Vincent Massey

Vincent Massey

Charles Vincent Massey PC CH CC CD FRSC(hon) (February 20, 1887 – December 30, 1967) was a Canadian lawyer and diplomat who served as Governor General of Canada, the 18th since Canadian Confederation.

Massey was born into an influential Toronto family and was educated in Ontario and England, obtaining a degree in law and befriending future prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King while studying at the University of Oxford. He was commissioned into the military in 1917 for the remainder of the First World War and, after a brief stint in the Canadian Cabinet, began his diplomatic career, serving in envoys to the United States and United Kingdom. Upon his return to Canada in 1946, Massey headed a royal commission on the arts between 1949 and 1951, which resulted in the Massey Report and subsequently the establishment of the National Library of Canada and the Canada Council of the Arts, amongst other grant-giving agencies. He was in 1952 appointed as governor general by George VI, monarch of Canada, on the recommendation of Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, to replace the Viscount Alexander of Tunis as viceroy, and he occupied the post until succeeded by Georges Vanier in 1959. Massey was the first Canadian-born individual to serve as Canada's governor general and he proved to be a successful transition for the office away from occupants who had consistently been both members of the peerage and born overseas.

On September 16, 1925, Massey was sworn into the Queen's Privy Council for Canada, giving him the accordant style of The Honourable; however, as a former governor general of Canada, Massey was entitled to be styled for life with the superior form of The Right Honourable. He subsequently continued his philanthropic work and founded Massey College at the University of Toronto and the Massey Lectures before he died on December 30, 1967.