Érik Canuel, 63, on June 15, of secondary plasma cell leukemia. The son of actors Yvan Canuel and Lucile Papineau, Canuel began his career in the mid-1980s making music videos for artists like Sass Jordan and Sylvain Cossette. He went on to study film at Concordia University, co-founding Kino Films with Pierre Gill and Marie-France Lemay. Directing in both English and French, Canuel’s work included television series like Big Wolf on Campus for FOX and The Hunger for Showtime. His 2000 IMAX film Hemingway: A Portrait earned a Genie Award for Best Short Documentary, among other accolades. Other credits included Barrymore, starring Christopher Plummer, in 2011; Red Nose (Nez rouge) in 2003; and Bon Cop, Bad Cop, the highest-grossing Canadian movie of 2006, which broke box office records. More recently, he had directed a number of episodes of CTV’s Transplant, Ransom, 19-2, Flashpoint, and Les Jeunes Loups, among other series.
Keith Cox, 66, on June 3. After attending UBC, where he obtained a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Industrial Relations, Cox followed his father – play-by-play pioneer and B.C. Sports Hall of Famer Jim Cox – into media, starting at Cariboo Radio (CKCQ) Quesnel in 1983. Stints at CKNW Vancouver, CJVI Victoria, and then Broadcast News (BN) in Edmonton (where the infamous 1987 tornado hit just two weeks into the job) and later Toronto where he worked in the Queen’s Park Bureau. He made the foray into television in 1993 at CTV Toronto and then KAKE TV in Wichita, KS. Cox and his wife Mary relocated to Denver in 1998 where he received his Masters in Education and taught elementary school in the Cherry Creek School District for seven years. He semi-retired in 2015, and had been living on Vancouver Island since 2020.
