Jacques Ménard is a respected banker in the Canadian and Québec business community. He is well known for his philanthropic activities, including those at Glendon College. Not only does he successfully direct the Québec activities of a major Canadian bank but, over the course of quite a few years now, he has also demonstrated a sustained interest in and exceptional commitment to youth and their education and success.
In 2008, he published Si on s’y mettait [Let’s Get on with It], a true heartfelt cry about the urgency of building a dynamic society. With this goal in mind, he focuses on a dozen or so challenges that our society must meet in order to build such a society: taxation; the environment; sustainable development; the challenge of education – a challenge that is currently confronting North America as a whole; health; and the new demographic realities of today’s world, which do bring opportunities but also their accompanying issues. His goal in writing this book was thus to launch a public appeal for action in these various areas. It quickly became a bestseller, the profits of which were given to charitable organizations.
In 2011, he published Réussir, aller au bout de ses rêves [Being Successful: Following Through on Your Dreams], an essay that concentrates on individual success which, in his view, constitutes one of the most reliable ways of achieving collective success. In a recent conversation with Glendon Alumni E-magazine, Ménard reiterated his passion for education and youth success. To prepare this second work, he had surveys carried out polling young people and their values. “I was trying to juxtapose the survey feedback from young people with the challenges I articulated in my first book,” he said.
He started from a basic principle, namely that we are defined as individuals by the accumulated choices, both good and bad, that we make in our lives. To illustrate this concept, Ménard decided to interview some individuals who have crossed his path over the years and who have messages to convey as to how they made the choices that defined them. He drew up a list of people such as Jean Béliveau , “who was at the top of my list,” he said, and then Céline Dion, Monique Leroux, Yvon Deschamps, Alexandre Despatie, Cardinal Turcotte, etc. What all of these people had in common was the fact that they were successful in their areas of work and had reached their potential.
The interviews led Ménard to the realization that none of these people had a magic formula that could explain their success. However, all of them shared some common characteristics: they all had a good degree of self-knowledge, were enthusiastic, worked diligently and were not afraid of hard work. They also had the humility to let other people help them, and all of these individuals attributed a part of their good choices to those who provided such help. Finally, they demonstrated a great deal of resilience because they experienced failure and even tragedy. They were also generous, using their talents for other people at particular times in their lives. These were the examples that Ménard wanted to present in his book to his young and not-so-young readers; his aim was to encourage them to make the right choices and especially to have them persevere in their studies and end up with a degree or diploma in hand.
High School Training
Ménard considers that the more general high school training is, or, in the noblest sense of the term, the more “liberal,” the greater will be the opportunities to make choices and develop two virtues: adaptability and resilience. He added, “These two qualities cannot be acquired by limiting oneself to the choice of a single skill. Parents need to be told that everything will be done to ensure that their child will become a person and, in particular, that their child will learn how to learn.”
Recalling his recent visit to Garneau School in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood of Montréal, Ménard noted some 70 cultural communities in this neighbourhood that was historically populated by Francophone Quebeckers. “In such an environment,” he added, “it is essential to equip young people to live in a multiethnic and multicultural setting.”
He feels that Montréal and Toronto are rapidly and widely experiencing this diversification of their populations. “In 2015, there will be more visible minorities than people of Caucasian descent in Toronto,” he stated. Ménard is convinced that higher education is the medium-term solution to making a positive adaptation to these new realities. “We must recognize the formative role played by education at all levels in our societies,” he stressed.
What about Glendon?
BMO is one of Glendon’s generous donors. According to Ménard, who holds an honorary doctorate from our College, the education and training provided by an institution like Glendon are more relevant than ever if we are to turn out men and women with sufficient autonomy to face change and equip them with a key element for success.
Ménard stated, “It is the aim of all communities and all parents to have their children receive training for an occupation or a profession; but particularly, in my opinion, young people need to learn how to learn and to develop a good capacity for synthesizing.” He considers education and training in the humanities to be more crucial than ever. “The humanities have a place in administrative training: economics, sociology, marketing, human relations…” We therefore require a rigorous curriculum that also has a humanist dimension – a dimension which, in his opinion, could be a distinctive feature of the education and training offered at Glendon, notably in business administration but also in all programs.
Ménard considers that the primary function of the university is to prepare future citizens and feels that citizenship carries with it a duty to make personal, social and collective contributions to the community. He is convinced that individual development results from a search for the public interest. This quest for the public interest must be woven into the whole fabric of the educational and training curriculum because, while education aims to equip people for life, it also – and especially – strives to ensure their development.
By Michel Héroux and Marie-Thérèse Chaput
L. Jacques Ménard is Chairman of BMO Nesbitt Burns and President of BMO Financial Group, Quebec.
http://www.livres.transcontinental.ca/fr/index.cfm?pid=348&CatID=342&InvID=286
Jacques Ménard, Réussir: Aller au bout de ses rêves, VLB publisher, November 2011.
Jean Béliveau C.C., G.O.Q. is a well-known hockey player. He is a ten-time winner of the Stanley Cup, including a record five times as Captain of the Montréal Canadiens.
