Anyone who dismisses Carolle Brabant as a glorified bean counter will be surprised.

‘Carolle is a woman of action,’ says François Macerola, SODEC CEO and former executive director of Telefilm Canada. ‘She is une personne performante [a high achiever] and she knows the milieu from every angle.’

A chartered accountant by trade, Brabant also knows the motion picture business in both official languages.

Telefilm’s newest executive director, Brabant is a native Montrealer whose childhood was a mirror of the country’s two solitudes under one roof. Her mom (who passed away just days after this latest TFC promotion) was a unilingual francophone and her late dad was an Ontario-born anglophone… who controlled the TV zapper.

‘At home we spoke French,’ Brabant explains candidly in English, ‘but as it was in those days, my father had control of the TV, so we were raised on English CBC,’ she laughs, adding that her introduction to American culture included The Ed Sullivan Show.

Also an avid reader, Brabant initially got her French cultural fix from the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre before she got hooked on indie cinema and the films of François Truffaut and Fellini.

Brabant also describes herself a ‘team player’ who is ‘driven by change,’ which is in itself an understatement – a Brabant trademark. She led the Crown Corporation out of the dark ages.

‘We had green screen [computer monitors] and no mouse,’ she recalls of TFC in the ’90s when she was appointed head of IT, partly to address the then-threat of Y2K.

‘Telefilm Canada was not up to speed in terms of technology. I became responsible for bringing the organization forward. I obviously didn’t do it all alone; I had a very enthusiastic team, and that’s part of what brought me to the next step. I really realized I was good at managing teams and motivating and making them see the path and delivering together,’ she explains.

CBC EVP Richard Stursberg agrees that collaboration is one of Brabant’s greatest strengths.

‘I think she’ll bring the entire goodwill and enthusiasm of Telefilm itself to the role,’ says Stursberg (himself exec director at TFC from 2001-04). ‘Financially, Carolle is very sophisticated,’ he adds.

Brabant graduated as a chartered accountant in 1986 from the University of Quebec in Chicoutimi and worked at a CA firm before joining TFC in 1990. In earlier days, she also worked as a bank teller and a store clerk, but she says she learned valuable lessons nonetheless.

‘One of the things that still serves me from that time is that I very quickly get the big picture,’ Brabant elaborates. From one job to the next, she asked herself: ‘What’s the common thread from one organization to another?’ The answers would help her ‘quickly understand the issues and find solutions.’

Problem-solving is ‘a skill I acquired during the early years,’ she says of her ability to ‘import things’ from one industry to another. And film industry leaders nod to the importance of being solutions-oriented in an industry which has been in a sea of change since the now-defunct Canadian Television Fund was created in 1996.

Recalls Valerie Creighton, president and CEO of the newly minted Canada Media Fund: ‘Carolle and I first worked together when the transition for the Canadian Television Fund to move the file administration from the CTF to Telefilm was announced by [then-Heritage] Minister Liza Frulla in 2005. This was no easy task.’

In fact, the merger of the CTF and Telefilm came with a mandate to lower administration costs to 3.5%. ‘And this year we will deliver 2.7%,’ notes Brabant.

However at the time, admits Creighton, ‘Both organizations resisted the change and the atmosphere was fractious to say the least. We both came to the job without any baggage or previous history. I was new to the fund and Carolle new to this process. This helped us create the change required in an extremely compressed timeframe.

‘Carolle listens, observes and acts. She works without the interference of ego and removes obstacles with the best interest of the client at heart,’ says Creighton.

So how did Brabant land in this crazy film biz?

‘I wanted to do something else; I didn’t want to be a partner in a CA firm,’ she says. ‘Being a partner in a small town, most of the people you meet in town are your clients. And the separation of the work/life balance wasn’t there, and to me it’s really, really important.’

Brabant is neither a feminist nor a solo player – what one might expect from the first female executive director of Telefilm. She actually says her personal life has been fundamental to her success.

Brabant didn’t exactly marry her high school sweetheart and live happily ever after, but close.

At the tender age of 22, she married a journalist (Benoît Munger) and followed her new husband north to Chicoutimi, where he was posted. Today he works for the French-language daily Le Devoir.

‘We met in Montreal and we started our life together,’ she says. ‘It will be 35 years this year. It’s one part of my life I’m very proud of; we succeed making it together.’

Brabant’s husband also backed her career ambitions.

‘In my 20s I worked as a bank teller,’ she says. ‘There’s not much of a career there.’ So she went back to school at 29 and got her CA before the couple agreed to another big change. ‘I saw an ad in the paper for Telefilm as an auditor,’ she explains, and the last 20 years flew by.

In 1990, Brabant started a new audit program at TFC that morphed into a compliance and recovery sector before she was promoted to director of IT, and then finally to director of administration in 2006.

‘During all these years my focus has always been clients,’ she says. ‘You are not doing it for yourself; it’s going to help the organization better serve the clients, and that’s the ultimate goal. That’s why we decided to come up with the I-services; what can we do to give less administrative burden to the client? We’re not going to ask 20 times for their address. We are not there to push paper from one end of the table to the other. We’re there to serve the industry.’