Jean Bernier, Radio-Canada/Supplied
Madeleine Poulin was one of the best-known television journalists of her generation at Radio-Canada, the French service of the CBC. Ms. Poulin, who died on Nov. 22 at the age of 87, was Radio-Canada’s first female parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa, and the first woman to work as the network’s foreign correspondent in Paris.
Ms. Poulin was soft spoken on television but that mild-mannered persona hid a toughness, as former prime minister Pierre Trudeau discovered in a dramatic interview in May, 1987. Mr. Trudeau clashed with his interviewer at several points.
One of Ms. Poulin’s long-time colleagues, Claudine Blais, described Mr. Trudeau’s approach as “confrontational.” His aggressive tone surprised those involved with the program, but it didn’t ruffle Ms. Poulin.
She was confrontational back, asking him why he attacked the artistic and intellectual class. Mr. Trudeau responded by asking his own questions. Ms. Poulin refused to answer; she had been warned he would use that Jesuitical technique, and she continued asking him questions.
Part-way through she asked about the Meech Lake Accord, the constitutional proposal that was defeated in part by Mr. Trudeau and the work of his allies including the premier of Newfoundland. As she asked the question, he took a dramatic look at his watch and said: “At last you get to the substance.”
“Pierre Trudeau was a great intellectual and a great politician but when he talked about Quebec society, he could get really angry,” said Alain Saulnier, who started as a researcher working for Ms. Poulin and rose to be head of news and current affairs at Radio-Canada. “Madeleine didn’t let it get to her.”
“He didn’t destroy me,” she said of what was the most famous interview of her career.
Bernard Derome, formerly long-time anchor of the nightly newscast Le Téléjournal, was even more blunt in his assessment of that interview.
“Trudeau thought we were all separatists,” Mr. Derome said.
The interview was a battle between two intellectually matched combatants. Both had studied in England, she at Oxford, he at the London School of Economics, and could have had the same confrontation at the same level in English.
When Ms. Poulin retired in 1997, she gave a long interview to fellow journalist Michaëlle Jean (who went on to serve as governor-general), in which Ms. Poulin said she didn’t believe in an aggressive style of interviewing. She dismissed it as old-fashioned. But she said as soon as she finished the Pierre Trudeau interview, she knew it would be controversial for her and the former prime minister. And it was.
The French-language press came down on her side in the following days, including one headline that described Mr. Trudeau as: “The true monster of Meech Lake.”
Madeleine Poulin was born on Aug. 31, 1938 in St. Jean sur Richelieu, south of Montreal. Her father, Philippe Poulin, had to quit university and worked in insurance. A relative, whom her niece Andrée Lauzon described as a “rich uncle,” offered to pay for Madeleine to go to university. After graduating from the University of Montreal with a degree in comparative literature, she won a scholarship to study at Oxford University in England.
Her thesis at Oxford was on the Irish poet Samuel Beckett. It was a prescient choice: Beckett, famous for his play Waiting for Godot, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, by which time Ms. Poulin was working in the newsroom at Radio-Canada in Montreal.
She started work at Radio-Canada as a receptionist in the summer of 1965. At the time she shared an apartment next door to the CBC building above a restaurant, the Café des Artistes. She was soon working on the news desk, which paid twice as much as the receptionist work.
Newsrooms were still male-dominated at the time but in Montreal, at least, there were far more women working on the French side than on the English side at the public broadcaster.
One of the stars in that era was Judith Jasmin, an early on-air reporter so admired in Quebec that there is even a school named after her. Ms. Jasmin was a role model for Ms. Poulin, as Ms. Poulin herself would later be for younger journalists.
One of those young women was Céline Galipeau.
“Madeleine Poulin was an inspiration to me even before I became a journalist. I remember her vividly reporting from Beirut and I said to myself: If she can do it, I can do it,” recalled Ms. Galipeau, who went on to report for both the French and English networks from Moscow, Paris, Beijing and London. She followed Ms. Poulin as the correspondent in Paris. She described Madeleine Poulin as a “grande dame,” or great lady, of French-language broadcast journalism in Canada.
“She was one of the first women to do that job. It almost seems ridiculous to bring it up today when they are so many women in the media.”
Ms. Poulin started in the newsroom in a tumultuous era, both internationally, where the Vietnam War was the big story, and domestically, where the October Crisis unfolded, with the abduction of British diplomat James Cross and the kidnapping and murder of Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte.
“We had the impression of being at the heart of what was happening in the world because we were receiving dispatches from Vietnam and on the other hand there [were] events that were happening in Quebec,” she said.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, her main job was as a newswriter specializing in foreign affairs. She did some local reporting, but in 1972 she was sent to cover an event in Panama, where the UN Security Council was having a special meeting. Ms. Poulin spoke Spanish, along with flawless English and French.
It was obvious from the start that she was good at field reporting. She was well-read, intelligent, elegant and telegenic.
She covered election campaigns, of which there were five between 1970 and 1976 at the federal level and in Quebec. Her wit and memory helped her. When covering the 1973 provincial election, she was with Gabriel Loubier, the head of the Union Nationale. When he spoke at a church named for St. Jude, she pointed out St. Jude was the patron saint of hopeless causes. The Union Nationale went from official opposition to zero seats.
Ms. Poulin was in-studio for many elections, working with the anchor Mr. Derome, who was the only person ever to address her by her nickname, Mado.
“Mado was highly intelligent, a woman of wit, a woman of learning and very independent-minded. She was a serious journalist,” Mr. Derome said. “She was a pioneer in the field and she opened the way for a generation of women journalists.”
In 1976, she was sent to Ottawa as the parliamentary correspondent for Radio-Canada. Again, it was a male-dominated place. In an interview at the time, Ms. Poulin pointed out that she had more experience than her male colleagues because as a woman she had to wait longer for a promotion.
In 1979, she was sent to Paris as foreign correspondent, the pinnacle of the career of journalists working for Radio-Canada or the CBC. From her base in Paris she was sent to many trouble spots, including Lebanon. “It was my only experience of war,” she told Ms. Jean. “We were driving in the suburbs of Beirut when a bullet came through the windshield and rolled to my feet. There’s a certain exhilaration in the face of danger.”
She quickly added that the aftermath of war is tragic, children with missing limbs in Afghanistan, for instance.
She wrote magazine articles about her experiences because she felt television couldn’t display emotion as well.
“On television there isn’t much room for real emotion, or else it’s sensationalized. It’s a bit short and a bit crude. And you need images,” Ms. Poulin said. “So I’ve had the opportunity to write a few articles in magazines.”
Following her time as a reporter and foreign correspondent Ms. Poulin worked as one of the hosts of Le Point, a newsmagazine that aired every evening after the main newscast, the French-language equivalent of the English-language network’s The Journal. Her specialty was doing interviews that dealt with the media, though she was known for being versatile.
“Madeleine could do an interview with Mordecai Richler, Pierre Trudeau or the artist Jean-Paul Lemieux, but she could also interview the man in the street,” Mr. Saulnier said.
In 1988, Ms. Poulin received the prestigious Judith Jasmin Award for her work in journalism. In retirement, she split her time between Montreal and Île d’Orléans, outside Quebec City.
Ms. Poulin leaves her husband, François G. Fortier. A sister predeceased her.
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