MONTREAL -- He may not have known it was one of the last things he would do on air, but the beloved late host of Jeopardy!, Alex Trebek, managed to send a boost to his home country and a few of its small, vulnerable islands in one of his final shows.
A question from Thursday’s episode, taped before Trebek’s death from cancer in November, stumped the three guests, but it lit up a lot of people’s phones north of the border.
“I found out about it from a colleague in Toronto who was tipped off about it by people who saw the show,” said Andrew Holland, the spokesperson for a Canadian nature charity, from his home in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
What was the question? For $1,000, Trebek gave contestants the clue that “Nature Conservancy Canada protects the St. Lawrence River, deeming it crucial to this province’s geography and history.”
The three contestants, who Holland said were all from California and Nevada, were stumped and moved on to the next question without trying to answer.
The answer, of course, was “What is Quebec?”
Quebec may be home to over eight million people and a landmass more than two and a half times the size of Texas, but Holland said he wasn’t particularly bothered by the fact that the contestants weren’t familiar with it.
“If you live in California or Nevada, maybe your sense of places isn’t as vast, you know?” he said.
Nature Conservancy Canada, Holland’s group, was too busy being thrilled that they and the St. Lawrence got a mention on Jeopardy!
“It’s super,” said Holland. “Any positive attention is good, but the fact that they named us on the show… I can’t remember anything like that happening before.”
Nature Conservancy Canada is the country’s biggest land conservation charity, active since 1962. Private landowners donate or sell it land that’s environmentally important, often because of the rare species that live on it, and the group protects the land and often allows the public to use it as a nature park.
Among its 35 million acres, it owns 17 small islands just off Montreal in the vast St. Lawrence River, “a beautiful spot” where the group has installed signs, observation lookouts and infrastructure for kayaking, Holland said.
The group's current CEO, Catherine Grenier, also happens to be from Quebec City, so staff rushed to tell her about the group’s cameo on Jeopardy!
Holland said that, given Trebek’s famous Canadian roots, he thought it was “neat” that “whoever selects the questions” had put in a last Canada reference.
That appears to be, largely, Trebek himself. He didn’t tape his last shows knowing they’d be the last, but he certainly signed off on the question about Quebec.
The show’s executive producer, Mike Richards, told CNN that Trebek, who was 80, was still filming two weeks before his death and didn’t know he wouldn’t be back, though he was very ill and had had surgery.
He also personally went through every single question.
“We met every morning before the shows, he had gone through every clue, and this was including the last taping,” Richards said.
“He went through all of them, 61 per show, rewrote them, gave them his flavour, sometimes called into question some of the information,” he said. “He really was the show. He craved knowledge.”
Trebek lived in L.A. for decades but spoke often about his ties to Canada and his hometown in Northern Ontario, where he started his career as a sportscaster.
He also believed in nature conservancies. In 1998, he quietly donated 62 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains “to be used as a wildlife corridor and as a free, public space,” Los Angeles Magazine reported last month.
The gift often went under the radar, but today the land is worth about $25 million and is heavily used by local people and animals, including mountain lions, that need open spaces to survive, the magazine reported. It’s called the Trebek Open Space.
Nature Conservancy Canada says it has zeroed in on the St. Lawrence because of the river’s many bird and fish species, including one large fish found nowhere else in the world—the copper redhorse, which “lives along the marshy edges of islands” and is threatened by pollution, habitat loss and dams.
But it also tries to rememeber that “nature is for all of us,” said Holland. “It’s very clear since this pandemic… We've gone out to our trails and parks and greenspace to try to clear our heads and improve our moods.”
Even if the Jeopardy! questions “only last five, 10 seconds, that vast viewing audience” may help with fundraising, Holland said.
However directly Trebek was involved, the group is seeing it as “meaningful,” he said.
“A lot of Canadians, and a lot of people, will miss him.”
