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Shahir, the Québec M&A market has been quite active this year;
my sense is a little more active than in some other regions of the country.
What do you put that down to?
Well, I think we're seeing a couple of things happening. We're seeing Québec companies
on the acquisition, like Couche-*** buying the
Statoil business, Genivar and CGI's acquisitions in
Europe,
and we've also seen Bell's attempted acquisition of Astral. So we're seeing those
companies looking at
better valuations, maybe globally,
trying to expand for strategic reasons. And we're also seeing some Québec companies that
are targets now,
probably because they're not happy with their stock price and they're happy to
give a private equity firm a chance to turn the business around or maybe get better
valuation sometime in the future.
In terms of inbound investment, we've had a change of government and there were some
early noises that they might
not be continuing with the Plan Nord. What's your best estimation of what's going to
happen there? I think all indications are
that the new Parti Québécois government's going to continue with northern development,
but we will have to see how it unfolds, specifically whether they agree increase
the royalties or not, but all the signals they're sending so far say they want
to continue development in the north.
We'll see whether they tamper with the royalty scheme that the previous
government had envisaged, but
all indications are that it'll be a go.