About Peter Desbarats
Peter Hullett Desbarats, OC (July 2, 1933 – February 11, 2014) was a Canadian author, playwright and journalist. He was also the dean of journalism at the University of Western Ontario (1981–1997), a former commissioner in the Somalia Inquiry and a former Maclean-Hunter chair of Communications Ethics at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario. Until his death from Alzheimer's disease, he lived in a heritage home with his actress wife Hazel in the East Woodfield Heritage Conservation District in London, Ontario. == Early life == Peter Desbarats was born on July 2, 1933 to Hullett Desbarats (1909-1963), a descendant of the printer and publisher George-Édouard Desbarats by way of his son Hullet Charles Henri Desbarats) and Margaret Rettie. The family lived on Connaught Avenue in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood of Montreal, where Peter attended Loyola High School. == Career == Before he was appointed dean of UWO's journalism school, which he successfully fought to save in the 1990s when UWO wanted to discontinue the program, he worked as a print and television journalist for 30 years, starting as a copy boy with the Canadian Press, Canada's national news co-operative, in his home town of Montreal. Desbarats worked in London's Fleet Street for Reuters news agency, as a political reporter and foreign correspondent for the Montreal Star and as national affairs columnist for the Toronto Star. In the 1960s and early 1970s he hosted the supper-hour news and current affairs show on Montreal television station CBMT, and in the 1970s was co-anchor and Ottawa Bureau Chief for the Global Television Network, winning the 1977 ACTRA Award for best news broadcaster. Desbarats wrote 13 books, including René: A Canadian in Search of Country, a best-selling biography of René Lévesque; Somalia Cover-Up: A Commissioner's Journal, a book about his stint on the Somalia Inquiry;, and Guide to Canadian News Media, a standard journalism text; as well as several children's books and a 2002 stage play, Her Worship, about controversial London mayor Dianne Haskett. With the cartoonist Aislin, he co-wrote one of the first books of comics history in Canada, The Hecklers: A History of Canadian Political Cartooning and a Cartoonists' History of Canada.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.