Phil DeVos doesn't exactly do boring. Consequently, he hasn't exactly had a particularly boring life, either. He was a veteran newsman starting his career at CBC Television, but after a storied career in broadcasting that many would have been justifably proud to call it a day and hang it up there, DeVos was not to be outdone. He decided to do a complete 180 and figured hey – why not be a police officer? He did just that – joining the Prince Albert police service for a long time as a Constable. The broadcasting bug never really went away, though, and DeVos returned to radio.
While you might know him as the recently retired top dog at YBID, the story of DeVos is just as colourful as his career itself.
Yorkton This Week sat down with one of Yorkton's most colourful and legendary characters to talk about his inside track to Santa, YBID, life as a police officer, and that time he clobbered Lloyd Robertson in the side of the cabasa with a snowball on CBC. Oops.
“My first job was actually in Estevan,” Devos recalls, “and other than a brief stint back in Winnipeg at a radio station called CJOB, all the rest of my adult life has been spent in Saskatchewan. I left Winnipeg and I came to Yorkton. Actually, I left Estevan,” he says, bemused.
“I came to Yorkton, and I worked at CKOS-TV, which was a CBC independent station [at that time]. I worked with a bunch of old war-dog announcers there that were pretty popular people – Linus Westberg, Roger Maclachlan, and Gerry Peppler was there then. Then I left and I went to Winnipeg [to] work for CJOB for a few years, doing some morning news runs and things like that. My wife's actually from Roblin [Manitoba], and we just had this terrible urge to leave the big city and come back to 'smallville'.”
“At that time, Yorkton was quite a bit smaller,” he recalls.
“We really enjoyed it here, so we came back and I started working at GX radio. Then, I became kind of disenchanted with broadcasting, which a lot of broadcasters do for some reason – mostly because of the money – and I joined the police force. I worked in Prince Albert and a couple of other smaller little areas over the course of the next several years, and then I went, 'Well, I don't know what I wanna do when I grow up,' so I came back to Yorkton under George Gallagher under CJGX and started working there in promotions, and ended up back in the news department as the News Director for a little while.”
From broadcaster to law enforcement, where else is there to jump? How about politics?
“From there, I ended up working for Garry Breitkreuz as a Member of Parliament Constituency Assistant. I did that for four years. It was around that time that I thought I'd dip my toes in politics, so I ran for City Council and got elected for a three year term as a councillor. The Mayor at that time was Ben Weber, and he decided he was retiring. So I ran for Mayor and was successful! I got elected for two terms – two three year terms.”
Phil then starts laughing.
“Then I got fired as the Mayor.”
Despite this, DeVos thinks fondly of the Council.
“I thought the council of the day did a pretty darn good job, and I'm still kinda proud of some of the accomplishments we had at that time [with] the Gallagher Centre being the jewel. If you were to try and take that facility away from some of the members of our community that were knocking it at the time, you might have a pretty big fight on your hands. So I like to think we were futuristic – a little bit of dreaming at the same time trying to keep some common sense in activities of [the] council.
“You know, big city life never appealed to us. As I said, my wife was from Roblin – she was a farm girl. I had grown accustomed to smaller communities having lived both in Estevan and Yorkton for a while. I miss the feeling of being a part of something bigger than me, and you can't find that in a big city. But I could find it in Yorkton, so that's why we came back here. We just missed the place. So when we came back here I was fortunate enough that I got a position as the Program Director at the old GX radio when it was under Ed Lawrence and George Gallagher, and these two characters had a lot of experience. I learned a great deal from the both of them. And we have the Gallagher Centre which is named after him, and his family are still a part of our community. He was a very formative man to my personal character. I'll never be as successful as George Gallagher, but he taught me a great deal and I've always appreciated that from him.
“Then I got into the economic development side of things. It led me to an opportunity [where] I was then approached by the then Yorkton Business Improvement District to take on the role as the Executive Director. That would have been in 2007. One of the things I did as Mayor is I was approached by some businesspeople in Yorkton to take a close look at business improvement districts, the way they worked in British Columbia. I went to a couple of conventions in B.C. To get an idea of what they did and how they were different from other organizations. The thing that's different about them is that you're not always in a funding mode. In other words, you know from year to year what your funding is going to be.”
Of course, Phil DeVos has a direct line to Santa Claus.
“Yeah, we're pretty tight,” DeVos admits.
“In fact, he let me wear his suit a couple of times. I didn't fill it out quite the way he did, but he's a pretty cool dude. He shared things with me, and he would tell me that there are certain individuals who are naughty and a certain bunch that are nice. It shouldn't always be about rewarding the nice people but helping the naughty ones to get a little nicer so they can get some presents, too.”
