Having grown up on a dairy farm in the Georgian Bay area of Ontario, Marc Lesperance bore witness to Canada’s transition from small, family-owned farms in the mid-eighties, to the industrialized methods that exist today.
He watched as neighbours struggling to make ends meet were forced to sell their land to those aiming to amalgamate and modernize.
“Gone are the days when you think of a family farm as, you’ve got a few cows, some chickens, some ducks. We were the last of them,” he said in a recent interview. “You may find the odd one now, but most of the farming now is large, milking parlours where they’re milking a couple hundred cows.”
The stories he shares about life on the farm are replete with praise for his father’s wisdom and stories about how hard his family worked to make it successful.
Chores in the morning and night – even on Christmas Day – were just part of life. Perhaps his most memorable duty was tapping trees in the spring, the beginning process of making maple syrup for the family.
Lesperance was 17 when he made the decision to join the Canadian military. In basic training, then military school in Kingston, he discovered an element of military life he deeply appreciated – camaraderie. His duties while in the military consisted mainly of communications work. He eventually transferred to the West Coast partway through his military career.
This was a deeply transformative time for him. “I tend to say, I was raised in Ontario but grew up in Comox. I did a lot of growing there,” he said. But as time went on, he no longer identified with the military. After nine years, he officially resigned.
Lesperance would take the lessons he learned in the military and working the family farm back to school, where he planned to study geography, but ended up with a degree in psychology. While attending university, he held two different jobs to support himself, one at a crisis counselling line and the other as a radio DJ.
With very little prior experience, other than working at a community radio station during high school, he was the benefactor of great timing. “I was looking for a job, and one of the places I applied to was the local radio station in the town I was in,” says Marc about this serendipitous experience. “I applied on Friday, and the next Friday I was on the air.”
He would be a live on-air DJ for 91.7 Coast FM and 98.9 Magic FM, in the years that followed. What was it like to work at small town radio stations? “Did you ever see that show from the seventies, WKRP in Cincinnati? … That’s in a nutshell what the experience was like,” he explains.
He cherished working with a group of unique characters at the radio stations. There, he would find camaraderie, friendship and family. Eventually he would chart a new course for himself, working as a dispatcher with the RCMP. This would start to pave the way for a move for him and his partner, Andrea, to Pender Island.
You can listen to more of Marc’s tale on my podcast, The Stories That Brought You Here. (tinyurl.com/episode-70)