One strand of fiction was important to me: younger writers from Quebec. Perhaps I was overly influenced by my two years at M&S viewing, even if from a distance, Quebec’s metaphorical coming of age. I’d warmed to the passion of Quebec’s creative community, which believed that strong cultural engagement was essential nation-building, worthy of support at the highest political levels.

Before he entered politics in the early 1970s and becoming minister of cultural affairs in René Lévesque’s cabinet, Denis Vaugeois was one of the founders of the publishing house, Les Éditions du Boréal. Once, after I had wrapped up an impassioned speech in Ottawa pushing for stronger cultural protections and, of course, more money, Denis, not famous for his empathy toward English Canada, embraced me and uttered the word “camarade.” I was touched. Coming out of the mouth of a Quebec nationalist, that word choice was a genuine compliment.

Almost 20 years of playing a role in the country’s cultural politics — debating, negotiating with, and much of the time siding with colleagues from Quebec’s cultural community — meant that I had friends in Montreal.

Pascal Assathiany, current owner and publisher of Denis Vaugeois’s old company, tops the list. Pascal is a committed publisher of the old school. His company is considered by many to be the leading independent house in Quebec, with the province’s most accomplished mix of high-quality fiction and non-fiction. As is essential for all successful publishers, he is also a careful, shrewd businessman.

I was always struck by his eyes: large, round, exaggerated behind thick glasses, full of mischief. It may have helped that our meetings unfolded over long lunches in L’Express. The restaurant exudes character. Home to the city’s cultural shakers and movers, zinc-topped bar, check-tile floor, and a jar of cornichons on every table. It commands pride of place close to the corner of rue St-Denis at rue Roy, a neighbourhood reminiscent of Paris yet defiantly Montreal.

Our discussions often touched upon the frustration of building anything in Canada, and why English Canadian publishing remained so systemically dysfunctional. The structure of the publishing business in Quebec differs fundamentally from that endured in English Canada. Even though most French publishers are distributed in Quebec, as most American and English publishers are distributed in the rest of Canada, the overwhelming disparity of scale faced by English-language publishers is more extreme.

Quebec publishers enjoy several structural advantages. Returns are very low and, spared active literary agents, advances remain modest, in keeping with the realistic scale of the market. Independent bookstores in Quebec also enjoy legislative protection requiring schools, universities, and other public institutions to buy their books from “accredited” bookstores, in turn directing their business to Quebec publishing houses.

Pascal loved to excoriate me about the business excesses of English Canadian publishing, which has to function without scale and endure massive competition from imported books, yet is saddled with the competitive requirement to overpay author advances, many of which can never earn out. Another glass of wine was sometimes required to resolve the toughest issues. In L’Express, the wine was generically French, but superior. The essential bond was the inherent goodwill linking our two worlds.

These lunches led to building a strong editorial tie between our two companies. We bought English-language rights to the best of his fiction, then the highest-quality fiction coming out of Quebec. Thanks to the Canada Council, translation costs were mostly covered. We could indulge our idealism while building financially responsible bridges.

These books never sold as well as we had hoped, but I felt, as did Patsy, who had been instrumental in initiating the relationship, that such a measure of cultural defiance was an important expression of principle. We published all of Monique Proulx, reissued all of Dany Laferrière’s novels (including the cheekily titled How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired ), and fiction from Daniel Poliquin, Guillaume Vigneault, and Gil Courtemanche, whose first novel, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, had become an international bestseller.

Daniel Poliquin, a Franco-Ontarian writer and distinguished translator in his own right, joined the list in 1990. He was blessed with a thick head of hair turning a distinguished grey, an open heart, a beguiling smile, and a ready laugh. We were to publish him five times, including his Trillium Prize–winning novel The Straw Man, L’Obomsawin, and his Giller-shortlisted novel A Secret Between Us.

His mordantly witty, sharp riff on Quebec and Canada, In the Name of the Father: An Essay on Quebec Nationalism, equal parts novel and polemic, hit the highest note. It savaged the conventional wisdom separating the intellectual communities of Montreal and Toronto. As a Globe and Mail review suggested, he was “a writer who has never met a sacred cow he hadn’t kicked in its lazy butt . . . his book is anathema to every federalist and every sovereigntist who doesn’t want facts to get in the way of pet theories.”

Publisher Scott McIntyre was co-founder in 1970 of the Vancouver-based independent publishing company that would become Douglas & McIntyre. He has been influential in the fight for a better and more supportive publishing policy for over 40 years, serving on numerous cultural boards and helping shape a groundbreaking UNESCO treaty that enshrines the principle of cultural diversity within international law. McIntyre is a member of both the Order of Canada and British Columbia.

Scott MacIntyre (Vasgen Degirmentas)

A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing was published on Sept. 9.