J Denis Belisle
Chairman, DESSAU International
My first visit to Europe was to Paris in the summer of 1962 as an AIESEC exchange student. This experience lit in me an intense desire to understand how foreigners think and live, a drive I never had before I joined AIESEC. So from Paris I went to Geneva, Switzerland where I studied under a Rotary International scholarship at the Graduate Institute of International Studies.
These two events marked the beginning of an international career I had not considered before. Upon graduation, I became Assistant Trade Commissioner at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC. Four years later, I left the Foreign Service to join Canadian Pacific in Montreal. I was their first full-time employee at a time when the company was launching an international consulting firm. I stayed 16 years, became Executive Vice President and, by the time I left, the firm had worked in 64 countries. I then returned to the Federal Government, first as Vice-President at CIDA (the Canadian International Development Agency) and then as Canada’s Ambassador to Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. In 1994, I became Assistant Secretary General at the United Nations and headed the International Trade Center of Geneva, a technical assistance agency owned equally by the UN and the World Trade Organization (WTO). I held this position until my retirement from the UN in 2006. Since then, I became Chairman of DESSAU International, a leading Canadian engineering and construction company active in 30 countries.
Thinking back to my days as a student, I could have been content completing university and settling in to a comfortable domestic job in my hometown province of Quebec. Instead, I visited 106 countries, 5 in which I have lived, and continue to have a taste for world affairs. AIESEC is responsible for this direction in my life. Professionally, I learned that to make a good career at home, one needs to embrace the world beyond. Personally, I became more tolerant of different ways of thinking, making me more open, less critical and not quick to judge others before understanding their history and heritage. If there is one organization that can help students discover the world to better contribute to it, it is AIESEC.
AIESEC Laurier 