Raymond Royer sits at the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Toronto on April 28, 2007. After leading Bombardier's mass transit division, Mr. Royer went on to become Bombardier’s overall president and later left Bombardier to head Domtar Inc.Arantxa Cedillo / Veras/The Globe and Mail
In 1982, Bombardier Inc. landed a monster contract to supply 825 subway cars to New York, valued at $1-billion (US$622-million). A cross-border political battle ensued.
Rival bidder Budd Co. cried foul, alleging that Bombardier was only able to win the work because it was backed with cheap financing from Canada’s Export Development Corp. A contentious Senate hearing in Washington followed and retaliatory duties were threatened, but the U.S. government let the deal proceed, agreeing that Bombardier had promised to provide better quality and quicker delivery times for the cars.
Reacting to the news was a beaming young Bombardier executive. “When a matter like this reaches a political level, you never know how it’s going to turn out, so we were really worried,” Raymond Royer, president of Bombardier’s mass transit division, told CBC News. “It’s turning out fine for us.”
Mr. Royer, who died in Montreal on April 24 at 86 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease, was a key figure in the deal, the man who helped transform Bombardier from a snowmobile company into a multinational that produced everything from rail cars to business jets.
After leading the mass transit division, Mr. Royer went on to become Bombardier’s overall president. He later left Bombardier to head Domtar Inc., rebuilding it in face of the declining fortunes of the paper industry. In a world where CEOs are frequently brash, larger than life personalities, Mr. Raymond was a quieter, more thoughtful presence.
“He was remarkable as a human being,” said André Desmarais, deputy chair of Power Corp. of Canada, an admirer of Mr. Royer’s leadership skills, strategic sense and open personality. The men first met when Mr. Desmarais joined the Bombardier board in 1986. Mr. Royer was later named a director of La Presse, controlled by the Desmarais family, and to the board of Power Financial Corp.
Raymond Royer was born in Sherbrooke, Que., on Sept. 30, 1938, the second eldest of eight children of Henri Royer, a plumber, and his wife Georgette Beaulieu. (He also had an older half-brother, who was born to his mother in a first marriage before she was widowed.)
Raymond was brought up in a modest family that valued education. All but one of his siblings attended university. Raymond earned degrees in both law and accounting from University of Sherbrooke. He was an excellent student and was twice named the university’s athlete of the year, developing a lifetime passion for tennis and golf.
In 1966, Mr. Royer joined Quebec Cartier Mining in Port Cartier, Que. Three years later, he became vice president of Skiroule, one of dozens of snowmobile manufacturers that had emerged in the province. When the company’s American owner decided to sell, Mr. Royer left Skiroule and was recruited by Bombardier in 1974.
In an effort to diversify, Bombardier had bid for a contract to build subway cars for the Montreal Metro. When the bid won, Mr. Royer’s job was to turn a former snowmobile factory in rural La Pocatière, Que., into an assembly plant for mass-transit vehicles.
It was a steep learning curve for the workers, so Bombardier decided to use proven technology licensed from a French company. The same formula was used when Bombardier won the New York contract, using a design from Japan’s Kawasaki Industries for the stainless steel subway cars.
“We didn’t want to re-invent the wheel,” Mr. Royer told The New York Times. Kawasaki allowed the Bombardier team to visit a plant in Kobe, Japan, to observe how the technology worked for six months after the contract was signed. The Japanese expected a dozen Canadians to visit.
Mr. Royer sent 60, including engineers, tool makers and union representatives. “The only condition I set was that when they returned, they had to identify three things the Japanese did better than us,” he recalled in a 2011 interview. Bombardier originally figured it would take 3,100 hours to build a single car. That total was reduced to 2,700 hours, a major savings.
Mr. Royer became a strong believer in Kaizen, the Japanese concept of continuous improvement, imbuing it into Bombardier’s corporate culture.
The success of the New York contract led to Mr. Royer’s promotion in 1985 to president and chief operating officer of the whole company, just prior to its purchase of Canadair, the aircraft manufacturer. That acquisition led to Bombardier’s success producing the Challenger business jet and sister passenger jet, but there were major challenges and tensions integrating the two companies.
In 1996, Mr. Royer quit Bombardier. He called the departure from Bombardier “amicable,” insisting that he had done all he could at the company. “There was nothing left to do.”
But it was clear that he had run up against the issue that dogged Bombardier for years: the dominance of the Bombardier family and especially Laurent Beaudoin, the chairman and chief executive. Mr. Royer would never become CEO. His departure led to a revolving door at the company over the next several years.
“He was trying to introduce too many changes and it was too much for Laurent to accept, so he was replaced by Bob Brown. And the same thing happened with Bob. And then the same thing happened to me,” said Paul Tellier, who served as Bombardier’s president for just two years, departing abruptly in early 2005.
Mr. Royer didn’t stay unemployed for long. He was appointed president and chief executive of Domtar Inc., a storied yet uncompetitive company in the declining pulp and paper industry. Initially, he expanded the company by buying mills in the U.S. But the market for its main product, fine paper used in offices, declined continuously, forcing him to lay off thousands of workers.
“I’m doing what is best for Domtar’s workers. If I don’t take action to change our cost structure, I could risk the entire company,” Mr. Royer told journalist Robert Thompson in Going for the Green, a book profiling Canadian business leaders.
In 2006, Mr. Royer engineered a merger with the fine-paper division of Weyerhaeuser Corp., considered a good move at the time. Mr. Royer retired in 2008. Domtar was bought in 2021 by Paper Excellence, a private Indonesian-controlled firm that has bought several other companies and now is Canada’s largest pulp and paper company.
Mr. Royer served on several boards including National Bank of Canada and Shell Canada.
Geneviève Burdon was five years old when Raymond Royer entered her life. Her brother, Thomas, was not even a year old. “My mother had lived through a very difficult divorce with my father,” she explained. They soon became a reconstituted family and Mr. Royer became her stepfather.
“He was one of a kind,” said Ms. Burdon, a Montreal corporate lawyer. “He knew how to navigate that fine line between being a stepfather and a father figure. He never presumed to be my biological father.”
“He was the rock that we could rely on without fail,” she continued.
Mr. Royer was an officer of the Order of Canada and an officer of the National Order of Quebec and was awarded honorary degrees by University of Sherbrooke, University of Montreal, Laval University and École Polytechnique.
He was active as a fundraiser for the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, where he and his wife, France Denis, were co-chairs of the community side of the $300-million campaign. He was also a major backer of the University of Sherbrooke and its hospital foundation.
Mr. Royer leaves his wife, France; his adopted son, Jacques; step-children, Geneviève and Thomas; as well as a granddaughter and four of his siblings, Denis, Diane, Lyse and Nicole.