Columnist at To have to, columnist, teacher, journalist Jean-Claude Leclerc died Saturday in Montreal at the age of 83. This voluble man attached high standards of probity to the exercise of his profession.
The widow of the deceased, Ginette Thériault, confirmed to the To have to that Mr. Leclerc died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Over the course of a career, conducted for the most part before the advent of digital tools, he had surrounded himself with a quantity of documents which, to hear him, proved to be even more important than the elements he drew from them. For his work. He dedicated to the exercise of journalism a kind of cult renewed according to the tide of information carried by the daily newspaper.
Jean-Claude Leclerc could expound abundantly on the ins and outs of journalistic ethics. At To have tohe acted for a long time as a trustee, vouches for journalists, after an annual review of compliance with conflict of interest standards and ethical issues.
For two decades, first under the direction of Claude Ryan, Jean-Claude Leclerc was a columnist at the To have to. In October 1973, when The duty officially takes position, under the pen of Ryan, in favor of the re-election of the liberal government of Robert Bourassa, the editorial writers Jean-Claude Leclerc and Laurent Laplante oppose. While Ryan renews his confidence in the Liberals in long texts, Jean-Claude Leclerc points to the “quiet capitulations” of this government and its refusal to adopt proportional representation as an electoral method. What’s more, he wrote, Robert Bourassa “leads a party that is always financed by big money,” calling into question the respectability of the whole.
Former journalist Jean-Pierre Charbonneau maintains that Jean-Claude Leclerc “was able to stand up to Claude Ryan and tell him what he thought”. When Charbonneau arrives at To have to in 1971, it was Leclerc who entrusted him with investigation files. “It was he who gave me my first files on municipal corruption. And that led the government to investigate. Jean-Claude Leclerc was someone who was not naive. He was interested in the underside of our society, in what was behind the “appearance”. He sought to unravel the not too avowed intrigues of our world. He was a good ally for investigative journalism. In 1980 he was a founding member of the Center for Investigative Journalism.
A Catholic progressive
According to Louis-Gilles Francoeur, Jean-Claude Leclerc felt an ambivalent admiration for Claude Ryan. “He admired him, but at the same time did not follow him on several issues. In the early 1970s, recalls Francoeur, “Jean-Claude represented a progressive pole in the To have to. He was a sovereigntist, but very moderate. »
As a student, he had been active, at the very beginning of the 1960s, within the Catholic Student Youth (JEC), a movement of which Claude Ryan had been one of the linchpins. “When I was a student, said Jean-Claude Leclerc, Ryan was already a legend. »
At the age of 27, after collaborating on an investigation for a regional newspaper, he entered the To have to in the spring of 1967 as a reporter for municipal affairs.
Bernard Descôteaux, director of the daily from 1999 to 2016, recalls that Jean-Claude Leclerc was particularly busy with To have to municipal and urban issues. “Mr. Ryan was at odds, to put it mildly, with Mayor Drapeau’s administration over ethical issues. A television had been sent as a gift by the Montreal police to the To have to, which the newspaper strongly denounced. “That left a lot of room for municipal criticism. »
Leclerc’s signature appears on the editorial page regularly from 1970. After the departure of Claude Ryan for the leadership of the Liberal Party, Leclerc’s signature remains very present under the leadership of Jean-Louis Roy, then of Benoît Lauzière. However, Jean-Claude Leclerc left the newspaper in the fall of 1990, when Lise Bissonnette undertook to restructure it, after having found itself some time before in a tumultuous situation. He left to teach journalism at the Faculty of Continuing Education of the University of Montreal. He will return to To have to a few years later, this time as a columnist. He has also collaborated on several other publications, including the daily The Gazetteas columnist independent from 1991 to 1995.
The thought of Jean-Claude Leclerc is attached to a Catholic tradition which has long irrigated The duty. Until 2016, Jean-Claude Leclerc also wrote the column “Ethics and religions” in the pages of the daily newspaper founded by Henri Bourassa. Until the spring of 2020, his readers followed him elsewhere in the pages of Presence, a religious news magazine. He had also collaborated in the past with RND (Notre Dame Review), a print kept by the Missionary Fathers of the Sacred Heart and offered by the Fédération des Caisses Desjardins.
Far from being a doctrinaire, Leclerc gave a strong social slant to his ideas, being wary of dogmas and the lack of openness which risked leading society to an evolution judged in his view to be harmful. For example, he defended the relentlessness of religious denominations against homosexuality, an injustice which he considered “particularly odious”.
During his regular visits to the drafting of the To have tothis old-timer enjoyed discussing topical issues with everyone, gladly shedding light on them in his own way, most often through the story of moments drawn from his professional experience.
After studying at Laval University, he obtained a law degree from the University of Montreal. Jean-Claude Leclerc had first attended, until 1957, the Saint-Joseph seminary in Trois-Rivières. A graduate of the same institution, the current director of the To have to, Brian Myles, believes that Jean-Claude Leclerc had a remarkable capacity for analysis. “As a young journalist, when I frequented the documentation center, I was struck, in all the files, to see texts by Jean-Claude Leclerc. It struck me, the number of editorials he had produced over the years, always with the same finesse of analysis and simplicity in the choice of words. He was, yes, a remarkable analyst capable of taking an interest in all sorts of questions. »