He fell in love with the French language as a teenager and over his varied 35-year career would tackle diverse issues from constitutional anxieties to telephone rates with a singular, often eclectic approach
FRED CHARTRAND/The Canadian Press
“I would rather land in a unilingual plane than crash in a bilingual one,” he joked to the audience. It didn’t go over well, as Mr. Spicer later recalled in his memoir. “My quip seemed not only heretical. It seemed an insulting, even demagogic betrayal of French-speakers.” But, he added, “it was plainly folly to risk human lives for cultural or political reasons.”
“He was really his own man and was driven by a relentless curiosity,” said his youngest son, Nick Spicer, a broadcast journalist based in Berlin. Mr. Spicer earned an honours B.A. in French and Spanish at University of Toronto and then travelled to Paris to study at the Institut d’Études Politiques, where he earned a diploma, before returning to University of Toronto and completing a PhD in political science.
After completing his stint as Commissioner, he moved to Vancouver, where he taught political science, became a newspaper columnist and hosted an interview show for Radio-Québec, the provincially owned TV network. After a series of disastrous real estate investments, he jumped at the opportunity to move back east as editor of The Ottawa Citizen, taking the job in 1985.
Heading the CRTC, a regulator with hundreds of employees overseeing corporate titans in telecoms and broadcasting, was an odd fit for the energetic and free-wheeling Mr. Spicer. The staff was surprised to hear early on that their new boss never watched TV and wasn’t much interested in it.
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