My old friend Paul-André Comeau died last week in Brussels, where his career as a foreign correspondent began fifty years ago. The media have well described, the day after his death, his career and his feats of arms, as a journalist, servant of the public, at the head of the Commission for access to information or as a professor. I would like to come back at greater length to his commitment to greater openness of Quebec to the world and let him tell us about the importance he attached to international news and to the role of the foreign correspondent, as he explained in a text from 1980 (The journalistscollective, Quebec America).
I knew Paul-André at the time of the first oil crisis, in 1973-1974, and the first pollution alerts, the “Stop growth” of the Club of Rome. Sadly, the world hasn’t changed much since then. At the time, I hosted an economic news program on Radio-Canada. I often spoke with him about these major issues and the construction of Europe, which fascinated him and whose development he followed from Brussels. His knowledge of the files and his ease in explaining them impressed me. We quickly became good friends.
It is with his collaboration that we, at Laval University, from the end of the 1970s, integrated a course on international information into journalism education. He took a few weeks each year to come and share his thoughts and his passion with our students. Paul-André loved to teach. He did so with the same pleasure in communicating that he experienced in exercising his profession as a journalist.
He believed it was illusory that Quebec correspondents abroad seek to compete, in the hunt for news, with journalists from news agencies, always on the go, many of whom follow the unfolding of events day and night. He deduced the following: “Also, the Quebec correspondent has, by force of circumstance, the obligation to put into perspective the various facets of an event. To provide the elements of reference, the parameters of interpretation. » To identify, in foreign news, important facts or elements of comparison for Quebec society. Thus, if we had looked better or listened to his reports on the battles fought in Europe in the 1970s to ban asbestos, we could have avoided the creation, and the subsequent fiasco, of a National Society of asbestos and the nationalization of a dying product.
“Poor relative? »
In his text from 1980, still current, entitled “International information, poor relation? “, Paul-André deplored the lack of space that our media then gave to international information, explained the causes (“a historical development which has only recently favored a beginning of openness to the world”), before plead for a necessary change of attitude.
Let’s read it again: “Listening to the problems and social changes, to the currents that agitate other societies are not without value in terms of our own collective journey. [… ]. In this sense, international information, in addition to facilitating a certain forward-looking or prophetic reflection, upsets habits and forces us to question a host of concepts or quasi-truths. It is moreover the most stimulating dimension of information that stands out from events in an attempt to identify the fundamental aspects of human activity in its movement and complexity. »
It is true that, more recently, since the pandemic, the problems in the supply chain and the inflation that it has caused, and, more recently, with the war in Ukraine and its horrors, foreign information seems to be omnipresent in our media. But we can fear that once the war in Ukraine is forgotten, and the pandemic is a thing of the past, the media will return to “normality”, to “international information, the poor relation”, to a look at the world, which Paul – André lamented, which is essentially limited to the United States and the “old countries”.
We must remember Paul-André Comeau’s plea: If “international information is not a panacea, […] yet it is indispensable in a world where autarky is a utopian concept”. That was in 1980. The question of the openness of Quebec, and of its media, to international issues arises today with as much, if not more, acuteness in these times when the need for interdependence has not never been so obvious.