Northern Sea Routes, Amazon War, the 2 CV and a Journalist from the Mad Men Era
October 2, 2023 Volume 4 # 19
Four Northern Passages
Warming water in the Arctic Ocean makes it easier to take the northern shortcut. British explorers like John Franklin and Henry Hudson died trying to find the Northwest Passage. Now ice-reinforced commercial ships do it with relative ease. But the easier routes are over northern Russia; fewer islands, not as ice-clogged and kept open by amazing nuclear-powered icebreakers. The Russians are said to be shipping oil across the north in single hulled non-ice class tankers. Risky.
Amazon
Lina Khan is the tough woman taking on Amazon with the intention of breaking it up. Khan is chair of the FTC (Federal Trade Commission). She is big tech’s nightmare.
Khan first wrote a paper in 2017 about the monopolistic practices of Amazon. Now that Academic exercise is being played out in real life. Her argument is that rivals can’t compete with Amazon and small firms that sell on Amazon pay such high fees that they have to jack up prices.
Amazon brands the case `misguided’. It would, wouldn’t it.
And a Canadian Book Publisher’s Complaint
Ken Whyte is a former newspaper (National Post) and magazine (Saturday Night, Macleans) editor and publisher who now runs Sutherland House Books that specializes in non-fiction. He also writes a weekly SubStack newsletter. In one of his recent posts he shows how little money is left once Amazon takes its cut.
This is a lift from his newsletter Shush.
At the end of his newsletter, Whyte promotes independent book stores.
75th Birthday of the 2 CV
The Citroen `Deux-Cheveux’ the car that is as French as a fresh baguette. It debuted at the Paris Auto Show in the first week of October, 1948. Citroen sold 5,111,469 by the end of the line in 1990. By 1950 there was a 6 year waiting list for the 2 CV.
As you can see, the 2 CV could carry four people and 50 kilograms of luggage. It has a two cyclinder engine that put out 9 horsepower and had a top speed of 50 kmh or about 31 mph. The horsepower inched up over the years and the van was popular though the regular model could also do deliveries, even baguettes
Speaking of French Wheels
The original Michelin Man from the 1894 or thereabouts.
European Cars Still Rule: China Moving Up
And spotted in Belgium from a Subscriber in France
Essay of the Week
This is an obit I wrote of Peter Desbarats. When I was in my lates teens early 20s I idolized him; there was one particular piece of his in the old Montreal Star I never forgot. He wrote about the capture of a man who escaped from Bordeaux Jail. He was independent, talented and ambitious.
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Peter Desbarats had four or five careers and was a success at all of them: newspaper reporter, feature writer, editor of a literary magazine, TV host, national anchorman, poet, playwright, political authour and writer of children’s books. He published a dozen books, one a best seller on Rene Levesque just before the election of the Parti Quebecois in 1976.
He was dean of the journalism school at the University of Western Ontario and Commissioner of the inquiry into what was known as the Somalia Affair. The government of the day killed it, but that left Desbarats free to write perhaps his most important a book, Somalia Cover-Up: a Commissioner’s Journal.
Peter Hullett Desbarats was born in Montreal in 1933 into a middle class family. One of his ancestors, George-Édouard Desbarats was the first official government printer of Canada and publisher of the Canadian Illustrated News from 1869 to 1883.
In spite of Peter Desbarats’ French name he was an English-speaker, not uncommon in Quebec where people with English names such as Blackburn or O’Neill can’t speak much English. The rule of thumb is you can tell the mother tongue from the first name and he was Peter not Pierre. He showed a talent for writing at an early age and was writing poetry by the age of nine.
The Desbarats family lived on Connaught Avenue in Notre Dame de Grace and Peter went to a private Jesuit boy’s school, Loyola High School, a ten minute walk from home. Loyola was English but modeled on the eight-year French classical college model: four years of high school, four years of college. Mr. Desbarats dropped out after the first year of college, something that left him with a bit of an inferiority complex, in particular in his academic career.
When he was 18 he had a wild party in his house while his parents were away. When he woke up to see the chaos the next morning he applied for a job he saw in the newspaper: it was working in the office at the air base at Goose Bay Labrador. He was gone for six months.
He started in journalism the old fashioned way: as a copy boy at Canadian Press, ripping feeds from wire machines and bringing it to the writers and acting as a general dogsbody at the bottom of the newsroom hierarchy. After that he moved to the Montreal Gazette where he chased fire engines, listened to police radios and all the other things a cub reporter did. But the Jesuits had taught him to write and he soon graduated to features.
In 1955 he went to London for a year and worked at Reuters, a kind of right of passage for many young Canadian journalists at the time. He came back went to work for the Winnipeg Tribune then the Montreal Star where he was a top feature writer. Desbarats knew the job on features was to find the odd things the daily news reporters didn’t have time to see.
The big story in the summer of 1965 was Lucien Rivard, a career criminal whose escape from Montreal’s Bordeaux Jail was a local scandal: he went over the wall while `watering the skating rink’ in temperatures that were well above freezing and he was on the loose for four months. There was a national angle: Rivard had oblique connections to a prominent Liberal and it shook the government of Prime Minister Lester Pearson.
When Rivard was captured on July 16, 1965, in the quiet south shore suburb of Woodlands other reporters wrote about the dramatic takedown. Mr. Desbarats found May Birch, a waspy woman having tea party nearby, and wrote a front page piece headlined Tea Party Turns Into Turmoil, contrasting the drama outside to her quiet afternoon ritual, oblivious to all around her.
“One of the greatest manhunts in Canadian history ended yesterday in a hail of flying teacups and panicking poodles,” read the lead paragraph.
Quebec in the 1960s and early 1970s was a political writer’s dream: a society turned upside down with the secular Quiet Revolution replacing the old order of the Catholic Church; and the birth of a new political party, the Parti Quebecois under Rene Levesque, a former star French language CBC journalist who Mr. Desbarats would have known from news conferences and downtown Montreal haunts.
His first political book was The State of Quebec: A Journalist’s View of The Quiet Revolution was published in 1965. It was reviewed in the Globe and Mail by the paper’s Quebec City correspondent, Guy Lamarche.
“The result is a fair analysis of Quebec with a description of the some of its social elements that could only be written by a young man who has known them all from the inside. I am thinking especially of Desbarats’ portrait of the Anglostocracy, a tribe that few French-Canadian reporters could deal with without prejudice,” wrote Mr. Lamarche.
Around the same time as the book came out Mr. Desbarats founded an ambitious literary and political magazine called Parallel. The name reflected the French and English nature of Montreal. It was short lived but it attracted some of the best writers in Canada. In the second issue Leonard Cohen published a short story called Luggage Fire Sale and Peter Newman, the Ottawa based journalist, wrote a profile of the former Conservative prime minister with the very mid 60s title: Diefenbaker a Go-Go. The Magazine was a quarterly and lasted only about seven issues.
Paul Wright, a CBC current affairs producer decided to put Peter Desbarats on television as host of a series of profiles called Eight Stories Inside Quebec. There were documentaries on Jean-Paul Desbiens, authour of the book Les Insolences du Frère Untel, (The Impertinence of Brother Anonymous) a critique of Quebec Society, as well as a portrait of an English speaking woman in Quebec City looking for her roots. The tone of the programs, promoting bi-lingualism and done before the rise of the separatist movement, seems outdated 50 years on. But it proved Peter Desbarats had the cool McLuhanesque demeanor demanded of television.
Soon Mr. Desbarats was hosting a nightly program called Seven on Six, the title telling you it came on at seven o’clock after the evening news on channel six, the English language CBC outlet in Montreal.
Peter Desbarats was in his element. The program, led by the intellectual Mr. Wright, took itself seriously and there were heated daily meetings to discuss ideas. One of the producers was the journalist and boulevardier, Nick auf du Maur. Mr. Desbarats was no slouch himself in the boulevardier department.
He was in many ways a man of the Mad Men era: handsome, well dressed—he almost always wore black-- great at his job and cool in a Don Draper kind of way. He was one of the first men to sport long sideburns, and wrote a magazine article about it, and for a while sported a Sherlock Holmes like cape. He rode a motorcycle to work.
“His boots were polished so you could see your face in them,” said Sandra Clementson, a script assistant on the current affairs program and another devotee of Montreal’s louche night life. “He was shy but very mischievous and an outrageous flirt. But always so polite to everyone, even when he crushed their ideas in a story meeting. And he was a natural on television.”
He worked on other programs as well, writing and narrating a controversial documentary Inside Television News. In the early 1970s he and producer Mark Blandford were given free access to ABC News in New York on the condition the 90 minute program was never shown in the United States.
“The program showed the shallowness of TV news at the time. The CBC tired to stifle it and only decided to run it at the last minute without any publicity,” said Mr. Blandford. “It was, to my knowledge, the first time that television news examined itself. The film remained a staple at journalism schools for years after that.”
Mr. Desbarats returned to print full time in 1970 as part of the Ottawa bureau of the Toronto Star, though he spent as much time as he could in Montreal.
“Peter was one of the last gentlemen reporters in Ottawa; intelligent, thorough, always well informed and ready to miss a story if he felt he couldn’t get all or most of the facts,” said Peter Newman who worked with him in Ottawa. “His approach was never partisan but fair and unbiased, occasionally too fair.”
Vince Carlin, who worked for Time Magazine at the time, said he interviewed Pierre Trudeau with Mr. Desbarats and the two Montrealers seemed to respect each other.
“Trudeau wasn’t someone who liked reporters but you could see by his body language that he had time for Desbarats,” said Mr. Carlin. “Desbarats was very generous. He taught me a lot about the country when I first moved here from the States.”
Bill Cunningham, who ran the news department at the newly formed Global TV, lured Mr. Desbarats to Global. In 1973 he became the joint anchor of the nightly news and held that job until 1980. During that time his first marriage broke up and CBC reporter David Halton remembered it caused Mr. Desbarats some embarrassment.
"Desbarats stood up at an Ottawa news conference and was the first to ask Trudeau about his separation from Margaret. Trudeau obviously knew about Desbarats' marriage troubles and said something like `I'll tell you about my separation when you tell me about yours.' Desbarats sat down. It was the only time I can remember him not having a comeback."
While he was at Global. Mr. Cunningham kept telling him to sign a contract but he never did, so when the network changed hands in 1980 it was easy to fire the high paid anchor.
Mr. Desbarats’ best selling book was Rene: a Canadian in Search of a Country, published in 1976 just ahead of the surprise victory of the Parti Quebecois in the November election. It was snapped up by English Canadians who wanted to understand what happened.
After Global Mr. Desbarats worked for a number of inquiries and commissions. The first one was Tom Kent’s Royal Commission on Newspapers. Shortly afterwards he was approached to become the dean of the journalism school at the University of Western Ontario where he stayed from 1981 to 1996. His wife Hazel said he was surprised when he was offered tenure, especially after his experience at Global.
“I remember he said `is this what I think it is, a no cut contract?”
There were some rumblings from academics at Western about hiring a man who didn’t even have an undergraduate degree. Some of them never got over it. When the University wanted to shut down the journalism school, Mr. Desbarats led a spirited campaign to keep it open; in a dramatic ending his side won by one vote.
After he left the journalism school he took on the job as a commissioner of the Somalia Inquiry, looking into atrocities committed by Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia.
“He was really angry when the government shut it down,” said his wife. He got even by writing a book about it and there was some grumbling that he was using information gathered on government time but nothing came of that complaint.
Among his other accomplishments he wrote three plays, the early ones performed at the Centaur Theatre in Montreal, the other in London, Ontario. Peter Desbarats received a number of awards over his long working life, including two ACTRA awards. His family said he was proudest of being an officer of the Order of Canada.
Peter Desbarats was 80 years old. He died from complications\ due to Alzheimer’s Disease. He is survived by his wife Hazel, his children Michelle, Lissa, Sharon, Brynne, Shasta, Nicholas, Jane, Jennifer, Jane and Jonathan and 11 grandchildren. A daughter Gabrielle predeceased him.