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Manitoba History No. 89
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Memorable Manitobans: Georges Forest (1924-1990)

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Georges Forest
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Language rights activist.

Born at St. Boniface in 1924, he founded the Agence d’Assurances Forest Limitée in 1948 and operated it throughout his life. He was a candidate in the 1963 and 1968 federal general elections but came in a distant fourth place each time. He engaged in a long battle to restore French as an official language in Manitoba, winning a famous court case in the Canadian Supreme Court over a unilingual parking ticket in 1979. He was co-founder of the Festival du Voyageur in 1970. He received a Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977. He died of a heart attack at a Festival dinner in St. Boniface, on 14 February 1990. He was buried in the Glenlawn Memorial Gardens.

See also:

Divided Minority: Franco-Manitobans and the Forest Case by Emmet Collins
Manitoba History, Number 64, Fall 2010

Sources:

Obituary, Winnipeg Free Press, 16 February 1990, page 40.

“Friends, francophones remember Forest” by Gloria Taylor, Winnipeg Free Press Weekly, 25 February 1990, page S7-9.

Dictionary of Manitoba Biography by J. M. Bumsted, Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999.

This page was prepared by Gordon Goldsborough.

Page revised: 21 January 2018

Memorable Manitobans

Memorable Manitobans

This is a collection of noteworthy Manitobans from the past, compiled by the Manitoba Historical Society.

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