Georges-Philias Vanier PC DSO MC CD (23 April 1888 – 5 March 1967) was a Canadian military officer, diplomat, and statesman who served as the 19th governor general of Canada from 1959 to 1967, the first Quebecer and second Canadian-born person to hold the position.

After earning a university degree in law, he served in the Canadian army during the First World War; on the European battlefields, he lost a leg and was commended for his actions with a number of decorations from King George V. Subsequently, Vanier returned to Canada and remained in the military until the early 1930s, when he was posted to diplomatic missions in Europe.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Vanier once again became active in the military, commanding troops on the home front until the cessation of hostilities in 1945, whereupon he returned to diplomatic circles.

Vanier was appointed to replace Vincent Massey as governor general in 1959 by Queen Elizabeth II, on the recommendation of Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, and he occupied the post until his death in 1967.

[4] Vanier's maternal grandparents were John Maloney and his wife Elizabeth (née Fitzgibbons), Irish immigrants who arrived in Montreal in search of a better life.

[11] Inspired by Father Gaume, Vanier hired a tutor, a Frenchman living in Montreal, Camille Martin, who introduced him to French literature and culture in general.

[11] Martin was a mysterious character who had left France for unknown reasons and ran his tutoring services for the French-Canadian haut bourgeois out of his house on Mackay street, known locally as "The Hermitage".

[20] In a letter to his sister Frances, Vanier wrote: "I could not read the harrowing account if Belgian sufferings without feeling a deep compassion and an active desire to right, as so far as it is within my power, the heinous wrong done [to Belgium]".

[20] On 14 October 1914, Vanier attended the rally in Montreal's Parc Sohmer organized by a Canadian militia doctor, Arthur Mignault, where the lead speaker was the former prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, that led to the formation of the 22nd Battalion.

[25] In the same letter, he expressed his love of France as he wrote: "Ah, the sheer joy of it-to visit Paris on leave from the trenches where we are all trying to do our bit for the triumph of civilization".

[28] In his letters to his family, he spoke of his sense of peace as he heard the Trappist monks chant while he rested in the monastery's garden; in his diary, he wrote about feeling depressed at the sight of so much death and suffering that it made difficult for him to sleep at night.

For four years beginning in 1921, Vanier acted as aide-de-camp to Governor General the Viscount Byng of Vimy, leaving this post when he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel and took command of the Royal 22e Régiment at La Citadelle.

[49] On 17 June, Paul Reynaud resigned as premier and was replaced by Marshal Philippe Pétain, whose first act was to announce that his government would seek an armistice with Germany.

[49] With the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, Vanier and his wife fled to the United Kingdom and then back to Canada in 1941, where he was commissioned as commander of the military district of Quebec and began an early policy of bilingualism in the army.

[54] Through Beneš expressed much hatred of Neville Chamberlain, whom he blamed the most for the Munich Agreement, he also spoke about the "collective guilt" of the Sudeten Germans whose loyalty to Czechoslovakia had proved to be wanting in 1938.

[54] Beneš spoke frankly to Vanier about his desire to expel all of the Sudeten Germans after the war, saying that it was possible for Canada to be shared by different peoples, but not in Czechoslovakia.

[55] Vanier had a strong liking for the romantic young King Petar II of Yugoslavia, whose restoration he supported, through he also felt the Yugoslav prime minister, Božidar Purić, was not a leader.

In May 1943, the United States was conspicuously absent among the Allies in refusing to recognize de Gaulle's government-in-exile based in Algiers as the legitimate government of France.

[62] In a dispatch to Ottawa, Vanier wrote: "Ever since I came to Algiers I have been endeavoring to prove to the department that the only reasonable course for us to follow was to acknowledge the Committee as the future and later de facto administrator of France after the Liberation".

[64] Pauline Vanier ended her letter: "This morning we hear that Leclerc's division has entered Paris, that Romania has capitulated, that Marseille has been liberated, that Grenoble has been taken, that we are marching on Lyon, that Lisieux is taken, that we are nearing Le Havre, that another column is going up towards Lille.

[69] Vanier reported that the survivors were emaciated "walking skeletons" whose bones that protruded through their skin made it impossible for them to stay in one position for very long and that he could see "how their knee and ankle joints held together".

[69] As for the three missing SOE agents, Vanier discovered that Frank Pickersgill of Winnipeg, John Macalister of Guelph and Guy Sabourin of Montreal had all been tortured and executed at Buchenwald in September 1944.

[72] Like other Canadian diplomats, Vanier saw the Commonwealth as the model solution, believing in the same way the Dominions were independent, but united by having the British monarch as their head of state that a similar system was needed for the French empire.

[73] In 1949, an agreement was struck under which the United States would pay most of the costs associated with the war in Indochina in exchange for the French granting a nominal independence to Vietnam under the Emperor Bao Dao.

[72] Vanier strongly supported Canadian recognition of the State of Vietnam, arguing that recognizing Bao's government would assist the French with obtaining funds from "a U.S. military aid bill" that was being debated in Congress.

Vanier sat as a director of the Bank of Montreal, the Credit Foncier Franco-Canadien, and the Standard Life Assurance Company, and served on the Canada Council for the Arts.

In spite of the challenges of poor health and political unrest in Canada, the Major-General said of his commission to represent the Queen: "If God wants me to do this job, He will give me the strength to do it.

[74] Diefenbaker, however, felt that more Francophone representation was needed in Canada's government; in his memoirs, he wrote he had considered a non-English-Canadian for the post and attributed his decision to put forward Vanier for appointment to a chance meeting with the Major-General.

When he was in residence, Vanier would pray twice daily in the chapel that was eventually fit into the palace's second floor and,[1] at a time when the Canadian federation was under threat from separatists factions in Quebec, Vanier delivered numerous speeches, in both French and English, and infused with words praising the co-habitation of Anglophone and Francophone Canadians; in one of the last orations he gave, he said: "The road of unity is the road of love: love of one's country and faith in its future will give new direction and purpose to our lives, lift us above our domestic quarrels, and unite us in dedication to the common good...

On 4 March 1967, before watching a Montreal Canadiens game on television at Rideau Hall, Vanier had conversed with his prime minister at the time, Lester B. Pearson, and had expressed to him that he was willing to continue on as governor general until the end of the centennial year.