L. Ian MacDonald

L. Ian MacDonald was a Canadian journalist, author, speechwriter and diplomat whose career sat at the meeting point of Canadian politics and the press for more than half a century. Born Lawrence Ian MacDonald in 1947, he grew up in Montreal, where his father Arthur, an engineer, died of a heart attack in 1958 when Ian was 10 years old. His mother was Marian MacDonald.

He attended Loyola High School in Montreal and then Loyola College, now part of Concordia University, graduating in 1969 with honours in political science. As a teenager on a class trip to Ottawa, he looked down on the Parliamentary press gallery and decided he wanted to become a journalist. At Loyola he was also equipment manager of the 1967-68 Warriors men's hockey team, which was inducted into the Concordia University Sports Hall of Fame in 2002.

He joined the Montreal Gazette soon after university. By his early 30s he was the paper's TV and radio columnist and soon afterwards a city columnist, later becoming its national affairs columnist. He also wrote for the Montreal Daily News. In 1972, at a Friday evening encounter in a bar beneath the Place Ville Marie law office of a young lawyer named Brian Mulroney, he began a friendship that would shape his life. In 1984 he published Mulroney: The Making of the Prime Minister, a bestselling account of Mulroney's rise from boyhood to the country's highest office.

From 1985 to 1988 MacDonald served as principal speechwriter to Prime Minister Mulroney, and for years he also wrote the Queen's Canadian speeches. He later described the job as "a privilege and a pleasure", comparing writing for Mulroney to riding Secretariat in the Belmont Stakes. From 1992 to 1994 he was Minister of Public Affairs, the head of communications, at the Canadian Embassy in Washington.

Back in journalism, he became editor-in-chief of Policy Options, the magazine of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, from 2002 to 2012, after being hired by Hugh Segal. In 2013 he and Lisa Van Dusen founded Policy, an independent nonpartisan magazine of Canadian politics and public policy that grew to include Policy Online and The Week in Policy. He wrote a weekly column for iPolitics and was a frequent commentator on CPAC and CTV. Mulroney once said MacDonald's columns mattered because he had "worked on the inside at very senior levels of government and knows how it works."

His books, mostly published by McGill-Queen's University Press, include Free Trade: Risks and Rewards (editor, 2000), From Bourassa to Bourassa: Wilderness to Restoration (2002), Leo: A Life, written with Leo Kolber (2003), Politics, People and Potpourri (2009), named by CBC as one of the best political reads of that year, Inside Politics (2018) and Politics and Players (2022). He served on the Concordia University Board of Governors and the board of Loyola High School.

MacDonald had two daughters, Grace, born in 1990, and Zara, born in 2009. His niece Christina Smith served as mayor of Westmount. He lived in Montreal.

In June 2023 he went on hiatus from Policy because of a cognitive impairment, and in November 2023 he became Founding Editor and Publisher Emeritus, with Lisa Van Dusen succeeding him. When Mulroney's state funeral was held in Montreal in March 2024, MacDonald was unable to serve as an honorary pallbearer and watched from a nearby hospital room. Two months later he published a final reflection on his friend in Policy.

L. Ian MacDonald died on 8 October 2026 at the age of 78. Policy Magazine announced his passing that day, and the Montreal Gazette remembered him as a former chief speechwriter, magazine founder and longtime national affairs columnist. Colleagues recalled his gentle temperament, graceful prose and sunny smile. The cause of death has not been made public.