Pierre Jeanniot, then-director general of the International Air Transport Association, October, 1993. He died on June 22 at 92.Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press
Pierre Jeanniot, who as president and chief executive of Air Canada spearheaded the privatization of the Crown-owned airline in 1988 and had ambitions for it to become a global player only to be pushed into early retirement by a restive board of directors, died on June 22 at 92.
A self-made man who arrived in Canada from France as a teenager with his mother, he attended university at night, joined Air Canada as a technician and spent years climbing through the ranks. He broke barriers at the airline, becoming the first francophone to head the traditional anglophone enclave.
At the top of Air Canada management, he clashed with Claude Taylor, the airline’s long-time president and chief executive, whom he replaced in 1984. Six years later, it was Mr. Taylor who was brought back to take the same job when Mr. Jeanniot was urged to leave.
Never intending to retire, Mr. Jeanniot reinvented himself as director-general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), spending a decade leading the trade group for the world’s commercial airlines.
Mr. Jeanniot had an extraordinary early life. His father, Gaston Jeanniot, was from a modest family of railwaymen in France’s Lorraine region while his mother, Renée Rameaux, came from a moneyed family from the Jura. The two got together as pen-pals when Gaston was a French soldier during the First World War.
The couple met in person after the war, married and had a daughter, Christine. But within two years, they divorced. Despite the breakup, Gaston and Renée stayed in touch and a decade later, remarried. By that time, Gaston was director-general of a French-owned railway in Ethiopia, so the family settled in Addis Ababa, living in a spacious flat over the central railway station.
When Renée again fell pregnant, she travelled to France and Pierre Jean Jeanniot was born in Montpellier on April 9, 1933. Young Pierre spent his early years in Addis Ababa but following Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, Italy took control of the railway and Gaston eventually lost his job.
The family returned to France and Gaston set himself up as an insurance broker but soon went bankrupt. The couple divorced a second time and Pierre lost touch with his father, who married again and died in mysterious circumstances during the Second World War. Life with his mother in occupied France was difficult with young Pierre forced to wear wooden shoes and shoot small game to survive.
Pierre attended a lycée in the Jura but was expelled for poor grades so his mother taught him at home. Meanwhile, his sister Christine had moved to Italy after marrying an Italian military pilot, who was shot down and killed on a wartime mission. Widowed with three small children, Christine encountered a Canadian RCMP officer who was stationed in central Italy after Canadian troops helped capture Monte Cassino. They married within weeks and by the end of the war, Christine and her family had moved to Montreal.
With postwar conditions in Europe difficult, Christine urged her mother to join her in Canada so, in 1947, 14-year-old Pierre got on a plane in Paris with his mother and flew to Montreal for a new life. It took 40 hours in five stages to cross the Atlantic.
Arriving in Montreal, Renée got a job teaching at a prestigious French girls’ school and Pierre attended Catholic public school, where he did well. After finishing high school, he got a job as a draftsman at Northern Electric. Anxious to continue his studies at night, his only option was to attend Sir George Williams College, which later became Concordia University.
That proved a challenge because he didn’t know any English. Yet he persevered and became fluently bilingual, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in four years of intensive evening and vacation classes while holding a full-time job.
In 1955, Mr. Jeanniot joined Trans-Canada Airlines, as Air Canada was then known, as a quality control technician. In 1963, a TCA DC-8 crashed shortly after takeoff from Dorval airport in Montreal with the loss of 118 lives. In the wake of the disaster, Mr. Jeanniot, by then a maintenance division chief, helped develop a comprehensive “black box” recorder, which tracked a range of key data housed in a container that could survive the extreme conditions encountered during an airplane crash.
Mr. Jeanniot rose steadily in the government-owned airline as pressure grew for more bilingualism and promotion of francophone managers. He took a lead role in a plan to make French Air Canada’s language of work in Quebec and was credited with a compromise solution in the dispute involving Quebec pilots who insisted on speaking French with air traffic control in the province’s air space.
In 1984, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau called Mr. Jeanniot, by then executive vice-president and head of operations, to his office. As Mr. Jeanniot recalled in his biography, published in 2009, Mr. Trudeau told him his ministers thought he would be the best choice to become president replacing Mr. Taylor and offered him the job.
Former Air Canada president and CEO Calin Rovinescu, centre, with former presidents Claude Taylor, left, and Pierre Jeanniot, May, 2009. Mr. Jeanniot replaced Mr. Taylor as president in 1984.Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press
Mr. Trudeau asked Mr. Jeanniot to suggest a new chairman. To the Prime Minister’s surprise, he suggested Mr. Taylor, thinking it would be a gracious move. But when the announcement was made, Mr. Taylor was furious. “He sulked,” Mr. Jeanniot recalled. Mr. Taylor, who died in 2015, told a journalist years later, “I just wasn’t ready to give it up. We had a lot of things to do and maybe I thought I could them better.”
A few months later, the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney were elected. They changed the whole board and began to prepare the company for privatization. But the two rivals remained at the top of the organization, a situation that was far from ideal. “In a hive, there is only one queen,” said Mr. Jeanniot.
That didn’t stop the company from modernizing its fleet, including the controversial $1.8-billion purchase of A-320 jets from Airbus. Under Mr. Jeanniot, Air Canada also became a trailblazer when it came to tobacco control, becoming the first commercial airline to ban smoking on all flights between Europe and North America.
His son Michel Jeanniot, a Montreal lawyer, says of his father and Mr. Taylor: “When they had the same objective on something, it was never a problem,” giving the example of privatization, which was launched in 1988 and completed a year later. As for the source of the rivalry, he said it was clear to him. “My father was a hard-line red Liberal and Taylor was a dark blue Conservative.”
Their backgrounds and business approaches also diverged. While Mr. Jeanniot was a brainy sophisticate with easy bilingualism and a university degree, Mr. Taylor was a down-to-earth farm boy from New Brunswick who began work at the airline as a night reservations clerk in Moncton but never mastered French. He was hugely popular with rank-and-file employees.
John Gradek, a lecturer on aviation issues at McGill and a former Air Canada employee, said that Mr. Jeanniot “gave off this European, French attitude occasionally, a little bit nose in the air.” By contrast, “Taylor grew up in the airline. He knew everybody. Taylor was the employees’ president. Pierre was the politicians’ president.”
The two men also clashed on their vision for the airline. Mr. Jeanniot was convinced that Air Canada should become a global player and aggressively expanded its international operations, particularly in Asia. Mr. Taylor wanted to concentrate on the airline’s traditional markets in Canada and the U.S. “Pierre was far more international in his attitude,” said Lorna Marsden, an Air Canada director in the early 1980s.
In August, 1990, there was shock when Air Canada announced that Mr. Jeanniot was taking early retirement and Mr. Taylor would take on the role of chief executive while the airline conducted a search for a replacement. There was never any public explanation for the switch but Mr. Jeanniot recalled later that the board had decided his international strategy was too ambitious and had to be curtailed. He felt he had no choice but to resign.
Mr. Jeanniot said he received no severance and no public send-off after 35 years of service.
Although Air Canada said that Mr. Jeanniot was taking early retirement, his son said his father never intended to stop working and set himself up in an office across from the airline’s headquarters, paid for by Air Canada. In 1993, he landed a new position as director-general of the International Air Transport Association, where he stayed for nine years, moving to Geneva where IATA has its executive offices.
“He loved that job,” said Michel. It allowed him to represent an industry he loved with governments around the world. He expanded IATA beyond its European and North American base to include airlines throughout Asia and represented the world airline industry in the turbulent days after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.
On retirement from IATA, he became chair of Thales Canada, a defence company, and continued consulting. Despite deteriorating health and a couple of strokes, he continued to go to his office daily until the final months of his life, according to his son.
Mr. Jeanniot was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1989, a Chevalier of Quebec’s Ordre National in 2002 and an Officer of France’s Légion d’Honneur in 2017. He received honorary degrees from McGill University, Concordia University and the University of Quebec. Mr. Jeanniot was particularly close to the University of Quebec where he spent a year on secondment from Air Canada to help set up the institution in the early 1970s. He later served as the first chancellor of the University of Quebec at Montreal and was the first president of its foundation.
Mr. Jeanniot is survived by his wife of 46 years, Marcia David, his children Pierre Jr., Michel and Lynn, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. His first marriage ended in divorce.
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