Maxime Gagné: The ability to rebuild
No running water, no electricity. A hunting camp deep in the woods, a solar panel added later, snow he melted to wash himself. Nights at minus forty when he had to get up because the snow was blowing in between the boards.
Thirty-two months.
Maxime Gagné, founder and publisher of EnDroit.ca, describes it as some of the best moments of his life.
His family came to see him from time to time and kept telling him to come back to reality, that it was dangerous. He did come back, eventually. But when he talks about that period, he slows down. It was the only time it happened during our entire conversation.
Today, he spends his days on a citizen platform that helps Quebecers find their own way through the justice system. Between the hunting camp and that platform, there is a story nobody ever asked him to tell.
What you see
Seven hundred pages of legal guides. Hundreds of citizen testimonials. Investigative files. Millions of views a month on social media. Journalists with thirty years in major newsrooms writing in to ask if they can join the team.
From the outside, it looks like a newsroom. With staff and a budget.
There is neither.
Maxime works at least a hundred hours a week, from four or five in the morning until midnight. Seven days a week. A few volunteers and collaborators around him, and everything else paid out of his own pocket for the past year.
In twelve months, he has taken a day and a half off.
I wanted to understand what drives someone to do this. Not the mission, that is written all over his website. What lies underneath.
The boy who was told to keep quiet
Maxime received his first diagnosis at sixteen. Back then, people talked about Asperger's syndrome and Tourette's. At the time, a diagnosis was received very differently.
'' You weren't supposed to talk about it much. You're fine, you can do what you need to do, you can work, so you don't have a problem. ''
So he took on that version of himself. For decades, every time something happened, a tic, a grimace, a reaction that spilled over or bothered people, he was told to stop. He forced himself. He hid.
He started working very young. Groceries, sales, whatever job you can get at that age. Later, he earned a diploma in petrochemistry and spent about ten years in refineries and smelting furnaces. He also drove a locomotive.
He talks about it calmly, like a closed chapter.
'' That wasn't a life for me. Being managed by plant supervisors doesn't suit us. It's not a good life for people like us. ''
“People like us” means people who work the way he does. During his years at the plant, he didn't know they existed. He thought he was the only one.
He eventually went out on his own. That's where he felt he belonged.
Destroy and start over
Maxime has lived with addiction since his teens. He describes himself as a periodic user. Seven years with nothing, no alcohol, no drugs, then a three-month relapse that takes everything with it.
He doesn't sugarcoat it. Addiction is recognized as a disease by the World Health Organization, and he holds on to that word. Rightly so.
“It's the only disease that makes you destroy yourself without meaning to. Nobody gets up in the morning and says: today I'm going to blow my savings, lose my house, lose my wife.”
Six rounds of therapy. Thousands of meetings, where he crossed paths with doctors, cabinet ministers, pharmacists, people no one would ever imagine sitting in those rooms. Friends dead from overdoses, more than he can count on one hand. He has been sober for years.
Then he told me something I haven't been able to forget since.
'' If I show up at the hospital with cancer, I get care, people bring balloons to my room, they tell me I'm a hero, that I'm fighting. If I show up on all fours after an overdose, and I've lived that, we're miserable outcasts of society. You deserve what's happening to you. You chose this. ''
He said it calmly, without trying for effect. And he went on, almost in the same breath:
'' I should be dead. ''
What he adds next explains a lot of what follows. He talks about his luck. A family that could support him financially, an ability to get back on his feet quickly. He knows most people didn't have that, and he draws a conclusion he states without any drama: he has an obligation to give a little back. Not to be a saint, he points out. Others do far more. But if he changes something for one person, he will have done what he could.
What heals him
It was during those years that he left for the forest. He had decided to leave everything behind.
'' I'm getting rid of everything, I'm leaving. ''
He became a father during those years. That's what brought him back.
With his former partner, he bought a huge private estate, with lakes, a river, maple groves, animals and kilometres of road to plow to reach the house.
One separation later, he now lives in the city. He makes a point of saying it's temporary.
“That's what saved my life, really. Nature, animals, rivers and lakes.”
What his brain makes possible
I asked him to flip the usual narrative. Everyone talks about neurodivergence as an obstacle. I wanted to know what the way he functions allows him to do that others can't.
He thought for a moment, then gave me the sentence that this whole article ended up being built around.
'' The best part of being neurodivergent, for me, has been the ability to rebuild what life destroyed through the disease of addiction. ''
He goes into detail. After losing everything, he was back on his feet in six months, in a year. Several times. Twenty-five properties bought, renovated, rented out, sold. Businesses built from inventory bought up when other businesses closed. He says he once bought a waterfront house one morning, based on a newspaper ad, without visiting it, by wire transfer, because he had decided it would make a nice project.
He knows full well the effect this has on the people around him. The twenty-seven-foot boat that appeared in the driveway without anyone hearing about it first.
'' That's the side of me everybody hates. ''
He has tried medication. Two attempts, never more than two weeks. The effect was immediate: it removed exactly what bothered other people. He was fine for them and no longer recognized himself, so he stopped.
It's the same wiring that led him to read the codes of procedure cover to cover and to spend, by his count, five thousand hours studying law and artificial intelligence, without being a lawyer and without ever claiming to be one.
And it's the same wiring that keeps him from sleeping.
'' There's no way sleep is coming, because I still have eight letters to write and three emails to send. I'll do them, and then I'll be able to sleep.”
He says it simply, as one part of his life among others.
The day he understood he wasn't alone
When the justice system caught him in its gears, Maxime first thought he was an accident.
Someone who had slipped through the cracks.
'' Then I realized it's widespread. It's patterns. ''
He spent two years going through the mechanism himself, one body at a time.
A complaint to a professional order. A claim to a compensation fund. A request for review. An appeal to an ombudsman. Each one has a good reason not to act, and each one refers you to the next. Twelve doors later, the citizen is right back where they started.
'' It's the perfect loop. You go around in circles, and nobody opens a door for you. ''
At first, EnDroit.ca was there to point people toward other resources. To explain what the document they just received from a bailiff means and which professional to turn to. He comes back to this several times during our conversation: he does not give legal advice and he does not review files. He is not a lawyer.
But within a year, what he was receiving changed how he understood the need.
'' They don't need legal advice. They need to be heard. ''
He receives hundreds of messages a week. Some people write to him saying they don't even want a reply. They just want someone to read it. Sometimes people reach out when they are in a very bad place. He directs them to the right resources.
On those days, he is still thinking about it the next morning.
That part of his work, I recognize.
In my sessions, I often meet someone who comes looking for a strategy, and I realize along the way that it wasn't the first thing they needed. They needed to tell someone what had happened, someone who wasn't going to judge them. Once it has been said and heard, the rest becomes possible.
Maxime describes the same thing, at a different point on the journey.
He doesn't hide his views on artificial intelligence either. He uses it, says so publicly and defends it as an accessibility tool for neurodivergent people and for those he describes as too rich for legal aid and too poor for a lawyer. He believes the legal profession will shift toward support and advocacy, which no machine will do. Then he stops to point out that he is not a legal expert, that this is his opinion and that he may be wrong.
What can't be taken from him
This year, he put words to something he had carried all his life.
'' I realized I had the right to be who I was. And that I had to stop apologizing. ''
To measure how far he has come: before posting his first video, he had recorded one hundred and sixty takes. A sheet of paper in his hands, stuttering, tics. Today, he records about ten before keeping one.
He understood something else at the same time, and it may explain everything else. His principles are not up for negotiation. He is willing to give them years and his freedom. And he discovered he wasn't the only one who works like that.
'' I thought I was the crazy one. ''
Those principles have been tested. The platform has received formal demand letters and threats. He calls it a collection. At first he was nervous. Today, volunteer lawyers handle them, and he has learned to tell an intimidation tactic from a real legal step.
He points out something the people sending those letters clearly didn't see coming.
'' A typical person gets that and thinks: why would I keep going? My life is simpler without this. People like us, we live in complexity. If you send me that, it becomes my goal. ''
Maxime has been involved for years in a legal dispute he can't discuss publicly. What he says about it fits in a few words. He is being asked to give in on something he holds to be true, and he refuses. He doesn't see his case as a fluke: he recognizes in it the same mechanism he documents for others.
'' That would mean I accept what happened. I could never sleep again. I could never look at myself in the mirror again. ''
That refusal has a price, and he knows it. I pointed out that it was a steep one. He answered without hesitation.
“I don't recommend it to you. You have your family, your work, your house. Make sure you take care of your kids. Me, I'm able to do it, because everything has already been taken from me.”
He repeated that sentence several times. Everything has been taken from me. He has been well-off and he has been on the street. He has owned an estate with several lakes and he has had nothing at all. What survived is an ability to rebuild and a handful of principles.
The principles, nobody has managed to take from him.
When he told me he could never look at himself in the mirror again, I told him it was refreshing to hear, because I work the same way. My sense of justice has always been outsized, to the point of driving me up the wall some days. But it's also why, when I believe in something, people know they can count on me all the way. I was actually diagnosed as autistic this year, but I'll close that bracket here. This isn't my article.
What he doesn't say first
Toward the end, I asked him one last time why he does all this. He had already answered twice: the mission, and the obligation to give back. The third answer had nothing to do with the first two.
'' If I'm being honest, that community probably helps me a lot more than I help it. I take care of them. And they take care of me even better. ''
He describes his harder days, the ones when he doesn't feel like it. Then an email comes in, from someone doing worse than he is, and he takes the time to reply.
'' That person just saved my day. ''
He applies exactly the same reasoning to his dogs. He has been adopting Great Danes in need for a very long time, eleven so far. They have their own beds, their good steak. One of his dogs actually invited herself into our interview. She was gorgeous.
When I tried to praise what he does for these dogs, he corrected me before I could finish my sentence.
“I'm not that selfless. I adopt them because I need them.”
I smiled. I call my cat “my little therapy.” So I wasn't really in a position to argue.
A man who can talk about himself for an hour and a half without ever casting himself as the hero, and who gives without counting while swearing he does nothing special. That may be what struck me most about him.
The building
At the end, I asked him one of my offbeat questions. If the justice system were a building, what would it look like?
He didn't hesitate for a second.
“What you'd see are the cracks on the outside, the broken windows, the peeling paint, the wear and tear. But the key point is what you wouldn't see. The foundations are under attack.”
Then he kept going, and his answer went well beyond my question.
'' Stop trying to patch it. Stop trying to paint over it. Above all, stop making people believe your building is in good shape. It isn't. Move your building. ''
I won't weigh in on the substance. It's not my field, and Maxime would be the first to say he is giving an opinion.
But I recognize someone who talks about rebuilding from experience. He has torn down and rebuilt his own life often enough to know you don't fix foundations with paint.
What you take away from a meeting like this
I closed my screen and sat still for a moment.
What stays with me has nothing to do with justice or institutions. It's simpler and harder.
Maxime has spent his life apologizing for who he is, losing what he had built, rebuilding it, losing it again. Every time the cycle comes back around, he finds what he needs to rebuild.
And the day he asked himself what that ability could be used for, he put it to work for people who also have to start over.
He told me his best moments were thirty-two months without water, without electricity, without comfort, without anyone. I understand better now. It's the only period of his life when he had nothing to rebuild.
That's the kind of conversation you come out of changed.
Follow Maxime Gagné
EnDroit.ca: the citizen legal information and mutual aid platform he founded. Practical guides, anonymized citizen testimonials, investigative files and court news.
If you are going through a difficult time, Info-Social 811 is available everywhere in Quebec, at any time, free of charge. For addiction, Drug: Help and Referral answers at 1 800 265-2626, day and night.
You will find more portraits of perfectly atypical and fiercely formidable professionals on The offbeat conversations
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