A question of generation, temperament or urgency in the face of the spiraling horizon, we walk straight ahead, stubborn denial in the face of the inevitable end of the journey, including that of loved ones… Yet I knew that Jean-Robert was eaten away by a ruthless and dazzling brain cancer. Generously supported by his spouse, Lyne Hébert, he was conscious and calm until the last days.
How to testify to Jean-Robert, the love of my 20 years, hair and beard disheveled, known in the heart of a snowstorm in 1969 just like the one where I write this word? Witnessing, over more than 50 years, the keen intelligence, integrity and lucid courage of a loved one is not easy. As Günthers Anders points out in The Battle of the Cherries, published years after the death of Hannah Arendt with whom he lived for several years: “What’s Hannah’s in it and what’s of me, how many things from then and how many today, I cannot say. »
After his debut in student journalism and then at the National Student Press, Jean-Robert was part of one of the last teams of the newspaper The Latin quarter, at the time of the events of October 1970, when part of the team was “hiding in the bushes”, to use the expression of the time. While working elsewhere, he then supported the creation, notably by Serge Martel, of the Agence de presse libre du Québec, the APLQ (1971-1973), which, conceived in the wake of the Liberation News Service in the United States and the Liberation press agency in France, at the origin of the daily Releasemade it possible, long before the Internet, to have privileged information and analysis links with numerous national and international networks.
In 1971, our publication critical of federal youth employment programs, entitled “Youth Perspectives – The cool of a government too much examined the underlying issues of these programs, which have contributed to the creation of day care centres, food counters, tenant associations or even the “Squad of Murality”, but at the cost of identifying many leaders, as in the anti-poverty programs in the ghettos of the United States, analyzed by Piven and Cloward.
Jean-Robert also played a key role in the review crazy time, which, from 1978 to 1983, established itself as one of the main independent journals contributing to renewing the political and socio-cultural discourse. It was at this time that Jean-Robert’s keen interest in contemporary arts and literature materialized, which led him to write three novels.
While having been at the heart of the social movements of the 1970s and 1990s, Jean-Robert Sansfaçon, an economist, profoundly left-wing, generous, pragmatic, sensitive, lucid and concerned with the democratization of knowledge, always favored in-depth analysis and cordial and enlightened exchanges, so many character traits which clearly contributed to his remarkable contribution and his influence on the To have to.