Extendicare Inc. (Markham, Ont.)
Revenue (2024 Q3 TTM) $1.4 billion
Profit (2024 Q3 TTM) $63.9 million
Three-year share price gain 49%
P/E ratio (trailing) 14
Canada’s long-term care (LTC) sector was hammered when COVID-19 arrived. Many elderly residents died, and vaccines didn’t exist yet. There was political controversy, too. Who should care for the elderly—governments or the for-profit private sector?
It’s hard to imagine anyone more qualified to serve as CEO of the biggest publicly traded Canadian company in the business than Dr. Michael Guerriere. “Mike is fine,” he says.
Guerriere was named CEO in 2018 with a highly varied resumé. After 10 years of medical training, he went to work as an internal medicine specialist at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital in the 1990s. “I practised for one and a half years and then got into management. I was asked to take on a temporary role,” he says. He also earned an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Chicago’s Northwestern University.
Temporary has turned into three decades. Among other things, Guerriere had exec jobs in teaching hospitals for 10 years, chaired the board of governors of Toronto Metropolitan University and helped launch the Courtyard Group, a consultancy that was bought by the health care arm of Telus Corp. in 2011.
He didn’t have much time to find his feet at Extendicare EXE-T. “It changed me, just watching the heroism of our 22,000 staff coming to work every day,” Gurriere says. He also says there’s been “a good policy response to the pandemic.” Funding in Ontario was increased to add 30% more LTC staff and 58,000 beds.
Now, governments and companies have time to tackle some fundamental issues. One is an aging society. “The biggest demographic Extendicare serves is over 80,” Guerriere says. But 95% of them want to age at home. Hence the need for large amounts of capital that governments alone can’t afford—they need help from the private sector.
Extendicare owns and operates 123 LTC homes in three provinces—Ontario, Alberta and Manitoba. But in 2023, it formed a 15%-owned joint venture with Montreal-based Axium Infrastructure Inc. It will own the new homes Extendicare builds and operates in the future.
Guerriere is also proud of the fact that, as of the third quarter of 2024, more than half (53%) of Extendicare’s previous 12 months of operating income came from services—home health care and managed services—rather than LTC.
At age 61, he thinks the company has plenty of room to grow. “Me and my team are just getting started,” he says.
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