Lieutenant-Colonel M.C. Grison
Régiment de Hull

It is important that Canadians should have an appreciation of the physical magnitude of their country, It is more important, too, if we are to overcome tendencies to sectionalism, that Canadians as individuals and groups should get to know and understand one another.

(Victoria Daily Times, 7 Apr 1943)

Born in Ottawa on 11 September 1899, Marcel Charles Grison was a graduate of the University of Ottawa and owner of a moving and storage company. Commissioned with le Régiment de Hull since 1923, he had been appointed commanding officer in July 1939. The battalion mobilized in 1941 but was assigned to home defence duty.

By 1942, Régiment de Hull, largely composed of franophone speakers, had been attached to the 13th Infantry Brigade, 6th Division in British Columbia. In a letter to the Courtney, BC municipal council a year later in April 1943, Grison wrote:

We were the first French-Canadians you had ever seen, certainly the first regiment representative of the majority of our province of Quebec. You might, then, quite understandingly have taken us into your community with a trifle of reserve. Instead, the good people of Courtenay vied with one another to make our men feel they were among friends and comrades in the Great Effort …In breaking down the narrow provincialism which has been a threat to a more robust Canadianism, nothing could be more effective than the results of a happy association of east and west at Courtenay and it duplication in all the other communities in which service men from distant parts are stationed.

Despite the civil good feeling, Grison was deemed unsatisfactory to stay in command for Canadian participation in the Aleutian theatre. The 13th Brigade was soon to join the American-Canadian landings on the presumed Japanese occupied island of Kiska. In June 1943, Grison was replaced by Lieutenant-Colonel Dollard Ménard, former commanding officer of Fusiliers Mont-Royal and hero of the Dieppe Raid. Ménard led the battalion ashore on the now abandoned Kiska and soon became acting commander of the brigade.

Grison died in Ottawa on 24 July 1986.