=Garneau, Sir George=, formerly Mayor of Quebec City, and one of the prominent merchants and capitalists of that city, who has been for many years President of the National Battlefields Commission, is a son of the late Hon. Pierre Garneau, Member of the Legislative Council of the Province of Quebec, and several times member of the Provincial Cabinet. On the mother’s side he was a grandson of Mr. Edward Burroughs, the Prothonotary. Sir George is a native of Quebec, having been born on November 19, 1864. He received his earlier education at the Quebec Seminary, afterwards entering as a student the Montreal Polytechnic School, where he graduated as Civil Engineer, in 1884. Four years afterwards he took the degree of Bachelor of Applied Science in Laval University, where for a period he was Titular Professor of Analytical Chemistry. For a time he held the position of assistant engineer on the construction staff of the Quebec and Lake St. John Railway, previous to his being taken in as a partner in his father’s wholesale dry goods establishment. Aside from his business pursuits, he identified himself with civic affairs, and on being elected alderman, he was chosen as Mayor in 1906, and at the close of his term was unanimously re-elected for a second term of two years. It was while he was Mayor that he became Chairman of the National Battlefields Commission, in 1908. During that year there occurred the Tercentennial Celebration of the founding of Quebec. In association with Earl Grey, he was prominently identified with the supervision of the preliminaries to that Celebration, and has since deeply interested himself, with his associate Commissioners, in the laying out of the Battlefields Park, which is still in course of completion as one of the most striking of Canada’s historic landmarks. His zeal as an overseer of that enterprise and the interest he took in the events of the Celebration, graced, as it was, by the presence of the Prince of Wales, now King George V, and other notables of Canada and the Motherland, was signalized by the honor of knighthood at the hands of King Edward VII, an honor subsequently supplemented by the President of the French Republic, in the bestowal of the Legion of Honor. On the creation of the Quebec Public Utilities Commission, in 1910, he was appointed member of the same and acting President, the appointment being extended for a period of ten years. His career has been marked by the holding of many other high positions connected with the progress of his native city. For a time he was a Director of the Railway Company, under which he had been in his earlier years a civil engineer. He has been Director of the Prudential Trust Company, a Director of the Quebec Steamship Company, a member of the Advisory Board of the Richelieu and Ontario Navigation Company, a Director of the Quebec Land Company, and a Governor of Laval University. His brother, the Hon. E. B. Garneau, was appointed to the Legislative Council on the death of his father. Since the demise of both of them, Sir George has continued to be President of the firm of “Garneau Limited.” He was married in 1892, to Miss Alma Benoit, daughter of Alphonse Benoit, for many years Secretary of the Department of Militia and Defence of Canada. His family consists of five sons and three daughters. In these later years Sir George has taken a deep interest in the Entente Conferences for the promotion of unity between the two distinctive races of Canada; and during the Toronto Conference, he was received at a special Convocation of the University of Toronto, and had the honor of LL.D. conferred upon him. The ancestors of the Garneau family came originally from France in 1663; and the subject of this sketch as a French-Canadian, using the French and English languages with equal facility, has never failed to acknowledge himself as an all-Canadian, devoted to the cause of a common Canadianism, under the aegis of the British Empire. He also served in the Canadian Militia, from which he retired with the rank of Captain of Field Artillery in 1894.
Climate Digest
A Cyclopædia of Canadian Biography — Part 32
2026-11-15 10:58:00 · The Daily Ledger
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