This is what one author said of them:
Without outside capital, a small business will often have a hard time growing, and, because it remains small, will have a hard time raising capital. A point of significance, however, is that this particular vicious circle is one within which most French-Canadian entrepreneurs are content to revolve, in part because of a reluctance towards capital from outside the business or family and in part because of the resistance to growth. Reliance on outside capital is seen as threatening independence and security, an attitude which perhaps depends to some extent on the peasant heritageBut this is what we noticed under Duplessis:
French-Canadians became an increasingly affluent market for financial services of all kinds and turned to the new francophone insurance, banking, trust and investment companies. Massive urbanization favoured concentration of real estate and commercial activities. As in finance there was no major barrier to the entry of small French-Canadian enterprises to such a dynamic environment (…) while the industrial development occurred mostly thorugh foreign and English-Canadian corporations, some French-Canadian companies did participate in older industriesThis is an empirical illustration of business activities in Quebec showing that under Duplessis, business activity did in fact live a gigantic boom.
Source:
Niosi, Jorge. 1984. « The Rise of French-Canadian Capitalism». In Alain G. Gagnon (eds), Québec : State and Society. Agincourt (Ontario) : Methuen Publications, 186-200.
Taylor, Norman. 1960. “French-Canadians as Industrial Entrepreneurs ”. Journal of Political Economy 68-1, 37-52.
