Westburne Marks a Century in Canada With a 300-Guest Event in Laval
The company that filled a Laval parking lot with food trucks, demo stations and a robot dog last month started life a century ago in Montréal, and not in electricity at all.
Westburne, today one of the country's larger electrical distributors, was incorporated in 1926 as the Westburne Oil Company Limited, a Montréal-registered venture backed by Calgary businessmen chasing the gas boom in Alberta's Turner Valley. The pivot came slowly. A plumbing and heating wholesaler in Québec City, Saillant Inc., became its first distribution acquisition in 1952. Electrical supply followed in 1967, refrigeration and ventilation in 1979, and by 2000 the company had sold off everything that was not electrical. Rexel acquired it the following year.
That hundred-year arc was the occasion for the Laval gathering, which drew roughly 300 customers, suppliers and staff for a day that functioned as equal parts reunion and trade show.
Archives on one side, automation on the other
The layout did most of the storytelling. Guests moved from archival stations tracing the company's century in Canada straight into hands-on demonstrations of automation-ready equipment, including a robot dog that, by the organizers' own account, stole the show.
The juxtaposition was deliberate. Electrical distribution has spent the past decade absorbing a wave of connected hardware, and the branches that once sold conduit and breakers now field questions about controls, sensors and building automation. Putting the filing cabinet next to the robot made the point without a slide deck.
Westburne reported longer dwell times and heavier interaction at every station than in previous years, which it attributed to the equipment on display rather than the hospitality. The hospitality was not absent: an Eaton tent, a food truck line, games and themed stations ran alongside the demos all day.
The conversations were the product
Events like this are easy to dismiss as customer appreciation with a catering budget. What the organizers noticed instead was the substance of the talk. From the Eaton tent to the food truck queue, customers and suppliers were discussing products, industry trends and specific problems rather than simply catching up, turning a celebration into something closer to a working day.
That matters more than it sounds for a distributor. Westburne sits between manufacturers and the contractors, plants and institutions that install their equipment, and a good deal of its value is knowing what is coming and who needs it. A parking lot where a supplier's business development manager and a contractor end up in the same food line is, in that sense, infrastructure.
Pictured above are Nicolas Pinard, general manager for Québec at Westburne, left, and Carlos Cano, electrical channel business development manager at Eaton.
A Québec footprint
Westburne dates its current Québec operations to 1975 and employs 429 people across the province, a base that has outlasted several changes of ownership and one complete change of industry.
The centennial is being marked nationally as well, with a baton relay travelling to Canadian branches through 2026 under the banner of a hundred years of showing up and solving problems. The company has also assembled its history on a dedicated centennial site, westburne100years.ca.
For a firm that began by drilling for gas in Alberta and now sells the switchgear behind automated buildings, the through line is less about electricity than about distribution itself: being the company that has the part, knows the application, and is still there in a hundred years to be asked.
Photo courtesy of Westburne.