Denis St-Jules was a familiar, reassuring presence for francophones in Northern Ontario for more than two decades, as the voice that Radio-Canada listeners heard every morning to start the day.Courtesy of family
Denis St-Jules, a radio personality, poet and leader in the franco-Ontarian community has died of cancer in Ottawa at the age of 73.
For more than two decades, Mr. St-Jules was the voice that Radio-Canada listeners heard every morning to start the day. He helped open CBON, Sudbury’s French-language station in 1978 as a researcher and columnist and spent the next 30 years at the outlet, most of the time as host of the daily morning show.
A native of Sault Ste. Marie, he was committed to defending the rights of francophones in the sprawling region and was active in building several of its cultural institutions.
For the francophones of Northern Ontario, he was a familiar, reassuring presence. “He was in everybody’s living room and car radio for 20 years,” according to Marcel Vaillancourt, a broadcaster and educator who worked alongside Mr. St-Jules at Radio-Canada.
Curious, friendly and upbeat, Mr. St-Jules was well-suited to early-morning radio. “I try to be a jovial, good-natured person,” he once told an interviewer. “It’s part of our responsibility as morning people to make things pleasant. We can’t just wallow in bad news in the morning.”
“He was always easy to work with,” said Jacques-André Blouin, a technician who worked with Mr. St-Jules at CBON, the kind of professional broadcaster who made the work sound a lot easier than it was. Although the station was based in Sudbury, the morning show frequently travelled to locations across the North, from Thunder Bay to Hearst, for remote broadcasts in an effort to get closer to listeners.
Mr. St-Jules was born in Sault Ste. Marie on March 12, 1950, the youngest of six children of René St-Jules, a lifetime employee of Algoma Steel, and his wife, the former Geneviève Turmaine. He began his studies in local schools but was forced to leave home for Sudbury because there was no French high school in the Sault.
After completing his studies at Collège du Sacré-Coeur, a Jesuit-run high school, he earned a bachelor’s degree in French literature at Laurentian University, where he became a key player in the burgeoning francophone cultural scene. For francophones, it was a challenging era. Quebec nationalism was in the ascendancy and the very notion of a French-Canadian identity shared by francophones across the country was tossed aside by Québécois nationalists as they focused their identity on Quebec exclusively.
Ontario francophones realized quickly that they would have to build their own institutions and sense of self if they were to survive.
“When we arrived at university in 1969, we no longer had an identity,” said Réjean Grenier, a contemporary of Mr. St-Jules who later also worked at Radio-Canada and became publisher of Le Voyageur, a local French weekly. “French-Canadian identity was scorned. It no longer existed.”
As a student, Mr. St-Jules joined a theatre troupe that put together a multimedia production inspired by the theatrical happenings of the 1960s. It was called Moé, je viens du Nord, ‘stie (Me, I come from the North, dammit) which celebrated franco-Ontarian language and identity and challenged the community’s traditional Catholicism. The play tells the story of a miner’s son who dreams of attending university until his girlfriend gets pregnant.
It was a hit, touring towns throughout the region, but its forthright discussion of sex and drugs shocked the Catholic establishment and the play was banished from schools and parish halls by the clergy. The play led to the establishment of the Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary.
When Mr. St-Jules and fellow students began writing poetry and wanted to see a collection of their works in print, they realized they could never interest a Quebec publisher so they set up their own, Éditions Prise de Parole, whose first book Lignes-Signes, is a collection of poems named for one of Mr. St-Jules’s creations.
Mr. St-Jules was also involved in the establishment of La Nuit sur l’étang, an all-night cultural and musical event, and Coopérative de Nouvel-Ontario (CANO), known best for the music group that took its name. A string of cultural institutions was established and the Radio-Canada station in Sudbury was there to report on their activities.
His broad interest in the arts never faded, said his daughter, Manon, an actor. Besides his poetry, “he played the guitar and was a great singer.” At home, “he was a very affectionate Dad” and always supportive of his children’s aspirations.
Mr. St-Jules was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Sudbury in 2010.
He died on Feb. 26, leaving his wife, Carmen; daughter, Manon; son, Marc-André; three grandchildren and two of his brothers.
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