The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50808
incomes have grown 20-per-cent faster in Quebec City than elsewhere in the prov- ince since 2000. Unemployment, too, has fallen by more than half in the same time frame to less than four per cent. Quebec also continues to rank among the safest and least expensive cities in which to live and run a business in Canada — at the time this article went to print in late June, there had not been a murder in this city of 700,000 since Oct. 31, 2006. "Times are Mathieu Comeau much better here now because the city is not as de- pendent on gov- ernment," says Stephen Gordon, an economics professor at Laval University. He says, unlike other areas of the country, which rely heavily on one or two key sectors like oil and gas, agriculture, fishing, or manufacturing, the provincial capital has experienced growth in all sectors, from services and construction to tourism and finance, which represents nine per cent of jobs in the region. "No one sector is boom- ing; they're all doing well," said Gordon. "And that's good." "Economically speaking, the city has changed completely," says Jean Brunet, a commercial lawyer and managing part- ner of Stein Monast, a half-century-old firm of more than 50 lawyers that merged with Montreal's Desjardins Ducharme in 1992, a partnership that ended last year. When he joined the firm in 1979, Brunet says it focused almost exclusively on providing commercial and fiscal le- gal services for some of the region's big- gest retail, manufacturing, and securities companies. "Many of them don't even exist anymore," he says. "Others, like the paper mills on the North Shore, migrat- ed first to Montreal, then Toronto." In addition to adding fuel to the merger frenzy, Brunet says those changes have transformed the way many com- mercial lawyers here work and the type of services firms offer their clients, often in tandem with their big-city partners. "Our clients still need representation here, even if their headquarters are now www. Law ye rmag.com A UGUST 2008 49 www.steinmonast.ca/en located elsewhere," he says. "The big dif- ference now is that about 80 per cent of the files we do are with Toronto and Montreal, mostly in English." The advent of a new generation of homegrown clients with major-league clout, however, has resulted in many big files being driven and directed from Que- bec City. In addition to manufacturing giants like construction material supplier Canam Group Inc., from the Beauce re- gion, and real-estate empire Cominar, which Brunet helped to bring public and later convert into Canada's first real es- tate investment trust, Quebec City's ma- jor law firms have been both bolstered and transformed by the development of three niche sectors — high tech, life sci- ences, and processed materials. Key research facilities — including Quebec City's University Hospital Centre (known as the CHUQ), Canada's largest