observation that editors often suppressed stories unfavourable to advertisers. Peter liked the novel.
“Preview” had been a good experience for Peter. It showed him how to condense a story and forced him to look for stories of interest to readers. “Preview” may also have provided a model for his radio shows, which usually opened with a short, pithy essay or bulletin, often personal. In feature articles, Peter was developing into a mature writer. While he had begun with articles on The Varsity and Sir Casimir Gzowski, as 1961 drew to a close he was casting his net farther afield to catch topics such as prison reform and the rising generation. In November 1961, Peter was posted to Montreal as the first Quebec correspondent for Maclean’s. By that time, Le Magazine Maclean,17 the French-language version of Maclean’s, founded in the late spring of 1960, was beginning to raise the hackles of Quebec nationalists. It was already clear that the French version wasn’t a voice of Quebec, in spite of a top-notch staff that included Pierre de Bellefeuille, Jacques Guay, and André Laurendeau, who was also editor of Le Devoir. In August, Premier Jean Lesage called the new magazine a mark of respect for Quebec culture, but pointed out that it wasn’t really representative of Quebec culture. Peter’s office was on Peel Street, where the French-language version was produced.
A short piece for the entertainment section of Maclean’s called “The Bike Race That Has More Fans Than the Grey Cup” (December 2, 1961) was Peter’s first article written in Montreal. Le Tour du St-Laurent, modelled on Le Tour de France, was in its ninth year. It attracted more than a half-million spectators along the route from Quebec City to Montreal and through the Eastern Townships. It cost about $15,000 annually, and its founder was Yvon Guillou, a Frenchman whose greatest concern was an infestation of performance-enhancing drugs! Almost a year later, in the issue of October 6, 1962, Peter’s expanded article on the race appeared in Maclean’s under the title “Ohé, les Gars du Tour du St-Laurent!” In translation it was published that same month in Le Magazine Maclean. Each evening the riders and their fans were entertained by stars such as Dominique Michel, who, Peter pointed out, was the wife of Camille Henry of the New York Rangers. The overall winner of the race was Aleksei Petrov, who, Peter claimed, was as handsome as Bobby Hull.
On December 16, 1961, A.J. Newlands “with Peter Gzowski” penned a feature called “What It’s Like to Drive a Buick to Moscow,” in which Newlands described a road trip from Great Britain to the Soviet Union where his wife and he were surprised to discover good roads, friendly people, and clean sidewalks. Peter, it seems, edited the article and probably rewrote it.
Soon after the Gzowski family settled into a house on Snowdon Avenue in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG), Peter took the train to Quebec City to learn French. While Peter’s French improved only marginally, he began to understand the resentment created each time that French Canadians/Québécois were forced to listen to and speak English. He concluded that if he had to live in a second language “in order to compete on equal terms with everyone around me,” he, too, might become a separatist.18 The resultant article, told with good humour and humility, was published in Maclean’s on January 27, 1962.
Peter quickly picked up the currents of change in French-speaking Quebec. In the “Background” section of the December 16, 1961, issue of Maclean’s, he wrote a short piece called “Why the Separatists Aren’t Ready to Separate — Yet.” The month before, he had attended a Laval University Conference on Canadian Affairs where panellists André Laurendeau, René Lévesque, and Gérard Pelletier, seated next to Eugene Forsey and Doug Fisher, complained about the absence of bilingualism in Ottawa and the fact that federal government cheques were issued only in English. At one point Lévesque told the young, enthusiastic audience that English Canada needed French Canada more than the latter needed English Canada. While surveys concluded that only a minority of Québécois opted for independence, Peter warned that if grievances were allowed to simmer, more and more French Canadians would support the idea of an independent Quebec.19 The article was translated and published in Le Magazine Maclean in January 1962 as “J’ai découvert les racines du séparatisme.”
On February 24, 1962, Peter’s “Quebec Report” dealt with the move to secularize education. The leading organization pushing for a more “neutral” education was Mouvement laïque de langue française, composed mostly of francophone parents who were worried that their children were learning too much about the Church and not enough about modern, secular society. To examine the issue, the Lesage government had established a commission. “Things don’t change that fast in Quebec — even in the ‘quiet revolution,’” Peter noted. This was his first printed use of the phrase. The term was in the air, and good listener that he was, he picked it up. Years later he was credited with inventing the phrase, which he denied. It was coined by Brian Upton, a reporter for the Montreal Star. After Upton and Peter talked in Montreal in 1961, Peter had absorbed the phrase.20
In March 1962, Peter used the term again. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker was perceived by Québécois as unsympathetic to their aspirations. He massacred the French language; he refused to establish a royal commission to study bilingualism; and he didn’t appoint a Quebec lieutenant. Peter understood that Diefenbaker failed to understand the Quiet Revolution and the determination of Québécois “to take a full share in Canada’s future.” Hence, the politician to watch, Peter advised, was Réal Caouette, the leader of the Créditistes, a party that had won safe Liberal seats in the 1958 election and that threatened now to take seats away from the Conservatives. Even though Liberal leader Lester B. Pearson wasn’t much more popular in Quebec than Diefenbaker, Peter predicted that, in the next federal election, the Liberals would win as many as sixty seats in the province. He was right. In the federal election of 1962, the Conservatives’ huge majority was reduced to a minority, in good part as the result of the rise of the Créditistes. To explain the Créditistes to English Canada, Peter interviewed Caouette. “A Strongman’s Road to Power” appeared in Maclean’s on July 28, 1962. There was no French version in Le Magazine Maclean. Quebec already understood the Caouette phenomenon.
For the “Quebec Report” of May 5, entitled “The Astonishing Success Story of French Publishers: Now They Can Make Money on Books They Don’t Sell,” Peter talked to Jacques Hébert, whose Éditions de l’Homme published bestsellers that were helping to inspire the Quiet Revolution, a term Peter used twice without capitalization in the short article. Hébert’s stable of books included Jean-Paul Desbiens’s Les insolences du Frère Untel, which attacked the public school system run by the Roman Catholic Church; and Marcel Chaput’s Pourquoi je suis séparatiste.21 The annual Salon du Livre de Montréal, which had begun modestly in 1959, boasted eighty-eight exhibitors in 1962. Québécois were eager to read about themselves.
In his “Quebec Report” of June 2, 1962, called “GOING: The Supporters of the Separatist Movements,” once again Peter predicted the decline of separatism, whose principal leader, Marcel Chaput, was becoming more and more isolated. The previous April, Peter pointed out, Cité Libre had devoted an issue to separatism, including an article by Pierre Trudeau, who derided the totalitarian spirit of some separatists, the anti-semitism of others, “and, in all of them, the worship of generalizations and economic incompetence.”
On April 7, 1962, in the “Background” section of “Preview,” Peter’s short piece focused on the St. Lawrence Seaway. In “To Open an Ice-Bound Seaway, Just Blow Bubbles,” he discussed the possibility of extending the navigable period of the seaway by using an air compressor to force the warmer bottom layer to mix with the top colder layer, thereby melting some of the ice. On July 28, 1962, Peter’s article “Are New Dailies Impossible? Le Nouveau Journal’s Short, Sharp Life Says Yes” dealt with the demise of a rival to La Presse. And on September 8, 1962, his “Progress: Twelve More English Canadians Are Learning French” praised l’Université de Montréal’s new course designed to make a dozen anglophones and the same number of francophones bilingual.
Peter
