A Tribute to Jon King Grant
January 10th, 1945 – November 25th, 2024
By James Raffan
The Canadian Canoe Museum marks the passing of Jon King Grant, a booster, donor and former board member whose association with the Museum goes back to its very beginnings in Peterborough. We send condolences to Jon’s and Shelagh’s children and grandchildren and, in doing so, celebrate this remarkable community leader’s belief that building the Canadian Canoe Museum would be an important and worthwhile project for Peterborough and for the country.
Jon’s connection to the Museum goes back to December, 1980, when a group of committed paddlers and historians from Camp Wanapitei and Trent University, led by Bruce Hodgins, including Shelagh Grant, along with John Marsh and John Jennings, gathered to explore the idea of responding to Kirk Wipper’s search for a new home for the Kanawa International Museum with a proposal to bring Wipper’s priceless collection of canoes and kayaks to Peterborough.
Often in the background but always present for events as the Museum’s momentum in Peterborough grew, Jon was an early financial supporter from the days of passing the hat to cover costs of proposal development to contributing generously to more involved campaigns to bring the idea of the Canadian Canoe Museum to life. But besides money, what Jon brought to the conversations about the fledgling museum was business acumen. He was CEO of Quaker Oats from 1976-1994 but he was also involved through the Museum’s early years in a number of other corporate and non-profit boards that gave him insight into things the museum board should and shouldn’t do.
At the invitation of John Jennings, Jon moved from informal advisor to Chair of the Museum Board in 2000 or so, at one of the most exciting but fractious and divisive times in its history. Thinking back on that development in the Museum’s arc, John Jennings remembers Jon Grant’s leadership as “very even handed” as members of the board wrestled with the success of the millennial transformation of the OMC office building into a proper museum. The momentum of that transformation and the possibility of new federal money for continuing to develop the museum divided the board between those who counselled caution and others who sought to move ahead with architects and plans to develop the old OMC factory and the land between.
By Saturday, January 12th, 2002, Jon, as Chair of the Museum Board, was on the front page of the Peterborough Examiner in a photo with two cute children paddling a spring-loaded Grumman canoe in the Summer Strokes exhibit, announcing a $600,000 federal SuperBuild grant to help fund the continued expansion of the Museum. The paper says, “The grant will be matched through a museum fund-raising campaign [that will generate funds] to construct a $1.2 million outdoor learning centre that includes a paddling pond where visitors can try out canoes and kayaks.”
In the months that followed, two significant and possibly portentous things happened: 1) Jon blew the whistle on a federal government cabinet minister who he showed was meddling in the affairs of a Crown corporation (of which Jon had previously been a director and chair)—a turn of events that led to him stepping down as museum Board Chair because he felt that his connection to this dust-up with the federal government was drawing attention away from the museum; and 2) The Museum’s SuperBuild grant was suddenly withdrawn without explanation, leaving the museum in a difficult position with commitments it had made to the expansion on the promise of these funds coming from the federal government. In hindsight, this collapse of the “paddling pond” project at 910 Monaghan Road in 2002-2003 may have tilled the tumultuous organization soil in which the seeds of an eventual move to Little Lake germinated.
Speaking personally, when I came on the scene at the Museum in January 2004, first as Curator and then as Executive Director, one of the first people I turned to for counsel and advice was Jon, who was always very generous with his time and who always seemed able to put every conflagration-du-jour into deep organizational context and perspective. Visits with Jon at his personal office in the Turner building, or sharing lunches on the street patios downtown, always took me to a better place because he always engaged conversation so thoughtfully, so quietly and without fanfare or fuss of any kind. For that, I will always be grateful.
Even in the wake of Shelagh’s passing in 2020, Jon kept his focus on and with the Museum. He was fascinated by the “pivot” through Covid from a proposed building project at the Peterborough Lift Lock to pandemic-inspired plan to purchase the Johnson Property on Little Lake from the City and to build a new museum there on a spectacular lakeside campus. As Chair at the time of the millennium “pivot” he must have cracked that little crooked grin of his at the irony of how it is that the Canadian Canoe Museum always seems to get to where it needs to get to but not, it seems by the most obvious or easy route.
So inspired was Jon by the new Canadian Canoe Museum that he and the family made a substantial donation in August 2022 to help with the build, in memory of his long-time spouse and paddling partner. At the dedication, Jon said, in his inimitable self-effacing way,: “The Grant family honours Shelagh Grant’s love of the North, its land, peoples, rivers, and rapids with this $250,000 gift. Shelagh’s vision and committee work help to guide The Canadian Canoe Museum in its early stages.” Kudos to you, Jon, for supporting Shelagh … and the Museum … for all of those years!
Jon’s celebration of life will be at the Canadian Canoe Museum in the new year. The family asks that those interested in attending the event should email the Grant family at [email protected] for more information.
