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Dec.5 - Dec.12, 2004 |
Hon. Jerahmiel S. Grafstein
(Senate chamber)
Honourable senators, this week we learned that Mr. Trudeau is climbing up the charts to become Canada's Greatest Canadian. Why? For the simple idea of Canada as a distinct society: a bilingual and multicultural society. This week, we learned as well of the sudden passing of Daniel Iannuzzi, the visionary dreamer and co-founder of Canada's, and the world's, first multilingual television station in Toronto, who tried to breathe life into Mr. Trudeau's idea.
Dan was also a founder of the Canadian Italian daily, Corriere Canadese, which he started in 1954 at the tender age of 20. Over the years he acquired and published a number of other third language newspapers.
Dan shared the intellectual direction of his enterprises with his wife, Elena Caprile, and the business direction with his long-time partner and brother, Paul.
Dan, a Montreal-born Canadian of Italian descent, dedicated his life and work to eradicating systemic discrimination in our society against third languages and third language groups, especially those of Italian descent.
If Dan had problems, it should be said that his heart was larger than his body. He could not bring himself to say no to a writer, producer or artist with a problem and, in his business dealings, he was the eternal optimist. He was probably too optimistic.
For years he fought for a national multilingual, multicultural television service across Canada. He could not persuade the regulators to make it a part of the basic service. As I said, Dan wanted to breathe life into the idea of a bilingual, multicultural Canada.
I first met Dan over 30 years ago. I was a co-founder of CityTV that changed television to reflect the face and voices of the streets of Toronto. We enlisted Dan as the producer of our weekend segment on multilingual programming.
This segment quickly outgrew its allocated weekend time slot, so Dan and I set off to co-found the first full-fledged multilingual television service, the first fully independent multilingual television service broadcast in over 20 languages weekly in Toronto, the very first of its kind in the world.
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