be a regulatory hurdle.” Unless, he added, “there was a commissioner of competition and a minister at the time that were both sufficiently ready to roll over, which is unlikely.”

Then there’s the matter of pride. Quebecor’s acquisition of Videotron in 2000 was effectively a Quebec government-backed mission to save a then-struggling cable provider from the clutches of Rogers, that English-speaking corporate interloper from Toronto. Having it fall into the hands of a rival would be a point of shame for Péladeau, who has spent much of his career belittling those very rivals. 

Translation: Quebecor’s most valuable asset will long be in Quebec hands. For PKP, who is approaching retirement age in years, though probably not in spirit, it’s all the more important to pick a proper successor to see the company into the future stretching well past the view from the 13th floor. 

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.” @MartinPatriquin