Jean Chrétien was the advocate of unlikely appointments to the Senate.
Around the same time he appointed two very different artists to the Senate, Viola Léger, the actress who immortalized Antonine Maillet’s La Sagouine, and Jean Lapointe, a real visionary who had created a reception building that bears his name. The two had never been in politics, which was not the case with Jean-Louis Roux, the other actor Jean Chrétien made senator in 1994. Roux was one of the headlines for the No during the 1995 referendum campaign.
Being a liberal ran in the Lapointe family. Jean’s father was a Liberal MP for riding Matapédia-Matane in Ottawa from 1935 to 1945. It was therefore more tradition than belief that Jean Lapointe had voted no in the 1980 and 1995 referendums. Earlier this year , in an interview with Radio-Canada, he confessed that “Quebec independence would come one day and that he wanted it very much”. His time in the House of Lords had convinced him of the irreconcilable differences between the country’s two founding nations.
The two loneliness
The reactions after his death prove him right. Even if he had been a senator, even if he had starred on an Ed Sullivan Show program with Jérôme Lemay as Jérolas, his disappearance didn’t get much coverage in the English-language press. Snippets in some newspapers and short radio and television news programs. Nothing more. We are far from the many interviews and programs broadcast on our televisions, let alone the bright pages published by the newspapers. Once again this is a perfect example of our two solitudes.
If it happened that we did too much after the death of a Quebec figure, Jean Lapointe well deserved this media spill. He was above all a man of great benevolence, a man who was very attentive to others, which is not the usual lot of many artists who focus on themselves. I could see his kindness during the opening gala of Télévision Quatre-Saisons.
A hug from Jean Lapointe
Jean Lapointe was one of the stars invited to the gala held on Sunday evening, September 7, 1986 at the Place des Arts. I had to open the show in a tuxedo and wore an Aboriginal headdress to commemorate the head of an Indian chief, which was the image long before Radio Canada broadcasts opened. The headdress was made in Kahnawake in the colors of TQS in the purest Mohawk tradition.
There was a lot of activity behind the scenes. Alone in my dressing room, while the cameramen adjusted their equipment, the dancers rehearsed their moves, and the artists applied their make-up, I repeated the speech I had written for the occasion. I was afraid of speaking to a full house and appearing on stage in a giant cabbage, symbolizing the birth of the network. A few minutes before I left my dressing room, there was a knock on the door. It was Jean Lapointe.
– I come to hug you, to calm you down.
This man, whom I barely knew, had guessed that I was scared to death. He hugged me for a good minute and then whispered in my ear, “You have nothing to worry about, people will like you if they feel like you like them. This is my secret to overcoming stage fright!”
Jean Lapointe must never have had stage fright, because the Quebecers adored him.
