Description: Ian Macdonald is an author, former Canadian trade diplomat and entrepreneur, a WWII Veteran of the RCAF and Fleet Air Arm.
Ian Verner Macdonald (Ian Macdonald) is a true native son of Ottawa and one of the first to be born at the newly-built Ottawa Civic Hospital – on January 19, 1925. He was raised on Glen Avenue in Old Ottawa South which in those days bore all the characteristics of village life where most everyone knew everyone else. Summers he spent in a real village – Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia where his pioneer Scottish ancestors settled 200 years ago. He attended Hopewell Public School and Glebe Collegiate, leaving early to
During his diplomatic career, he had the privilege of meeting such notables as the Queen, Prince Philip, Princess Margaret, the Duke of Gloucester, Sir Charles Woolley, Konrad Adenauer, Hjalmar Horace Greely Schacht, Friedrich Krupp Jr.,, Cyrus Eaton Jr, Averill Harriman, John J. Hopkins (President of General Dynamics), Frank Carlucci, Joan Crawford, George Romney, Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid al-Maktoum (Ruler of Dubai), Tarik Aziz, Robert Winters, Tom Bata, Ernest Manning, Lester Pearson, Peter Newman and an
Heeding the oft-repeated assurance of his engineer father, a seasoned WWI Veteran, that “nothing is impossible” (which he would invariably challenge with: “Well, how about taking a walk on the moon?”) he succeeded where others failed. When only two years into his first posting, to Bonn, West Germany, despite ambassadorial outrage over offering military equipment to “the enemy”, he became arguably the most productive trade official in Canadian history. Inspired by his aviation background, Ian sought out the