Sir Édouard Percy Cranwill Girouard, KCMG, DSO (26 January 1867 – 26 September 1932) was an Empire enthusiast, a Canadian railway builder, High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria and the East Africa Protectorate and British industrialist.

Girouard's father was a wealthy French-Canadian lawyer who went on to become a Conservative MP and Supreme Court justice while his mother was an Irish immigrant.

Quickly earning a reputation as a very able and tough railroad man due to his work in Maine led to Girouard being offered a position in Britain in 1890.

[2] By 4 August 1896 Girouard reported to Kitchener the railroad now extended from Wali Halfa to Kosheh, covering some 116 miles of arid desert.

Building a railroad in the desert in the 19th century presented major challenges such as attacks from the Ansar, a workforce of about 800 Sudanese who knew nothing about building railroads and had to be taught everything, the occasional heavy rain that washed away the track, the need to import everything, and a cholera epidemic which killed off most of the workers in August 1896.

[4] Girouard had to establish two technical schools to train his Sudanese workers about how to work as station masters, yard shunters and signalers as none of those skills were known in the Sudan which had never known railroads.

[5] In his 1899 book The River War, Winston Churchill praised Girouard as an extraordinarily capable man who made the advance into the Sudan possible.

The answers to all these questions, and to many others with which I will not inflict the reader, were set forth by Lieutenant Girouard in a ponderous volume several inches thick; and such was the comprehensive accuracy of the estimate that the working parties were never delayed by the want even of a piece of brass wire.

[6] These victories were largely made possible by the railroad Girouard built, which allowed Kitchener to bring in enough supplies and men to apply crushing firepower against the Ansar.

[6] This was highly risky as Girouard had always built his railroad close to the Nile, where there were gunboats to protect his workers from Ansar attacks, but he accepted the risk and went to work.

[6] This line that Girouard built allowed Kitchener to move the Egyptian and British armies under his command into the heart of the Sudan and defeat the forces of the Khalifa at Atbara and Omdurman in 1898.

In 1902, he was awarded the Second Class of the Imperial Ottoman Order of the Medjidie "in recognition of his services as President of the Council of Administration of the Egyptian Railways, Telegraphs, and the Port of Alexandria".

[11] Lord Kitchener wrote in a despatch how Girouard had been his "principal adviser in all the numerous and intricate questions pertaining to railway administration in South Africa", and concluded that "he is an officer of brilliant ability.

In 1906, Winston Churchill, then Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office, promoted Girouard as the successor to Sir Frederick Lugard as High Commissioner in Northern Nigeria.

Girouard was also responsible for building a railway from Baro, on the Niger River, 366 miles north to the ancient city of Kano.

His involvement in the controversial move of the Maasai led to a smoldering dispute with the Colonial Secretary, Lord Milner, who accepted his resignation in 1912.

Mount Girouard, which is located in the Bow River Valley south of Lake Minnewanka, Fairholme Range, in Banff National Park, Alberta.

Governor of Northern Nigeria (1908–9), of East Africa (1909–12), and director general of munitions supply in the British government (1915–16), he also wrote several books on the strategic importance of railways."

The Irish historian Donal Lowry used Girouard's career as an example of "French-Canadian loyalism" to the British Empire in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, using him together with men such as Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who served as Prime Minister between 1896 and 1911; Louis-Honoré Fréchette, considered to be the most talented French-Canadian poet of his generation; Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier who wrote the national anthem O Canada in 1880; and Major Talbot Mercer Papineau, the politician and soldier who might had become Prime Minister had he not been killed at the battle of Passchendaele in 1917; who all identified with the British Empire.