Peter Gzowski and the Canadian Conversation

The life and work of Peter Gzowski have been considered from time to time in the courses taught in the graduate program in communications and technology offered at the University of Alberta. His last visit to the University of Alberta was in May 2000, when he addressed the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences on the importance of liberal arts education in Canada.

Gzowski's influence on Canadian journalism crossed individual media. Now that the chronology is closed, the range of his influence seems striking. Beginning as a "newspaperman," Gzowski was later to comment that he was a writer "working in radio." His print journalism was informed by a love of the written word and as a young man he seemed impatient to change the conventions of magazine and newspaper writing. But it was in radio that he created something that hadn't been done before, judging by the affection and regard his work engendered in audiences across the country.

In our teaching, my colleagues and I in the communications program discuss the wisdom of recognizing the social, political, and economic contexts for communications technologies and media. Morningside, the radio program for which Gzowski became most beloved, was deeply set in the contexts of a tradition of the "writer-speaker" in radio, Canadian regionalism, and a conception of broadcasting as a public good. When Gzowski received a prestigious U.S. award in 1996, the George Foster Peabody Award, it was evident that his vision of radio - a "village bulletin board" for Canada, as he called it - had become something of a new model, and not for Canadians only.

Then there was his nationalism. Nationalism has often been associated with the very human impulse to close off access to a group. Gzowski's nationalism didn't seem to be motivated this way, as confirmed by the estimated 27,000 interviews he conducted as a radio host. His nationalism was concerned with identity as a mode for potential healing of individuals and groups. Gzowski expressed that distinctive nationalism whenever he had a public opportunity. He argued, gently, that no individual or group need be left out of full participation in Canadian society. In 1990, when receiving an honorary degree, he said: "However profound our differences (in Canada), our similarities outnumber them: our gentleness, our essential politesse, our history, our institutions, our 'melting pot' our parliamentary system, our sense of the land."

The potential for the Canadian identity that Gzowski envisioned is not much more than a hope, of course - and he himself never claimed that it would ever be transformed into something more. But his life and work, we see perhaps more clearly now, were devoted consistently to that hope. To enact his beliefs, Gzowski was committed to literacy as a universal right of citizenship. His fundraising efforts to that end for Frontier College engaged the famous and the powerful. He firmly supported the notion of a liberal arts education as a core institution for promoting understanding among individuals and groups. This belief was made concrete in his active terms as chancellor of Trent University. In short, he was determined to use his status and wealth to support his ideals, in a way that was exemplary, even inspiring.

Mainly interested in Gzowski's romantic traditionalist outlook, which people sensed when they listened to his interviews and read his articles and books, I wrote about these themes in 1994, in Peter Gzowski: An Electric Life. Romantic traditionalists continually make social and professional connections. They look for and even encourage complex bonds among individuals and groups. Gzowski's own connections of family had been severed, and there was a life-long mourning for a mother lost early and a sense of loss for five children who grew up with only a tentative relationship with their intense, neurotically busy, but sentimental father. I still think the romantic traditionalist was at the core of his sensibilities, but I missed something when writing about him in 1994.

Sartre's conception of a life was that it could not be judged by others until it was complete, that an individual's words, acts, and dispositions must be regarded as part of a whole. A life is a creative act in this view. Gzowski's life was given by measures to the idea that it was within our capacities to create a national identity that would be a source of pride. Many of us will remember the man for the communicative empathy and persuasion that he practiced during a career that took in all of the broadcast and print media. Peter Gzowski longed, in fact, for a Canada of diverse individual, regional, and national identities. For that, it's fitting that his life, now complete, is widely admired and celebrated.

(Dr. Marco Adria is an associate professor of communications and director of the Master of Arts in Communications and Technology program, Faculty of Extension.)