ICG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-06-15 published
Radio pioneer built network
He founded Ontario's first French-language radio station in 1951
when his local station denied francophones airtime.
By Randy RAY
Special to The Globe and Mail Monday, June 16, 2003
- Page R7
He started in business as a butcher, and later was a soldier
and a hotelier, but Conrad
LAVIGNE's first love was show business.
Whether he was operating the television stations in Northern
Ontario that became the largest privately owned television broadcast
system in the world, appearing at the staid proceedings of the
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission,
or at conventions, Mr.
LAVIGNE often delighted those within earshot
with jokes, stories, witty comments -- even singing.
Like the time he sang grace during the annual meeting of the
Association for French Language Broadcasters in the 1970s.
"Members of the head table, including myself and Premier Bill
DAVIS, walked into the room and stood behind our chairs," recalls
Pierre JUNEAU, chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunications Commission from 1968 to 1975.
"Mr. LAVIGNE, who was chairman of the French-language broadcasters
group, began singing grace in French, and with his very strong
voice. People felt sort of strange with this."
When he was done, Mr.
LAVIGNE looked at Premier
DAVIS and quipped:
"Well, Mr. Premier, this is to show you that when you are chairman,
you can do whatever you like."
J. Lyman POTTS, former vice-president of Standard Broadcasting,
remembers the time in the early 1960s when Mr.
LAVIGNE appeared
before the Board of Broadcast Governors -- predecessor of the
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission --
in support of a radio or television station licensing application.
At the beginning of his presentation, Mr.
LAVIGNE expressed his
regrets that Board of Broadcast Governors member Bernard
GOULET
had died at few days earlier. Then, without skipping a beat,
he looked toward the ceiling and said: "If Bernie were here today,
I think he would vote for my application."
"It broke up the room," says Mr.
POTTS. "If ever a meeting got
dull he'd liven things up. It was a joy to find him at meetings.
He was a unique personality."
Mr. LAVIGNE, who was born in the small town of Chénéville, Quebec,
on November 2, 1916, and raised in Cochrane, Ontario, died in
Timmins, Ontario on April 16 following a lengthy battle with
emphysema. He was 86.
Friends, family and business associates say Mr.
LAVIGNE had show
business in his blood in his late teens. On many evenings, the
young man who moved to Timmins from Cochrane at age 18 to open
a small grocery store and butcher shop with his uncle would act
in plays in the hall of a local church. But he didn't get into
the entertainment business in a big way until after he helped
Canada's war effort, got married and started his life as an entrepreneur
in the hotel business.
In 1942, he sold his butcher shop and enlisted in the Canadian
infantry. He became a commando training officer while stationed
at Vernon, British Columbia, and in 1944 headed overseas. While
on a furlough from Vernon he returned to Timmins and married
Jeanne CANIE.
The couple raised seven children.
Mr. LAVIGNE returned to Canada in 1946 and bought the Prince
George Hotel in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, which at the time was
a booming gold-mining town. He sold the business in 1950.
He entered the world of media and entertainment by founding
CFCL,
the first French-language radio station in Ontario in 1951, in
what, essentially, was his way of ensuring the area's large French-speaking
population had a voice in the North.
Michelle DE
COURVILLE
NICOL of Ottawa said her father launched
the station after a group of francophones that he was part of
in Kirkland Lake was told by the manager of an English-language
radio station that they would no longer be given regular air
time to discuss issues of interest to French people.
"He was very proud of being a francophone," says Ms. DE
COURVILLE
NICOL. "
When he was told that his compatriots would no longer
be welcome on the local station he said, 'Oh, ya!' and got the
idea of starting a French-language radio station. He moved to
Timmins, applied for a licence and got it."
CFCL soon attracted a faithful audience, especially in Northwestern
Quebec, where it could be heard more clearly than French stations
in Montreal.
In a 1988 interview with Northern Ontario Business, Mr.
LAVIGNE
remembered the time he hired a relative unknown named Stompin'
Tom CONNORS to perform live on
CFCL.
The radio station was located
above a jewellery store and the pounding from Mr.
CONNORS's size-11
boots caused china to fall off the shelves in the store below.
Radio was his first love until the mid-1950s when, on a business
trip to southern Ontario, he saw his first television broadcast,
on WHAM from Rochester, New York He fell for the concept of television
and he and an engineer friend drove to Rochester and learned
everything they could about the magic medium of television.
Back in Timmins, Mr.
LAVIGNE bought a hill in the north end of
the town, named it Mont Sacré-Coeur, built a road to the foot
of his hill, and began blasting rock and working in earnest to
put a television station on the air. By 1956,
CFCL-television
was a reality.
"There was always the fear of failure because of the sparse population,"
Mr. LAVIGNE said at the time. "But we had an engineer with us
named Roch
DEMERS, who later became president of Telemedia, and
together we started putting up rebroadcasting stations between
1957 and 1962."
Kapuskasing's rebroadcasting station was the first such facility
in Canada, and it added another portion of the sparsely populated
northeastern Ontario market to the growing station's network.
Eventually, Mr.
LAVIGNE built rebroadcasting stations in Chapleau
and Moosonee, Ontario and Malartic, Quebec, and by the time expansion
was completed,
CFCL-television served 1.5 million people. Eventually,
he built the station into the world's largest privately owned
system.
For many years he appeared on a very popular
CFCL program known
as the President's Corner, during which he would sit on camera
in a comfortable chair and read and respond to letters from viewers.
Between 1962 and 1970, Mr.
LAVIGNE's television network entered
the world of high technology with its own microwave network.
Mr. LAVIGNE had the northeastern Ontario television market virtually
all to himself for about 20 years until the Canadian Television
Network (CTV) arrived on the scene. He reacted by building new
stations in North Bay and Sudbury with a rebroadcasting station
in Elliot Lake to serve Manitoulin Island. Expansion continued
in 1976 with the purchase of a bankrupt television station in
Pembroke, in the Ottawa Valley. Eventually, Mr.
LAVIGNE's private
network stretched from Moosonee to Ottawa, and from Hearst to
Mattagami, Quebec
"When we first started we had the market all to ourselves," he
told Northern Ontario Business. "We had 20 hours a week of local
programming, and it was beautiful. We gave the North a unified
voice. One time, during a forest fire near Chapleau, our messages
arranged for accommodations for 1,000 people in Timmins."
Mr. LAVIGNE divested himself of his broadcasting holdings in
1980, primarily because he was refused permission to operate
a cable television service in the North. He remained a director
of Mid-Canada Television, the network that grew from his little
Timmins station in 1956, and was chairman of the board of Northern
Telephone Ltd. For a number of years, he served on the board
of the National Bank of Canada, and for 10 years served on the
board of ICG
Utilities (formerly Inter City Gas.)
His life after broadcasting also included 20 years as a property
developer in the Timmins area.
"He was always a physically active person," says Ms. DE
COURVILLE
NICOL. "In the years he was setting up his television stations
he would often go out with the engineers. He was not as happy
sitting behind his desk."
Mr. LAVIGNE was elected to the Canadian Broadcasting Hall of
Fame in 1990. His wife died in 1995. He leaves Ms. DE
COURVILLE
NICOL and six other children, Marc, Andrée, Nicole, Jean-Luc,
Pierre and Marie-France.
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