Bernard Lamarre, Lavalin chief, helped build modern Quebec

On Aug. 12, 1991, Bernard Lamarre sent a letter to his employees at Montreal engineering firm Lavalin – a last message of reassurance in the hours after a takeover deal had been struck giving long-time rival SNC control of his beaten-down company.

"I would have preferred this event, in itself desirable, to have occurred under less trying circumstances. But destiny, it seems, uses curious means to reach its ends," he wrote. "Do not regret the past nor fear the future."

It was, people who know him say, classic Bernard Lamarre: A thoughtful and hopeful note that acknowledged the reality of past failings while expressing faith in the power of staff at SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. to forge ahead. It is also, they say, exactly how they will remember him now: As an astute, assiduous and deeply self-confident man, a nationalist who saw possibility where others were paralyzed with doubt.

Bernard Lamarre died March 30 in Montreal's Notre Dame Hospital after a battle with cancer. He was 84.

Mr. Lamarre was an engineer who spun a small family enterprise into one of the world's leading engineering companies, piloting a series of bold projects that transformed Canada and drew international attention. He was also a role model for a generation of French-Canadian professionals who came of age during Quebec's Quiet Revolution in the 1960s and showed the world what they could do.

The footprint he leaves behind is broad and visible, especially in his home province of Quebec. Montreal's Ville Marie Expressway and Louis-Hippolyte-Lafontaine Bridge-Tunnel as well as the Olympic Stadium and massive James Bay hydroelectric network are among the projects he steered. Internationally, he also oversaw the 430-kilometre Canadian Unity and Friendship Highway in Niger, a modern road cutting through a desert, and the Sanctuary of the Martyrs in Algiers, a technologically complex monument commemorating the nation's independence.

A father of seven, Mr. Lamarre counted on his wife, Louise, to handle much of the child rearing. But on weekends, the wavy-haired engineer would often take the older kids on field trips to projects under way around Montreal. His son Jean, now an economist, remembers one Saturday that his father drove a few of them to the Honoré Mercier Bridge, then under construction.

"He was a bit adventurous. He brought us there and led us under water into a special caisson to see the piers of the bridge. It was deep so there were issues with pressurization on our ears and some of us had some problems. When we came home, he didn't want to discuss with my mother what he did with us," he chuckled. "He loved his job and he loved to explain all the technical stuff."

Bernard Lamarre was born in Chicoutimi, Que., on Aug. 6, 1931, during the Great Depression. His father was a surveyor and engineer. His mother was a teacher and postmistress. Unlike her brothers, she left school at 12 and never had the opportunity to pursue further studies. Perhaps because of that, she was determined that her own children be learned. She pushed them to study, despite the fact that formal education was not a priority at the time for most French-Canadian families in the region, where the pulp and paper industry was a major employer.

Mr. Lamarre thrived under his parents' pressure. The eldest of 11 children, he showed an early affinity for academics. He certainly wasn't a gifted athlete, with a friend teasing in his high school yearbook that he excelled in "all sports, as a referee." He wasn't a particularly good musician either, once telling an interviewer that although he fantasized about singing like Jacques Brel, "In my choir at college, I was so bad that they told me to mouth the words."

But he excelled in school, attending Montreal's Collège Mont-Saint-Louis and later the city's École Polytechnique, where he earned a degree in civil engineering at the age of 20. He won an Athlone scholarship from the British government to study at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. A few years later, another French Canadian, Guy Saint-Pierre, would occupy the same seat as Mr. Lamarre in the college's lab. In a strange coincidence, Mr. Saint-Pierre went on to lead SNC and become chairman of the merged SNC-Lavalin.

It was also chance that led to his meeting his future wife. In his second year at Polytechnique, he was asked to accompany his younger sister as chaperone on a student cruise to Europe. On the ship, Mr. Lamarre immediately noticed Louise Lalonde, a pretty nursing student, according to an account of the events in a 2007 authorized biography of Mr. Lamarre by writer Guy Samson. Despite his natural shyness around women, Mr. Lamarre mustered up enough courage to speak to her with the help of a bit of beer.

It was Ms. Lalonde who shared with him her knowledge of the buildings and artworks they would see on the old continent, of which he knew precious little at the time. It was she who would ignite in him a lifelong interest in art that would later see him become a major collector of contemporary works and chair of the board at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He led a significant expansion of the museum and increased its popularity during two stints as its chair, from 1982 to 1991 and 1997 to 2008.

"It was really his leadership that transformed the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts," long-time collaborator Léo Rosshandler, who was tapped by the engineer to handle Lavalin's own significant corporate art collection, said. "He was really the motor, the engine, that made the museum become something."

In 1955, Jean-Paul Lalonde, Louise' father, recruited Mr. Lamarre into his firm, Lalonde et Valois, which later became Lavalin. The company had been running at top gear since the end of the war and, according to a history of SNC-Lavalin published in 2011, there was so much work designing hospitals and schools amid Quebec's baby boom that employees were asked to put in six hours of overtime each week to keep up. When the St. Lawrence River became a major shipping conduit, the company hired even more engineers to widen its expertise.

Mr. Lamarre was just 27 when he took over the firm, after Mr. Lalonde suffered a heart attack. He quickly put his leadership and sales skills to use, winning numerous contracts and building up a network of contacts in political and business circles that was the envy of rivals. Through the early 1960s, Quebec Premier Jean Lesage embarked on a radical transformation of the province that included modernizing its aging infrastructure. The period was described as a kind of a golden age for Quebec engineers and Mr. Lamarre was near the centre of the action, parlaying lunches with contacts at Montreal's Beaver Club into contracts for the firm.

"At the time, I thought that Bernard Lamarre had some unique way of getting jobs," Mr. Saint-Pierre, then a senior employee with competitor Acres Quebec, said. Mr. Lamarre had a particular gift for navigating the political world and knew how to develop relationships with key decision-makers, he said. Later, he put some of those same politicians on his payroll – a controversial strategy for which he was heavily chided.

Jean Lamarre says his father employed former lawmakers, including Pierre Trudeau, in part because his own public speaking skills were lacking. He was very persuasive one-on-one, but found communicating in larger groups more difficult. "He admired those politicians. People like Marcel Masse or Clément Richard, he needed them to communicate better."

Ironically, Mr. Lamarre's ties to government might also have contributed to Lavalin's undoing.

In the 1980s, with a recession hammering the company's core engineering business, Mr. Lamarre became convinced that diversification was the best way to play defence. He envisioned a global conglomerate and Lavalin bought several major companies, including some that had nothing to do with engineering. Lavalin launched The Weather Network. The company took over the Ontario government's Urban Transport Development Corp. and got into real estate. It also acquired petrochemical maker Kemtec, a refinery in east-end Montreal. Mr. Lamarre's wife started to fret that he was getting into things he knew little about.

Politicians at both the federal and provincial levels pressured Lavalin to take over the ailing refinery, Mr. Lamarre told an interviewer. But when Kemtec's business model was destroyed by the soaring price of a key fuel feedstock, government support was too late and too small to make a difference. When a separate deal to broker Airbus planes also fell through, Lavalin's bankers came calling. The turmoil ended when the company was gently guided into the hands of cross-town rival SNC in 1991.

An empire whose annual sales peaked at $1.2-billion, Lavalin imploded under the weight of Mr. Lamarre's ambition and critics tore apart his legacy in the weeks that followed. Mr. Lamarre would later say he was simply glad his employees kept their jobs. He said the prospect of 6,000 Lavalin workers losing their livelihoods kept him up at night. He also expressed anger about the company's more recent legal troubles, laying the blame for federal corruption charges against the firm last year on a few greedy managers who destroyed its reputation.

"He had the folly, which many of the initial Quebec entrepreneurs had, of thinking he could do anything," Montreal business magnate Stephen Jarislowsky, who knew Mr. Lamarre, said. "I always thought it was extremely admirable the way he faced this really hard slap which he received when his company more or less went under and re-established himself and kept, through his attitude, the respect of the Quebec community."

Mr. Lamarre was predeceased by his wife, Louise, in 2002. He leaves his companion, Margot Lalonde; children, Jean, Christine, Lucie, Monique, Michèle, Philippe and Mireille; 17 grandchildren; three great-grandchildren and extended family.

Mr. Lamarre's social engagement continued well after his professional career ended. Among other causes and organizations to which he gave time and effort, he spent 17 years as a member of the board of the Société de développement Angus, a neighbourhood renewal group.

Mr. Lamarre was named an officer of the Order of Canada and grand officer of the Ordre national du Québec, as well as receiving 11 honorary doctorates. He never wore the ring that engineers typically wear to symbolize the unity of the profession. Said Mr. Lamarre: "Everybody knows that I'm an engineer."