Alexandre Taillefer has been a celebrity entrepreneur in Quebec since his two-year stint as a panelist on the Quebec version of the TV show Dragons' Den. His harshly lit office in Montreal seems surprisingly small, for a dragon known both for his outspoken views and for his contrarian investments in business and the arts.
When conventional taxis looked like they were doomed to fall to Uber, Taillefer started an electric-cab company, called Téo, which put its first cars on Montreal streets in 2015. Magazines are another limping industry, but last year Taillefer bought a glossy monthly outright – the faltering Quebec news magazine l'Actualité. He was also behind September's Mile Ex End music festival in Montreal; an opera version of Pink Floyd's The Wall, made for export and produced last spring with l'Opéra de Montréal; and the splashy but ill-fated Biennale de Montréal.
His office, which looks out on a blank wall, is lined with art photographs from his collection, almost all by young Canadians. One Francis O'Shaughnessy image shows a woman standing in an autumnal scene, wearing a bathing cap and boxing gloves, and blowing a trumpet. The photo has an intent, surrealistic joie de vivre.
Joie de vivre was in no short supply in Taillefer's life, by his account, until one evening in December, 2015, when he and his wife, the fashion executive Debbie Zakaib, returned to their home in suburban Saint-Lambert to find emergency vehicles in the street. Their 14-year-old son, Thomas, had taken his own life. The family abandoned their house, which they still own. They have lived ever since at an upscale Montreal hotel, which is where most of Taillefer's workday unfolds.
"Our daughter, Daphnée, couldn't stay [in the house] any more," says Taillefer, of Thomas's only sibling, who is now 14. "We couldn't leave her alone."
Taillefer's frequent media appearances in Quebec took a very personal turn earlier this year, when he spoke with obvious anguish about the loss of his son on the top-rated TV talk show Tout le monde en parle. He also spoke about how he felt compelled to try to improve things for other troubled kids and their families.
One result of that effort will be seen on Dec. 6, when Radio-Canada TV broadcasts a documentary Taillefer made with filmmaker Jean-Philippe Dion. It's called BYE – Thomas's only farewell, written on a Post-It note stuck to his computer screen. The film is about the stigma that still adheres to mental-health issues in Quebec, and the harm suffered by adolescents such as Thomas. More specifically, it's about the kind of cyberdependence that Taillefer believes put his son, an obsessive online gamer, into an unnecessarily isolated state. Thomas posted two messages that included the word "suicide" on the Amazon gaming platform Twitch, Taillefer says, yet no alarm was raised. He is lobbying to have such sites monitor for obvious signals of mental distress among kids who, like Thomas, don't show the depth of their misery to their families.
"One thing I found out during all the meetings I've had with psychiatrists and psychologists is that when you suffer from an addiction, be it drugs, alcohol or cyberdependence, your risk of suicide is one in 10," he says. "We knew Thomas had some issues, but nobody told us there was a suicide risk. That needs to be fixed."
Taillefer is a dedicated fixer. Many people think that entrepreneurship is about exploiting opportunities, but he says it's also about changing things that are too unsatisfactory to leave as they are.
L'Actualité was a case in point. With the migration of advertising to the internet in recent years, the magazine's revenue had plummeted. Its readership, however, had held firm, with around 90,000 subscribers for print and online. "It was still the No. 1 news magazine in Quebec, and there was a good chance it could disappear entirely," he says. As a francophone cultural nationalist, he couldn't accept that, and was willing to bet he could steer the magazine to a more profitable strategy. He bought it from Rogers Media a year ago through Mishmash Media, a media and entertainment consortium linked to his investment company XPND Capital. A revamped l'Actualité, the first issue under his ownership, appeared in September.
Taillefer's long-term goal is for the magazine to become part of an online, media-retail and social-media coalition that could provide a Quebec-based alternative to Amazon and Facebook. It's a theme Taillefer has raised in several interviews, and in one of his columns for the Quebec arts and entertainment monthly VOIR, which he also owns.
"Whenever I work on a project, I'm thinking about how it will impact Quebec's economy, society and cultural landscape," he says. He was "very disappointed" by Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly's refusal to impose tax or content regulations on Netflix.
"The government talks about 'net neutrality,' but that's a very bad understanding of the situation," he says. "People are actually controlling what we are watching and listening to. We don't realize how much we're influenced [by the systems of online providers]. Forty-five per cent of music sold in stores in Quebec five years ago was from Quebec. On Spotify now, it's less than 7 per cent.
"I feel that Canada has decided that defending Canadian culture on the internet is not a priority," he says. "We can't rely on them to defend our French culture. I'm not a separatist, but we need to take every measure required to help us protect that." Taillefer's brand of social capitalism, his support for a $15 minimum wage (already paid to his Téo drivers) and his advocacy for bigger investments in education and mental health sound a bit like a political platform in the making. He says he may consider a provincial run in a few years, although in a recent book (Lettres à une jeune entrepreneure), he criticizes all the provincial parties. "I'd like to diminish our inequalities, and make Quebec the happiest place on Earth," he says.
Taillefer was born in 1972 in Nouveau-Bordeaux, a Montreal neighbourhood. His father handled insurance for film productions, and his mother was an amateur painter who made replicas of famous paintings on the walls of the family home. Alexandre began collecting art at the age of 16 or 17, spending "all my money" on an Hélène Vincent canvas that he still owns.
Taillefer was an undisciplined student who dropped out of two universities by the time he started his first successful company, a website-design firm that attracted investment by Quebecor. By the age of 27, his stake had a paper value of $89-million.
He lost almost everything in the tech crash of 2000, clawing his way back via a smartphone game company called Hexacto. He eventually sold it for $10-million.
He kept buying art, and joined the board of l'Opéra de Montréal in 2006, becoming the youngest chairman in the company's history. "Opera needs to be reinvented," he says, "People don't have four hours to spend any more." Another Brick in the Wall, an operatic version of Pink Floyd's The Wall with new music by Quebec composer Julien Bilodeau, is Taillefer's idea of one way forward, and may be a model for more works to come.
He's now the board chair at Montreal's Musée d'art contemporain, where he was involved in a plan to double the museum's exhibition space by renovating the basement. He was also one of the godfathers of the Biennale de Montréal, which he predicted would be, within a decade, one of the top 25 such events in the world. It capsized after its second edition in 2016, leaving unpaid bills of around $200,000.
Taillefer says the event should have been a triennial, and needed more creative input from MAC, where it was largely housed. He blames the financial collapse on poor controls by the team led by festival director Sylvie Fortin. The issue had come up during the first biennale, he says, but the director was left in place, because "you think that if someone makes a mistake once, they won't do it again." As for the creditors – most of them art-transport companies – he says simply: "I think they'll eventually go bankrupt." It's not quite the response you expect from a socially conscious entrepreneur.
In Quebec, Taillefer is seen as a fountain of ambitious ideas, less so as a nurturer of the projects he puts in motion. In his book, he admits he isn't the type to soldier away at one thing. "I need the adrenaline of start-ups," he writes. Some of his recent projects, including the Biennale and the Mile Ex End festival, felt like they had been beamed to Earth with too little study of the ecology on the ground.
Taillefer says Mile Ex End was part of a plan by Mishmash to spotlight "the authenticity and the sound of Montreal," as compared with the global outlook of Osheaga, the summer music festival run by Evenko. Mishmash found an outdoor site for its two-day event on the edge of the city's hipster-friendly Mile End district. But nobody involved with the planning of Mile Ex End thought to talk with Pop Montreal, which for 15 years had been running a fall festival with a similar local focus, pitched to the same audience.
"Mile Ex End definitely ruffled some feathers," Pop Montreal co-founder and creative director Dan Seligman says. "It looked like a generic corporate interest trying to cash in on whatever buzz or reputation Mile End has." Pop Montreal held onto its audience this year, but "we were almost collateral damage in the crossfire between Mishmash and Evenko."
Mile Ex End and the Pink Floyd opera are business ventures, but Taillefer's commitment to the arts and cultural life is primarily personal. Montreal art dealer Pierre-François Ouellette credits him with igniting an interest in contemporary visual art in other Montreal business folk.
"Alexandre has really been instrumental in creating a new generation of collectors," Ouellette says.
"If you have a relationship with a piece of art, it talks to you forever," Taillefer says. Since his son's death, however, he and his wife have not often heard the call from new art discoveries, and have added little to their collection of about 350 works. Work remains a lifeline.
"Projects are what make you wake up in the morning," he says. The Taillefers are on the lookout for a new home, "something that reflects our life now."
He has no plans to create a permanent memorial for his son. "I'm not sure I want to create the Thomas Taillefer Foundation," he says. "His memory will be in our hearts, and the hearts of those who knew him. His urn sits right by my computer at home. The loss is very personal."
It's personal, but also has a social import that Taillefer is determined to amplify, in his advocacy for a $500-million increase in Quebec's mental-health budget, his involvement with l'Association québécoise de prévention du suicide and through his documentary film. He's still struggling to find meaning in a tragic event, and in doing so, to take another small step toward making Quebec the happiest place on Earth.