09/22/2025
🐾 Meet 🐾 Paul-Hubert | The Accountant who made pets his bottom line
Paul-Hubert is an accountant, not a veterinarian. But even an army of CPA’s could never calculate the impact he has had on countless pets, their pet parents and the people behind the pets here at VCA Canada and Vet et Nous. His love affair with animals began long before balance sheets and boardrooms. On a cold winter’s day a 10 year-old Paul-Hubert brought home his first stray that he had found shivering on the street. “Mom, can we keep him?”, he asked. Mom said “yes”. Another, and another soon followed. He remembers, “I loved how happy they always were to see you no matter what. That same feeling doesn't exist with any human, with anything. The connection you can have with an animal, what it does for you. You can't find it anywhere else.”
Years later, well into his career as an accountant, a family friend who owned a Vet Clinic confessed that she was having a tough time, that she couldn’t take it anymore. She described how hard it was to put down pets because their owners simply couldn’t afford care. That it had to stop. And that day in 2004 Fondation Animo pour la vie was born at Victoria Veterinary Hospital in St. Lambert. A different set of numbers started dancing around in his head. How many lives they could change. How many pets they could save. And they went to work.
Their mission was simple, but profound: Help low-income families save their pets by paying a significant portion of the veterinary costs needed for survival in the event of an accident or serious illness.
From the beginning they wanted to be for everyone, not just the people at their hospital. One hospital soon became five. Then a movement that spread across the Quebec in 2018 when they saw what was doing with its own program and approached them to collaborate, not as a sponsor, but as a true partner. Since then, thousands of pets have been saved all across the province, and it continues to make a difference. As Paul-Hubert has come to know, “Very few benefit from the human-animal bond like those who are financially challenged. If you can save the pet of someone who is in tough times, you are making those tough times a bit better.”
And even though it doesn’t take a CPA designation to know that all adds up, for this accountant the math is definitely mathing. He says, “It’s the best investment I ever made. At first it was a financial investment, at the end it was for my heart, my life.”
Paul-Hubert's story is a true reminder that while numbers can measure many things, they can’t even begin to measure the difference any one of us can make. 💙
