Power’s roots go back to the early days of electrification, when a group of prominent Montreal financiers foresaw the opportunities in building and providing hydro power for homes and industries across the country and around the world.

Early in the 1960s, governments in Canada’s provinces, including the province of Québec, pushed to nationalize the hydroelectric industry as an essential public service. Power had to reinvest the cash it had received from the liquidation of much of its portfolio wisely, prudently, and strategically.

By 1968, control of Power had passed to entrepreneur Paul Desmarais and a new leadership team which focused the Corporation on achieving record prosperity. Its investments were concentrated into a very few, large, diversified, long-term holdings, whose growth was nurtured through the 1970s and 1980s by effective managers with the full involvement and financial backing of the controlling shareholder. From that financially strong and rationally restructured base, and coincident with the advent of liberalized trade and the growth of the global economy in the 1990s, Power Corporation set out on a new path of expansion. The results speak for themselves: From the late 1990s up to the second decade of the twenty-first century, Power, led by Paul Desmarais’ two sons Paul, Jr. and André since 1996, has played a leading role in the consolidation of Canada’s financial services industry while simultaneously developing a portfolio of diversified international holdings.