It’s not corporate loyalty that prompts Timmins entrepreneur and philanthropist Jean-Paul Aubé to pause mid-conversation and quote “None of us is as good as all of us,” a favorite maxim from McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc.
As the owner of two franchises of the fast-food chain in Timmins, director of the local Days Inn as well as the Quality Inn in Sudbury, the community-minded Aubé has focused on the twin pillars of business and charity since childhood.
As such, he’s locally renowned as much for his business savvy as he is for his tireless support of a staggeringly broad range of causes, running from the Timmins and District Hospital Foundation to the Northern Cancer Research Foundation to the Kamiskotia Snow Resort.
"It’s very clear all the successes I’ve been involved with are possible only from the support of people in the community, which has been a running theme through my life,” says Aubé. “When you’re in a more isolated community, you don’t have the infrastructure that’s there in larger centres, so if you want to protect and improve local assets, you have to get involved.”
Known to his friends simply as J.P., Aubé learned the ropes at an early age, growing up as one of seven children through Earlton and Timmins.
Proud of his culture and eager for something to do, Aubé founded a francophone youth centre, La Lanterne, in Timmins at the age of 16, and used it to draw events, singers and other performers to the city.
By the time he turned 17, he raised enough money and organizational support to hire Gordon Lightfoot to play to a packed crowd of 1,800 in Timmins, something which surprised the singer as much as Aubé himself, he says, chuckling.
This entrepreneurial spirit caused him to chafe at the first two years of his professional career, which were spent as a secondary school teacher in Haileybury. There, he quickly learned he wasn’t the type to have bells telling him what to do and when.
At 25, he borrowed $300,000 to purchase and renovate a local hotel. Eighteen days after signing on the dotted line, he opened the Escapade Hotel and Suite 21 Lounge, the site of the first discotheque in Timmins.
He’s since opened a slew of other businesses, and sat for years as a director of Bell Nordiq, a publicly traded telecommunications company made up of NorthernTel and Telebec Limited Partnerships.
This work accompanied his extensive history of volunteer and community involvement, with the list of boards and committees he’s chaired reaching as long as his arm.
Among countless other efforts, he has served as vice-chair of the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation, and was a founding member and chairman of the Timmins EconomicDevelopment Corporation (TEDC) from 1986 to 1992.
However, it wasn’t until cancer touched his parents and his twin brother in the late 1980s that Aubé personally witnessed the sad state of quality and services available to afflicted people in the North.
Rolling up his sleeves, he launched himself wholeheartedly into the improvement of regional cancer care and the local hospital, which remains one of his hallmark passions even decades later.
In 1994, he chaired the $11.5-million community campaign to help build the new Timmins and District Hospital, and is currently the chair of Network 13, an alliance of nine hospitals in the district.
To this day, he still helps organize the annual spring ball hosted by the Days Inn, with all profits going directly to the hospital. The event has raised over $1 million over 12 years, with this spring’s event raising $236,000 in one night.
It’s this kind of interconnectedness with the community, its major players and its natural splendor that has helped to keep Aubé’s heart lodged firmly in Timmins over the years.
“Any time you want to get anything done, business or community-related, you just pick up the phone and you have everybody’s attention and enthusiastic involvement,” says Aubé. “Somebody upstairs likes me.”
Though chronically busy with business and social demands, Aubé has over time become friends with other prominent Timmins figures, including Porter Airlines president and CEO Bob Deluce, as well as Shania Twain, whose first performance at 17 was in Aubé’s hotel.
Even his fishing trips have an air of enterpreneurialism as he is just one of a quartet of influential Timmins business people, who jokingly call themselves The Chairs.
This includes Aubé, as well as Dave McGirr, NEOnet’s director of operations and TEDC chair; Don Wyatt, chair of the Timmins and District Hospital board; and John Larche, renowned prospector and one of the finders of the Hemlo deposit and honorary chair of the Discover Abitibi program.
The time spent together is something McGirr has cherished, providing him an opportunity to learn “a great deal” from Aubé, who he describes as having the strongest business acumen of anyone he’s met.
Despite his success as a businessman, it’s Aubé’s community spirit that makes the man unique, says McGirr.
“We’ve spent countless hours, evenings, fishing trips and dinners where the focus of conversation is on what can be done to bring the best of everything to Northern Ontario,” says McGirr. “He has a great personality, he’s a lot of fun, and a true entrepreneur. He’s a role model in doing what it takes to bring the best to the North.”
