Source : Toronto Star

Controversial radio host now an MP

The Monday federal election delivered tonnes of surprises but only one independent MP. The winner of the riding of Portneuf, near Quebec City, is a loudmouth and cantankerous cowboy called André Arthur. Remember that name. Once the new Parliament begins, you might hear it more often than necessary.

This radio host and sometime tourist bus driver ran in a federal election twice before. He did it for fun, knowing he didn't have a chance. He expected the same thing this time around and was quite surprised to defeat the Bloc Québécois candidate who kept calling him a clown. He did so without a campaign office, a political program and campaign signs. To be honest, Arthur didn't even campaign, proving in the end that a clown and a bad joke can sometimes go a long way.

In English Canada, Arthur has been referred to as a shock jock. But in Montreal, a city he loathes and where he failed with ratings at a couple of radio stations, we prefer the expression public nuisance.

For more than 30 years, Arthur has had a love affair with Quebec City, his hometown and the only place willing to give him a mike and the licence to insult every living politician, let alone a couple of dead ones.

More popular than Madonna, Mad Dog Vachon and the Bonhomme Carnaval combined, Arthur has gone from one radio station to another without losing his army of followers who think he is the only honest man alive and never afraid to speak the truth even if that means stretching it an inch, if not a mile.

He has a great radio voice and speaks an impeccable French spiced with a rich vivid vocabulary. He can be funny (if you're not his victim). He's not obsessed with sex like Howard Stern. But like Stern, he's faced loads of lawsuits, including one from ex-Quebec prime minister Daniel Johnson and his wife Suzanne Marcil, on account of his mean tongue and habit of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story, if not a good insult.

He has called one female minister of the PQ the lunch of another minister. His nickname for Andrée Boucher, the newly elected, colourful mayor of Quebec City, is Alice Cooper. His favourite adjectives when talking about the political class include stupid, idiot, nitwit, jerk and mental midget. That's when he's in a good mood. When he's not, words like bitch, bastard, pig, scum of the earth and rotten swine pour out of his nasty microphone.

René Lévesque called him a social termite. For almost a decade, King Arthur would celebrate on air the anniversary of the death of Edgar Trottier, the homeless man run over by the late premier as he was lying in the street in the middle of the night. Later on, King Arthur publicly accused a fellow journalist at the station he once owned of killing his ex-girl-friend with a shotgun. Benoît Proulx was charged with the murder despite lack of solid evidence; he was later found innocent.

In recent years, after being pushed out of the Quebec City market because he was too hot and too expensive to handle, King Arthur found a small, obscure radio station in Portneuf, 15 minutes away from the provincial capital, and went on with his business, sometimes teaming up in the morning at CHOI-FM in Quebec City with his spiritual son Jeff Filion.

King Arthur wants to shut down the CRTC. He was the one leading the parade when the police cracked down on a group of influential Quebec businessmen, including well-known morning-man Robert Gillet, accused of buying the services of juvenile prostitutes.

Thrilled to see Gillet, his archrival, go down, King Arthur continued to spread rumours about members of the political class, including Jean-Paul Lallier, the ex-mayor of Quebec City. Even though King Arthur accused the police of letting the big fish of the city go free, no one else was ever charged.

There are so many scary stories about André Arthur that I can't even remember half of them. But I'm sure not to forget the day I interviewed him 20 years ago.

At fortysomething, he lived in his father's house, surrounded by his father's books, still in awe of the soft-spoken, cultivated, well-respected radio host who was once chief of staff to former premier Jean Lesage. At the time, decades before Walkerton, Arthur had a water fountain smack in the middle of his living room, distrustful of the public water systems. As we talked, he kept glancing out the window in case the Quebec provincial police set him up by putting a kilo of coke or maybe a corpse in his car trunk. Are you serious? I asked in dismay. Deadly serious, he answered with piercing paranoid eyes. I ran out of his house, troubled and shaken.

One good thing about the election of the King as an independent MP is that he will no longer have a radio show and very few chances to get up and speak his mind in the House. But he doesn't care. The national media will be waiting outside, ready to lend him a mike. Ladies and gentleman, get ready for André Arthur.

© Toronto Star