LALONDE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-02-17 published
Claude J. GOUGEON
By Claire LALONDE
Monday,
February 17, 2003, Page A16
Father, husband, businessman, art collector. Born January 14,
1923, in Ottawa, Ontario Died December 14, 2002, of fibrosis
of the lungs, aged 79.
Act enthusiastic and you'll be enthusiastic was dad's motto.
In just such a positive manner, our dad raised five children,
urging us all to reach for the stars.
Dad received his training as a pilot with the Royal Canadian
Air Force during the Second World War. After the war, while working
as sales representative for Imperial Tobacco Company in northern
Ontario, dad met Rita
BANNON.
Perhaps it was his rich tenor notes
and the sweetness that emanated from his violin, mingling with
Rita's piano melodies, which led to their 1946 marriage in Sudbury, Ontario
In Sudbury, Claude began working for Rita's father at Bannon
Brothers' Furniture Store and raised his four daughters and one son.
His entrepreneurial spirit surged and he moved to Arnprior, Ontario,
where he invested his energy in his own furniture business and
became president of the local businessmen's association.
Later, his love of wood and fine form resulted in his establishing
Estate Antiques, a furniture-based antique shop in Orleans, Ontario
(Our tongue-in-cheek quip used to be that: "Everything was for
sale except Rita and the kids.")
On one occasion, my soon-to-be husband was sleeping in a downstairs
bedroom. Dad had just finalized the sale of the oriental rug
upon which the bed sat; he and my brother Tom tried to unobtrusively
hoist the bed (upon which my startled fiancé was feigning sleep),
to roll up and remove the rug.
Dad later developed a lasting passion for art, specifically 19th-century,
Canadian art. Our home became his gallery. With each family visit
we were caught up in dad's joy and expertise as he explained
each new piece. He would point out the effect of light and shadow,
the artist's self-rendering in a painting, the notch in the stonework
that identified a historical date. His appreciation of art was
as infectious as his personality.
Family was dad's first passion, however. He cherished our mother
and often deferred to her natural good taste in the purchase
of fine paintings. As children, our lives were filled with stories
of boating expeditions on the Rideau and Trent canals, and a
perspective of the world that no kaleidoscope could ever duplicate.
Dad's energy for life was boundless. He never had problems, only
challenges; his love for his family was unconditional. This attitude
was evident three weeks before my wedding, the day when I arrived
home distraught over the bankruptcy of the clothing store where
my wedding dress and three bridesmaids' dresses were stored.
Dad knocked at the door of the establishment and spoke to the
owner. Later that day, he arrived home, arms overflowing with dresses.
A natural teacher, one of dad's greatest lessons to us was his
last: the manner with which he graciously surrendered his worldly
goods and independence. In spite of a profound hearing loss,
great difficulty breathing and myriad other discomforts, dad's
attitude remained uncomplaining and positive.
His "act" of enthusiasm had become his natural personality and we were all benefactors.
Claire LALONDE is Claude
GOUGEON's daughter.
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LALONDE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-06-07 published
Bureaucrat 'invaluable' to ministers
Analyst was a key negotiator in talks that led to the formation
of the World Trade Organization in 1995
By Bill GLADSTONE
Special▼ to The Globe and Mail Saturday, June
7, 2003 - Page F11
Gerry SHANNON could have been a professional hockey player like
his father, but decided instead to play in a much bigger arena.
Mr. SHANNON went on to become a top career public servant who
helped to formulate the federal government's policies on international
trade. At one time, he held the No. 2 posting in the Canadian
embassy in Washington and was a key negotiator in the talks known
as the Uruguay Round, which led to the formation of the World
Trade Organization in 1995.
Mr. SHANNON, who died recently in Vancouver at the age of 67,
is remembered as a fair, tough and passionate trade-policy analyst
who was a trusted adviser to ministers in the successive cabinets
of Pierre TRUDEAU and Brian
MULRONEY in the 1980s.
"Gerry was a larger-than-life character," said Peter
SUTHERLAND,
a former director-general of the World Trade Organization. "He
played a crucial role in the conclusion of the Uruguay Round.
He had a belief in the multilateral system that he combined with
an intense Canadian patriotism. His personality was also a factor
in bringing peaceful resolution to difficult negotiations."
"He was a straightforward guy -- you always knew where you stood
with him," said Marc Lalonde, a former Liberal finance minister.
"He was a man with a very solid judgment. He was a good team
player in that regard, the kind of guy you would want to have
as a senior public servant."
Born in Ottawa in 1935, Mr.
SHANNON received an early lesson
from his father -- hockey player Jerry
SHANNON, who played for
the Montreal Canadiens, Boston Bruins and other National Hockey
League teams -- on the necessity of appearing strong, no matter
what. Once, after a puck knocked out the boy's two front teeth,
his father shouted, "Get up, son, shake it off!" Young Gerry
did so and stayed in the game.
The same spirit of toughness also probably helped him cope with
the death of his mother when he was 10.
Despite an offer to try out for the Bruins, Mr.
SHANNON took
his father's advice and went to university. Graduating from Carleton
University's school of journalism, he worked as a reporter for
the Sudbury Star for several years before lifting his sights
once again. He wrote a foreign-service exam and was accepted
as a diplomat in 1963. "He realized that being a small-town reporter
was great and he enjoyed it, but he wanted to be involved in
the big world," said his wife, Anne Park
SHANNON.
His first posting was in Washington, where, despite any formal
training as an economist, he handled matters of trade and economic
policy. "He was good at pursuing Canadian interests with the
Americans.
They liked him," Ms. Park
SHANNON said. "He was very
affable and very good at just getting to the essence of things."
He also served as Canada's senior foreign affairs representative
in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia, and as ambassador to Korea,
one of Canada's youngest ambassadors at the time.
In the mid-1970s, at the height of the Trudeau era, he became
director of commercial policy for the department of external
affairs. After several years, he returned to Washington as the
embassy's second-in-command at a time when Canada's national
energy program generated heated discussions.
Recalled to Ottawa about 1982, he became the assistant deputy
minister of finance for the Liberals, then deputy minister of
international trade for the Progressive Conservatives. In these
capacities, he advised Mr.
LALONDE and Tory ministers Michael
WILSON and Barbara
McDOUGALL.
"He was a very professional public servant, he had a sense of
professionalism, he had a very good mind, he was tough, and he
understood very well the role of the senior public servant, "
Ms. McDOUGALL said. "He never tried to be the minister and he
was a straight shooter, which many of us appreciated when we
realized that this was the exception and not the rule.
"I worked with a lot of great public servants, but he was certainly
right up at the top," she said.
Anne Marie
DOYLE, who worked extensively with Mr.
SHANNON in
various government departments, recalls that he would go out
on a limb for employees when he thought that they were in the
right, and he possessed "iron in his spine" that made his superiors
respect him as steadfast and trustworthy.
"He had this phenomenal gift -- the ability to take a very complex
problem, see to its core and express it in just two or three
very articulate sentences so that someone like a minister or
prime minister would have found him just invaluable," she said.
"They would have his complex briefing and he would say, 'Well,
Minister, what it boils down to is just this, ' and it would
be just brilliant."
Mr. SHANNON was "one of the giants of Canadian trade policy of
the '80s and '90s," said Bill
DYMOND, executive director of
the Centre for Trade Policy and Law at Carleton University. "The
politicians trusted him because he was blunt, honest and loyal
to the government."
Known for his enthusiasm and for being indefatigable on the job,
Mr. SHANNON performed an astonishing array of official duties
while in Geneva from 1989 to 1995. As Canada's chief negotiator
for the Uruguay Round, he developed a binding dispute-settlement
system that was hailed as a major breakthrough. He was Canada's
first ambassador to the World Trade Organization as he had been
to its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
As an occasional ambassador to the United Nations, he gave to
its committee on disarmament the "
SHANNON mandate," a significant
negotiating protocol still in use today.
Mr. SHANNON was known as a loyal defender of Canadian interests.
Soon after leaving government in 1995 to work as an international
trade policy consultant, he wrote an article for The Globe and
Mail on Canada's seemingly never-ending softwood-lumber dispute
with the United States.
"We always get roughed up in dealing alone with the Americans
on issues they deem to be critical to them," he observed. "They
simply have too many guns and they persevere until they win."
Mr. SHANNON enjoyed hiking, gardening, opera, travelling, dogs,
crossword puzzles and playing hockey.
He and his wife moved from Ottawa to Victoria about a year ago
with the intent of retiring there. He was sick only a few weeks
before he died on April 26.
He leaves his wife, Anne Park
SHANNON, and sons Michael and Steven
from a previous marriage. He also leaves a sister, Carol
SCHWARZ,
of Ottawa.
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LALONDE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-12-30 published
Diplomat shaped cultural policy
Art-loving ambassador to Moscow and Bucharest also served as
Trudeau's press secretary and as a director of the Canada Council
By Bill GLADSTONE,
Special▲ to The Globe and Mail Tuesday, December 30, 2003 - Page R7
Peter ROBERTS, a former press secretary to Pierre Trudeau who
served as Canada's ambassador to Moscow and Bucharest and as
director of the Canada Council, is being remembered as a major
shaper of Canadian cultural policy and a late representative
of an older generation of broadly based, multitalented diplomats that has all but vanished from the scene.
A native Albertan, Mr.
ROBERTS died in Ottawa on November 21
after a varied career that stretched over four decades and included
stints in Washington, Hong Kong, Saigon and Brussels. He was 76.
As assistant undersecretary of state responsible for cultural
affairs from 1973 to 1979, he helped Ottawa develop protective
policies toward the domestic film and book-publishing industries,
and was instrumental in drafting the government's nationalistic
Bill C-58, which applied tariffs to American magazines sold on
Canadian newsstands. He also helped to establish the National Arts Centre.
"He was a superb civil servant because he had a capacity to listen
to ministers, understand their viewpoints and help them achieve
what they wanted to achieve," said John
ROBERTS (no relation,)
who was Secretary of State when Peter
ROBERTS was undersecretary.
"But at the same time, he had an extraordinary passion for the
arts and for culture. So he did have his own ideas about things
that should be done. He stimulated you to think and to adapt your thinking."
As ambassador to the Soviet Union, Mr.
ROBERTS took a keen interest
in George COSTAKIS, a former junior employee of the Canadian
embassy who had spent a lifetime amassing an outstanding but
illegal collection of modern art, both Russian and international.
Mr. ROBERTS helped arrange a major exhibition of the collection
at the Musée des beaux-arts in Montreal and later wrote a full-length
biography, George Costakis: A Russian Life in Art, published by Carleton University Press in 1994.
Raising Eyebrows, a book of memoirs and character sketches, was
published in 2000. He also wrote a book-length profile of former
Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, whom he met often during
his posting in Bucharest from 1979 to 1983, and who was executed
in 1989. The book, Revenge on Christmas Day: Fact and Fiction in Bucharest, is slated for publication in 2004.
"Peter was a multifaceted person who bridged the cultural world,
the literary world, the academic world and the world of the foreign
service," said Allan
GOTLIEB, a former ambassador to Washington.
"If you go back to the golden age of Canadian diplomacy, you
find examples of these very broadly engaged minds. Peter joined
a little later, in the 1950s, but he still seemed a part of that era."
Peter McLaren
ROBERTS was born in Calgary on July 5, 1927, and
grew up in Lethbridge, Alberta. His father was a locally stationed
federal tax official, his mother a schoolteacher. A brilliant
student, he earned an M.A. in English literature from the University
of Alberta in 1951, as well as a Rhodes scholarship that enabled him to study for three years at Oxford.
Afterward, he went down to London with a group of Friends, including
Mr. GOTLIEB, who convinced him to write the Canadian foreign-service
exam. He did so on a whim -- and passed. He taught English literature
for a year at Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec, and joined the foreign service in 1955.
Initially stationed in Ottawa, Mr.
ROBERTS began studying German
in anticipation of a posting in Bonn or Vienna. "The department
had just then begun to realize that it was an advantage for a
foreign-service officer, and for Canada, if the officer knew
the language of the country where he or she was working," he noted in Raising Eyebrows.
"I hear you're learning German," the personnel manager remarked to him one day.
"Yes."
"You must be interested in languages."
"Yes."
"How'd you like to learn Russian?"
Several months later he travelled by ship and train to Moscow,
where he served as third-in-command of the Canadian embassy from
1955 to 1958. He was posted to Hong Kong and Vietnam in the early
1960s and
to Washington for the rest of that tumultuous decade.
In 1970, the Prime Minister's Office essentially borrowed him
from the Department of External Affairs, as it was then known,
so he could serve as assistant press secretary to Prime Minister
Pierre TRUDEAU.
Returning to Canada after a nine-year absence
that had included a dreary stint working for the North Atlantic
Treaty
Organization in Brussels, Mr.
ROBERTS showed up for his
first day of work -- just as the Front de libération du Québec
hostage crisis was erupting. Marc
LALONDE,
Mr.
TRUDEAU's principal
secretary, asked him to represent him at a strategy-planning meeting with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
"I had been long enough in diplomacy to know that this was a
situation in which one did not speak without instructions," Mr.
ROBERTS would recall. "I had no instructions, and I hadn't the
faintest idea what the prime minister's views were on this abrupt
development. I promised I would listen, make notes, report, and
phone everyone. That I did, but I was glad that I had not ventured
to predict which way
TRUDEAU would jump. It was only a few days
later that the troops were in Montreal, suspects rounded up and
in jail, the War Measures Act proclaimed, and the prime minister
saying to the press, 'Just watch me.' By that time I was veteran and expert."
After that baptism by fire, Mr.
ROBERTS became full press secretary
and met daily with Mr.
TRUDEAU, often advising him on issues
that the Prime Minister may have considered unimportant, and
sometimes having the sobering thrill of hearing his words repeated
verbatim to reporters later in the day. It was Mr.
ROBERTS himself
who announced the Prime Minister's marriage to an "incredulous"
press gallery on March 4, 1971, and the birth of a son on Christmas Day.
External
Affairs reclaimed Mr.
ROBERTS in 1972 and parachuted
him into the cultural division of the Department of the Secretary
of State. The new assistant undersecretary awoke at 4 every morning
and studied for three hours before going to work, but even with
a "marvellous staff" who "filled in for me when I was stupid
or ignorant," he sometimes found the learning curve excessively steep.
"Gradually my diplomatic experience came into play," he would
write. "Diplomacy is partly a matter of faking. If you don't
know the answer, if you don't know who someone is, don't let
on. Smile enigmatically, and change the subject to the situation
in Peru. I did a lot of that at the Secretary of State."
Mr. ROBERTS learned Romanian before becoming that country's ambassador
in 1979, and found that the effort had been worthwhile because
it gave him exceptionally good access to Mr. Ceausescu, who seemed
flattered that a Canadian could speak his language; the leader
would dismiss his retinue of advisers and translators and meet
with Mr. ROBERTS alone to discuss a variety of political issues
ranging from the situation in Poland to the situation in Quebec.
Mr. ROBERTS enjoyed the meetings but understood that he was dealing
with "the most desperate dictator and tyrant in Europe" and one who was becoming increasingly unhinged.
Among the visitors to Bucharest during that time was Allan
GOTLIEB,
by then undersecretary of state for External Affairs, who recalled
being feted with Mr.
ROBERTS by their Romanian hosts at a deluxe
and crowded restaurant, where they washed down wonderful steaks
with equally wonderful wines. The next evening, seeking a place
for dinner, he suggested they return to the same establishment.
"He told me, 'It's not there any more -- it's not real,' " Mr.
GOTLIEB recalled. "He said, 'They opened it just for you.' He
took me back there and it was all boarded up. There wasn't a
soul there. It was like one of those Russian Potemkin villages you hear about."
As Soviet ambassador, Mr.
ROBERTS joined Prime Minister Brian
MULRONEY's entourage for the funeral of general secretary Konstantin
Chernenko in Moscow in 1985. Like most other world leaders present,
Mr. MULRONEY was keenly interested in meeting the incoming general
secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, and so was "predictably enraged"
when the appointment was abruptly cancelled because an inept
bureaucrat had overfilled Mr. Gorbachev's daybook with appointments.
Persuading Mr.
MULRONEY to be patient, Mr.
ROBERTS quickly convinced
the Soviets to rectify the error, and the meeting occurred in the Kremlin as originally planned.
Six months later, Mr.
MULRONEY expressed his gratitude to Mr.
ROBERTS by summoning him back to Ottawa to head the Canada Council.
Fascinated as always by the Soviets, Mr.
ROBERTS was reluctant to go, but realized he could not refuse.
"He was sad because Gorbachev had just come to power, and things
were just beginning to show signs of change," recalls his wife, Glenna
ROBERTS.
"He left with a great deal of regret, because he was really interested in seeing those changes."
Mr. ROBERTS retired from the Canada Council in 1989 and was an
adjunct research professor of political science at Ottawa's Carleton
University from 1990. He was diagnosed about 10 years ago with
the cancer that increasingly incapacitated him over the past year.
He leaves his second wife Glenna, children Frances and Jeremy
and their families, sister Mary, stepchildren Graham, Brendan and Hannah
REID.
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LALOR o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-03-05 published
McINTYRE, Marion (Monie) Elizabeth Daly Bean
Died on February 28, 2003 at Kipling Acres Nursing Home after
a long and devastating battle with Alzheimers. Monie was born
in Toronto June 18, 1923, the only child of Roland and Marion
Daly. She attended Bishop Strachan School in Toronto and the
University of Toronto where she earned her B.A. and M.A. in sociology.
She leaves behind her children who adored her: Diane (Dennis
LALOR), Martha, Sarah (Peter
LOCKWOOD) and Andrew (Lisa
PEDWELL)
as well as eight grandchildren: Alison and Matthew
SCHWARTZ,
Carolyn,
Michael,
Douglas and Hilary
LOCKWOOD and John and Leslie
BEAN.
She was predeceased by her second husband, Dr. Alex
McINTYRE,
the love of her life. We will always be grateful to him for caring
so much about her. Monie was beautiful and bright, creative and
colourful, tolerant and self-indulgent - and she made every day
more interesting for all of us. She loved gardening, travelling,
bridge, golf and fishing. She was always keen to learn and experience
new things and enjoyed a rich and fulfilling life. We want to
thank Sharmane
SPENCE for her wonderful compassionate, gentle
and considerate care of Mom in her final years, and Sandy
McINTYRE
for his many kindnesses over many years. Funeral arrangements
will be private. For those of you who remember her and loved
her we know you will understand, in truth, she left us many years
ago and we have been mourning her loss ever since.
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