Duceppe’s mother dies near seniors’ residence
MONTREAL • Former Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe’s 93-year-old mother was wearing winter clothing and fainted after hearing a fire alarm and going outside, where she was later found dead of hypothermia, her private retirement home says.
“Contrary to information circulated by some media, Hélène Rowley Hotte was wearing winter clothing when she left the residence,” the east-end Montreal residence, Lux Gouverneur, said in a statement late Monday afternoon. “Our security cameras show that she fainted some time after she left.”
Marguerite Blais, Quebec’s minister responsible for seniors, said Monday she has asked for a situation report from the health and social services ministry.
“We will shed light on this very sad story,” Blais said on Twitter.
The provincial coroner’s office is investigating the death, which occurred early Sunday. Quebec Premier François
Legault offered his condolences to Duceppe and his family.
“Isabelle and I are shattered by the death of Mrs. Rowley, Gilles Duceppe’s mother,” Legault wrote. “I offer all my sympathy to Gilles, his brothers and sisters, and to the whole family in this moment of great sadness.”
Police say a fire alarm sounded about 4:15 a.m. and the victim left her building at Lux Gouverneur.
She had hearing problems and probably didn’t understand the audio notification that her building wasn’t part of the evacuation order.
The door locked behind her as she went into a backyard, and she wasn’t able to get back inside the building.
Police received a call shortly before noon Sunday about a woman found dead in the snow, probably from hypothermia.
They transferred the investigation to the coroner’s office after determining there was no criminal element to the death.
Reached Monday by Postmedia News, Duceppe declined to comment.
Rowley Hotte was married to Jean Duceppe, one of Quebec’s best-known actors. He died in 1990.
In a statement, the current leader of the Bloc, YvesFrançois Blanchet, offered
sympathy to the Duceppe family. “The Duceppe family is part of the Bloc family,” Blanchet said. “In the name of our whole team, we offer sincere sympathy to Gilles Duceppe, Yolande (Duceppe’s wife), Amélie,
Alexis (the children of Gilles Duceppe) and all the family.
“We stand with you during this difficult time.”
The Lux Gouverneur complex was opened in 2009 by the company that owns the Gouverneur chain of hotels. Most of its apartments are for autonomous seniors, but some residents require nursing care.
A longtime friend of Duceppe, who asked not to be identified, said Rowley Hotte was in excellent physical and mental health and had dined with family members the previous evening. Family checked in with
her every morning, and they became worried when there was no answer to their calls Sunday. They arrived to find her unit empty, the friend said.
Rowley Hotte was a gentle, introverted woman who was always present for her children and focused on their education, according to a recent biography of Gilles Duceppe, by Robert Blondin.
“She was a determined woman who, because of the incessant professional activities of her husband, had to assume more often than not the role of both parents,” Blondin wrote in Gilles Duceppe: Bleu de coeur et de regard.
The mother of seven children, Rowley Hotte was particularly close to Gilles, her eldest.
Gilles once wrote about her: “All her life, my mother has dedicated herself to her children and her husband, with attention, dedication and patience that translate into an inexhaustible love.”
As the oldest child, Duceppe said he became very close to his mother. “We had many discussions and I think I provided real help. When you look at family photos, I always have one of my younger brothers or one of my younger sisters in my arms. When I left home, she told me she was losing a confidant and an accomplice.”
Rowley Hotte was the daughter of a London-born British home child of Irish heritage, one of about 100,000 orphaned, abandoned and poor children sent to Canada from the British Isles. She ended up with a family in St-benoît-du-lac after arriving in Quebec in 1906.