He was also a poet who wrote under the name James Wreford and was the recipient of Canada's top literary honor, the Governor General's Award, for his poetry.

[1] In 1949 Watson moved to Ottawa to become chief geographer for the Government of Canada, a position he held until 1954.

"[4] Watson also applied the concepts of social geography on a continental scale to examine regional differentiation in North America.

"Here his work emphasized social problems associated with multiracial development, the ‘energy crisis’, conservation of resources, urban decay, and suburban sprawl.

The first was the seminal 1944 anthology Unit of Five, which featured thirteen of his poems (alongside poetry by Louis Dudek, Ronald Hambleton, P. K. Page, and Raymond Souster).

The Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) says that they show "his technical skill – particularly in the use of the quatrain"; but also his weaknesses: obscurantism, didactism, and a habit of asking questions, "which becomes ponderous at times.

"[1] The DLB classified the poetry of Wreford's award-winning first book, Of Time and the Lover (1950), "as Christian pastoral elegy in that many of his poems portray man existing in a fallen world....

There the poet "responds through poetry to a series of places, from Newfoundland to the Yukon ... the geographer-poet attempts to demonstrate the strength of his culture and his own personal roots in it.