For 26 years, he has been a bit of a beacon for ICI Première listeners during peak hours. The legendary traffic columnist Yves Desautels will bow out next Thursday. He eventually got tired of playing in traffic morning and evening. The orange cones and the monster traffic jams will have exhausted his patience. The duty was able to follow him during one of his last shifts.
“I really liked my job When I started. There, much less. It’s time for this to end. When I started, things were blocked as far as Laval. Now it’s blocked all the way to Saint-Jérôme. It gets worse from year to year,” he says straight away, exasperated, putting a bit of theatricality into his hushed voice.
Yves Desautels is a radio character unlike any other. We get the measure of it when we see him arrive in shorts and sandals in the Radio-Canada studios with the ease of someone who is part of the furniture. Before going on air, he allows himself a few jokes with the other columnists of the 15-18 and the technical team. ” It is a beautiful gang, I’m going to miss them,” he confides, turning to us.
Then, in a solemn moment, the red light comes on. Host Annie Desrochers presents the show’s menu and takes a first tour of the table. Yves Desautels has the floor… But we hear his cell phone ringing. “Yes, hello, I’ll call you back, I’m on the air,” he replies as if nothing had happened, while his microphone is still on. In the studio and in the control room, everyone bursts out laughing. Nothing serious, on the contrary. Here, we are used to this kind of unforeseen event directly with him.
There is something of Claude Poirier in the demeanor of this man, who, like “the real negotiator”, relies heavily on calls from the public to give him information. “I’m not as old as Claude Poirier anyway! He’s almost 90 years old,” Yves Desautels jokes when the remark is made to him.
Except that at 73, the traffic columnist is no longer young either. Retirement, the man who is a grandfather three times over, has been thinking about it for several years. “Everyone I knew is leaving,” he notes, saying he had a bit of a shock when he saw Michel Désautels (with whom he is not related) leave Radio-Canada on last year.
On the road
The departure of Yves Desautels also marks the end of an era. He was the last traffic reporter still on the road in Montreal. Morning and evening in fact, after his first intervention in the studio, he leaves aboard his “hedgehog”, this car nicknamed so because of the antennas which once overlooked it. It is from this car in the colors of Radio-Canada that he travels the roads of the greater Montreal region and that he makes his three interventions per hour. It is also from there that he receives calls from his faithful “sentinels”, as he calls them, who keep him informed of the state of the road network.
“I listen to Radio-Canada mainly for you. Often, you know about business before Transports Québec. It won’t be the same after your retirement, that’s for sure,” a truck driver, who usually calls Yves Desautels, admits in our presence.
At other stations, those who do his work are now in the studio during peak hours. They follow traffic jams by referring to the Quebec 511 site and the cameras of the Ministry of Transport. After all, what’s the point of keeping a traffic columnist in the field? Especially with applications like Waze or Google Maps, which inform motorists of traffic conditions in real time.
“Everyone asks me what’s the point of still being in the car. It’s certain that I’m not connected to the scans like the others, who are in the studio. But I’m here if there’s something unexpected. The other day, when the Jacques-Cartier Bridge was blocked by a pro-Palestine demonstration, I was there. When there was the big fire in Old Montreal last year, I was able to arrive before the others too,” underlines Yves Desautels. He is worried that Radio-Canada will imitate other stations by confining the person who will succeed him next fall to the studio.
Life before traffic
In total, Yves Desautels will have spent 47 years with the public broadcaster. After studying literature, he began his career as a journalist in Western Canada. Then he was a radio reporter upon his return to Montreal. He was the first to arrive on site during the Polytechnique massacre on December 6, 1989, a date which remains anchored in his memory forever.
“I wasn’t supposed to work that night. But as I lived in Outremont, not far from the university, the assignor called me at supper time so that I could go see. All the other journalists were busy with other things. All we knew at that time was that we had heard that an armed man was hiding in the school. It was just when I got there that I realized that it was much more serious than we thought. In the end, I spent almost the night there,” he says, still very moved almost 35 years later.
His throat suddenly tightens when memories of the exchanges he had that evening with the victims’ parents, who were still waiting for confirmation of their daughter’s death, came back.
Yves Desautels loved the job of reporter. A great tennis fan, citing Gabrielle Roy as his favorite author, he would have liked to pursue his career in sports or culture. In his wildest dreams, Yves Desautels even wanted to be a foreign correspondent. “Except that there weren’t many chances on the French side. And we agree that I am no match for a guy like Jean-François Lépine, who has a similarly long CV,” he emphasizes, without bitterness.
He never saw traffic as a consolation prize, even if he admits to having sometimes felt a little confined to this role. He loved the privileged contact with the public that this job offered him. Too bad if some looked down on him.
“Honestly, I never felt disrespected. If there was, in any case, I’m sorry. I loved being in traffic. There is not a journalist who covers politics who receives the tsunami of love to which I have been entitled since I announced that I was retiring,” he argues.