Thousands of people will be descending on the Arsenal in Griffintown from Wednesday until Friday for the seventh C2 Montreal conference.
At C2, you might see a group of people meeting inside a plastic bubble.
You will see lots of men and women dressed to the nines. You might even see a group networking over rose on an electric boat on the Lachine Canal or a small city’s worth of food trucks.
There are circus performers and people slowing walking around with what look like multi-coloured pom poms on top of their heads. You may notice the Quebec Immigration Minister sauntering around or the mayor of Lachine.
“I went to a conference about the truth, and where the truth has gone and I found that very interesting,” Lachine Mayor Maja Vodanovic told Global News.
Some of the top-billed speakers this year are trans rights activist Chelsea Manning and renowned rapper Snoop Dogg.
Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau gave a talk about gender equality on Wednesday, and then took some time to speak with some teenagers attending the conference.
“I take young voices very seriously,” Grégoire-Trudeau told Global News.
“They matter today, not just tomorrow.”
There is a lot of prestige, glamour and colour, by what is the actual point of C2 Montreal?
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“It’s a gathering of 7,000 people from 60 countries trying to reinvent part of their world,” explained C2 CEO Richard St. Pierre.
The idea is to take business people out of the conference room, away from trade shows, and bring them somewhere different.
“Creativity is at the edge of your comfort zone,” St Pierre said.
Entrepreneurs from all over the world have come to network and make deals in an unconventional setting.
“It’s not your traditional ‘Hey, come to my booth and come say hi and talk to me,'” said Paul Kohli of Montreal-based designer bag company Matt and Nat.
“You walk around and talk to people, look at their badges and see how you can interact, how you can help. It’s all about networking.”
Kohli said he’d had constructive meetings with people who work at Facebook and other companies.
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Sebastien Bazin, CEO of multi-billion dollar international hotel conglomerate AccorHotels, said he’s he’s already full of new ideas after meetings with people he’d never have met if he wasn’t at C2.
“There’s a lot of people here on artificial intelligence, mobile payment, social networking. I need to get all this so I can decide whether I participate, or I don’t participate,” he told Global News.
The hope is that the weekend pass, which costs thousands of dollars, pays for itself by bringing home new ideas.
“A company out of Laval called Samajam, they came here two years ago, met some Chinese investors and now they’re 240 people working in China,” said St. Pierre.
C2 continues through Friday.