Lavoie

Lavoie is la voie, the way or the road, and it began as a note of where a household could be found: beside the highway, or beside the track. The older forms show the join. Delavoye is de la voie, of the road, and La Voie still keeps the article apart from the noun, before ordinary use pushed the separate words into the one a reader types today.

It is an odd member of its own class. Most surnames taken from the land are habitation names: they fix a man to a place he lived in. Lavoie does not. A road is what runs between settlements, so the family it marked was known less for where it came from than for what went past its door. It stayed modest in France. In Quebec it descends largely from one settler line and became a common name of the province, which is why its real history is a Quebec history, and mostly a twentieth-century one.

Herménégilde Lavoie was born in 1908 at Métabetchouan, in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean country. He studied at Chicoutimi, went to Quebec City in 1927 to read architecture, and was taken on by the provincial ministry of Agriculture. Made assistant director of the Office du tourisme de la province de Québec in 1940, he found himself putting a tourist industry into shape: organising the syndicats d'initiative, opening information bureaux, setting up courses in hotel-keeping.

The camera came with the job. He shot photographs for the Ciné-photographie service to advertise the province, and steered the visiting film-makers sent to show Quebec off, among them the Twentieth Century Fox feature 13, rue Madeleine and the Hamilton Wright travelogues that went out around the world. Handling other men's pictures decided him to make his own. In 1943 he shot the first, Les Beautés de mon pays.

In 1946 he founded the magazine La Belle Province as the organ of the Club des Habitants, whose mission was to make the countryside handsomer and French-Canadian culture better known by bringing town and country people to know one another. As its director he opened it to the men already defending that heritage: Marius Barbeau, Maurice Hébert and Jean-Claude Magnan all wrote for it. It ran from 1946 to 1950 and by 1948 carried twelve thousand subscribers. He ran competitions for the beautification of villages and campaigns to conserve architectural heritage, and photographed the case he was making: large families, work in the fields, windmills, the fishermen of the Gaspé.

In 1948 the Duplessis government dispensed with him, and he turned the dismissal into a second career. Trading on contacts made in office he set up Documentaires Lavoie, one of the first lay film-making outfits in Quebec. The client list is a cross-section of the province at work: an elevator taking shape at FX Drolet, the forestry operations of John Murdock, the JB Dubé sawmill at Mont-Laurier, a road-safety picture called Stop for the Quebec government.

He directed or co-directed a dozen shorts and mid-length films on Quebec popular tradition, and out of that work came two studies in human geography that UNESCO gave prizes to in 1953, L'Homme et l'Hiver and L'Homme et le sol, both made with the geographer Michel Brochu.

In 1962 he handed the company to his son Richard Lavoie and returned to the Quebec public service, at the ministry of Municipal Affairs. What fell to him there was the least loved file the province had: negotiating the expropriations for the future Mirabel airport with the fourteen municipalities and villages standing in its way. He spent ten years on it, retired, and died in 1973.

The cinema stayed in the family for three generations in Quebec City, through Richard and then the grandchildren Hugues, Geneviève, Valérie and Catherine. In 1975 Richard Lavoie premiered an hour-long documentary on his father's life and work on Radio-Canada's Beaux Dimanches, and the Musée de la Civilisation marked sixty years of the two men's film-making in 1997 and seventy in 2007. A city plaque at 477 rue Dolbeau records the house he lived in.

Jean-Noël Lavoie was born in Montreal in 1927, son of Zéphirin Lavoie and Laura Gaudreault, and was schooled at the Saint-Arsène orphanage in the city, at the Collège Laval and the Université de Montréal. He qualified as a notary in 1951 and set up practice at L'Abord-à-Plouffe, served the place as alderman, and was its mayor from 1959 to 1961, then mayor of the newly formed city of Chomedey from 1961 to 1965. In 1962 he started a paper of his own, Opinions de l'Île-Jésus.

The scattered municipalities of the island were then pulled into a single city, and Lavoie was a driving force behind it: he became Laval's first mayor in 1965, and was beaten when he stood for reelection later the same year. The assembly career survived that. Elected in 1960 and returned in 1962 and 1966, he resigned in 1969 to run for mayor of Laval, lost again, and was elected once more in 1970, 1973 and 1976, sitting for Laval as a Liberal until 1981. He was President of the National Assembly of Quebec from 1970 to 1976. He was named to the Order of Canada in 1992, and in 1998 he published the story of the city he had helped make, La saga de Laval.

Thérèse Lavoie-Roux was born at Rivière-du-Loup in 1928, daughter of Lauréat Lavoie and Charlotte Dubé. She took a master's in social work at the Université de Montréal and worked as a social worker and therapist at the Montreal Children's Hospital from 1951 to 1960. In 1969 the law changed to allow women to sit on the Montreal Roman Catholic School Board; the Archbishop of Montreal chose her as the first, she was elected vice-chair on her selection, and in 1970 she became chair and held the post for seven years.

In 1976 the premier, Robert Bourassa, asked her to stand and promised her a cabinet post if the Liberals won a majority. She took L'Acadie; the party did not win, so there was no portfolio, and she found herself the only woman on the opposition benches and one of five in the whole assembly, carrying the brief on the status of women. Re-elected in 1981 and 1985, she was Minister of Health and Social Services from 1985 to 1989 and Minister responsible for Family Policy. Brian Mulroney appointed her to the Senate in 1990 for the division of Acadie, where she chaired the Internal Economy Committee until she retired in 2001.

Jacques Lavoie, born in Montreal in 1936, was a public servant and a radiology technician before politics, which he approached with a persistence worth recording. Beaten at Quebec West in 1963 and 1965, and at Hochelaga in 1972 and 1974, he took Hochelaga at last on 14 October 1975, in the by-election called after Gérard Pelletier resigned the seat, and entered the House of Commons. Four defeats came before that win.

The same century put the name through most of Quebec's cultural register. Claude Lavoie (1918-2014) was a Quebec organist; Daniel Lavoie, born in 1949, is a Canadian singer-songwriter and pianist; Simon Lavoie, born in 1979, a Quebec director and screenwriter; Pierre Lavoie, born in 1963, a Quebec triathlete.

The furthest the name has lately travelled is to Kansas. François Lavoie, born in Quebec City on 27 February 1993 and now living in Wichita, is a ten-pin bowler with six PBA Tour titles, three of them majors. He won Pan American Games doubles gold at Toronto in 2015 with Dan MacLelland, rolling there the first perfect game in the history of those games, and took the U.S. Open in his first full PBA season in 2016 and again in 2019.