Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk

Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk FRS FRSE (20 June 1771 – 8 April 1820) was a Scottish peer. He was noteworthy as a Scottish philanthropist who sponsored immigrant settlements in Canada at the Red River Colony.

He was born at Saint Mary's Isle, Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland, the seventh son of Dunbar Douglas, 4th Earl of Selkirk, and his wife Helen Hamilton (1738-1802), granddaughter of Thomas Hamilton, 6th Earl of Haddington. His brother was Basil William Douglas, Lord Daer.

His early education was at the Palgrave Academy, Suffolk. As he had not expected to inherit the family estate, he went to the University of Edinburgh to study to become a lawyer. While there, he noticed poor Scottish crofters who were being displaced by their landlords. Seeing their plight, he investigated ways he could help them find new land in the then British colonies. In 1794, on the death of his brother Basil, Thomas became Lord Daer. After his father's death in 1799, Douglas, the last surviving son (two brothers died in infancy, two died of tuberculosis and two died of yellow fever), became the 5th Earl of Selkirk.

In 1798 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh his proposers being Dugald Stewart, Andrew Coventry, and John Playfair.

When Thomas unexpectedly inherited the Selkirk title and estates in 1799, he used his money and political connections to purchase land and settle poor Scottish farmers in Belfast, Prince Edward Island, in 1803 and Baldoon, Upper Canada in 1804. In 1804, he was in Halifax and became a member of the North British Society. He travelled extensively in North America, and his approach and work gained him some fame; in 1807 he was named Lord-Lieutenant of Kirkcudbright, Scotland, and in 1808 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

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