The Third Lesson of Pierre Juneau

The Third Lesson of Pierre Juneau

Inside Television 592
Publication Date: 2-24-12
By: Hubert O’Hearn


I didn’t know that the Juno Awards for achievements in Canadian music were named for him. That small addition to the wardrobe full of trivia that is stuffed into my brain led me to spend several increasingly impressed and admiring hours reading about the career of Pierre Juneau, who passed away this week at the age of 89. You too may have already read or seen one of the many obituaries which appeared this week, however there is still room to draw meaning from a life well led.

To be strictly honest, it’s easy work. Every stage of his life bears a story and a suggestion for the future. I doubt if Juneau’s life will ever be turned into a movie of the week - too many board rooms and memos, not enough leaping out of planes and hot affairs. Somewhere though, there is a biography writer who will turn out one hell of a great book. Within that book, there will be three essential lessons that bear close attention.

LESSON ONE: Choose Your Friends Well

There was no silver spoon feeding the infant Juneau his pablum. He was born to a working class family in Verdun, Quebec. Verdun, for those who don’t know it, is where people who work in Montreal live when they don’t make enough to live in Montreal. It’s the sort of place that used to be the meat and drunk of the Liberal Party: Federalist, blue-collar, and French.

Pierre Juneau rose above his birth station, shall we say, and went on to study at the Université de Montreal which was quite a hotbed of forward thinking among Canadian campuses at the time. Virtually every post-World War Two Premier of Quebec except Rene Levesque and Jean Charest graduated from it. So stimulated, Juneau did post-graduate work at the University of Paris where he befriended a U de M Old Boy named Pierre Trudeau.

They were very much the perfect duo, with Juneau the McCartney to Trudeau’s Lennon, or more whimsically the Leo Bloom to Max Bialystock. Someone needs to take care of the details and that was Juneau. He and Trudeau were co-founders of Cité Libre, for which one can make a pretty good argument was the most significant political journal in the history of this country (it’s a depressingly small list by the way). They fought the breathtakingly corrupt government of Maurice Duplessis, one sustained by a combination of a benevolent eye cast by the Catholic Church and wheelbarrows of graft. Cité Libre also fought for unions against corporatism, most notably its coverage of the legendary Asbestos Strike led by a young firebrand named Jean Marchand.

When the Liberal Party came calling in the early 60s, it dearly wanted Jean Marchand, a suave intellectual named Gerard Pelletier and because those two insisted on the third, it reluctantly took in Trudeau. Liberals like to forget about that bit of history.

Leaping ahead, Juneau became the head of the CRTC, as formed by the now Prime Minister Trudeau in his first year of power, 1968. And this is the second great lesson.

LESSON TWO: Culture Matters

Everything Juneau did was born out of the same philosophy that Trudeau held and that entire group of Canadian reformers of the 1960s held - you can change a country as much by its culture as by its laws. In ordering Canadian radio to start playing Canadian music, pronto and not just during the 3AM stoner deejay shift he created a national recording industry. The Juno was named in tribute in 1971; just three years into the job, he was loved that quickly.

Without him, No her

Later, at the tail end of the Trudeau years, Juneau became head of the CBC. The immediate task was to make all CBC programming 95% Canadian. And because he saw that a sizable and growing portion of the country was tuning in to CNN, he created Newsworld (sic). We would no longer be America Lite.

Is this the time, place and occasion to state that the country was better then, when it found its identity in providing opportunities for young people to demonstrate their love for this country through arts and culture rather than mixing their blood with the sand of distant wars? Perhaps not, but for my money that is the Third Lesson of Pierre Juneau. À Dieu.

Be seeing you.