OAKVILLE – After steering Cogeco’s Ontario operations through a period of unprecedented growth over the past five years, Gaston Germain will move on to new challenges as president and COO at Pelmorex, beginning next month.
Staff at the parent company of The Weather Network and Météomédia were informed of the changes at the top last week which will also see company founder Pierre Morrissette retain his CEO title but begin to concentrate more on overall direction and strategy than the day-to-day running of the company.
Germain has a long history in the Canadian cable and television industry. Prior to becoming vice-president of Cogeco Ontario, he headed up a joint venture between the cable company and SNC Lavalin to look for broadband opportunities abroad and was president and CEO of Sudbury-based Northern Cable when it when he left in 1993 to go to… Pelmorex for about four years.
At the time, the company was a radio broadcaster which had just purchased The Weather Network and the priority was to build the broadcast side of the business. Now, with 10.2 million subscribers, the broadcast side is very well established.
But that doesn’t mean Germain (pictured) will be standing still. "The future has a lot 
of moving parts around it," he told Cartt.ca today in an interview. "This is not a maintenance role. It’s a fast-moving, exciting opportunity."
Germain pointed to additional growth on the web (where TWN/MM are together, among the top three or four most visited web presences in Canada, behind only Bell Sympatico and global brands like Yahoo! and AOL) and through increased mobile applications as key drivers for Pelmorex – as well as to digital, HDTV and regulatory change as impending challenges.
"Pelmorex and Météomédia combined as a web presence are vying for the top spots. They are quite strong brands," said Germain. (Ed note: And since we still have no emergency broadcast system in Canada to warn of extreme weather and let us know what to do, The Weather Network/Météomédia has become the de facto source for such information for millions of Canadians. With gear in every cable headend, it can provide very localized weather information across the country.)
"It’s 10 years later (since he last left Pelmorex) and lots has changed. Certainly in 1996-97, the web and everything you could do with it wasn’t the force that it is… There’s going to be a steep learning curve for me."
Germain added he wasn’t looking for a new job but during a chat with Morrissette earlier this year, he was presented the opportunity. "We were just catching up and he was sharing some of his plans with me and at the end he said, ‘what do you think? Are you interested?’"
"I wasn’t really looking for anything new," he added. "I had a really good run (at Cogeco)… It’s a very good team here and we worked very well together."
Cogeco has not yet named a replacement for Germain.
