Bill Cole, 60, on Oct. 31 of kidney failure. Cole started his broadcasting career in Southern Ontario, working at stations in Windsor and Simcoe before rising to the position of news and sports director at 1570 CHLO St. Thomas. He went on to become a morning sportscaster on 680 News (CFTR-AM) Toronto from 1990 until 2005 when he married his wife Katie and began living in the U.S. After a stint on-air at WFLA Tampa Bay, the couple returned to Ontario and settled in Corunna, with Cole reading news at 99.1 CKXS-FM Wallaceburg.
Gilles Blais, 84, on Oct. 17. Blais had a career spanning more than three decades at the National Film Board, starting in 1965. Originally from Rimouski, among the flagship projects he worked on were Expo 67 multi-screen presentation In the Labyrinth, on which he served as assistant cameraman, and established a video unit for an agricultural outreach project in Tunisia in the early 1970s, serving as production advisor for eight films on human settlements shot in Africa for the United Nations Conference. Documentaries he directed included The Netsilik Eskimo Today (1971), chronicling the day-to-day of an Inuit family in Pelly Bay; The Followers (1981), about young Quebec devotees of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness; Joseph K. L’homme numéroté (1990), a docufiction on surveillance and private life starring actor Paul Savoie; and The Engagement (1994), about a troupe of intellectually challenged performers who travel to France to stage a theatre production, which captured the Hydro-Québec Public’s Grand Prize at the Festival du cinéma international en Abitibi-Témiscamingue and Best Social Issue Documentary at Hot Docs. After leaving NFB in 1997, he went on to direct and serve as a cinematographer on numerous projects including a credit as Director of Photography on more than 150 episodes of the TV series, How It’s Made.
