Obituary of Robert Francis MacDiarmid

Robert “Bob” MacDiarmid passed away on the morning of January 5, 2026, surrounded by family and close friend Stephen Rayner. He was predeceased by his wife Angeles Garcia and is survived by his sons Alan and Victor and their respective wives Jess and Kathryn.

 

Born in Ottawa to Ken MacDiarmid, a former WWII tail gunner in a Halifax bomber, three times shot down and the recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross, and Margaret MacDiarmid, a typist for the army, Bob grew up an alley cat in the working class neighborhood of Centretown. By the time he was four, his father was permanently institutionalized in Brockville Psychiatric Hospital, having succumbed to PTSD-induced schizophrenia. With his mother struggling at home, he spent his time wandering the streets, brawling and picking up battle scars until a good friend from the better part of town introduced him to the public library.

 

There, he developed a deep devotion to reading, political thought and public welfare that would shape his life view until the day he died, remembering always that public works had given him access to a life his family couldn’t. The summer he finished high school, he left home to hitchhike on a dime through Europe and the U.S.

 

He attended university at Simon Fraser and worked as a longshoreman until, dismayed by a rightward shift at the university, he left his studies and went to work with the CPR steel gang building rail, all the time living in trailers with a crew of ex-cons and drunks. A stint as a construction worker in the Edmonton winter followed before he settled down as a steel worker and union organizer at Stelco’s steel plant. There, he dove into rabble-rousing union and leftist politics and began his life-long hobby of amassing books like precious trophies.

 

Our parents met in Edmonton at a meeting of the 4^th International (of course) and planned a first date. He never showed. On the scheduled night, a crane operator named Jack arrived at the plant break room with a shotgun wanting to know who was poisoning his coffee. Our father and three others were taken hostage. Twenty-four hours later one hostage was dead and another one shot in the leg. He survived by reminding Jack that he, as union representative, had filed several grievances against Stelco on Jack’s behalf.

 

Jack gave himself up eventually and our father slept for a day before calling our mother. The rest was history. They moved to Barcelona where Alan and Victor were born. There they lived for six years, punctuated by idyllic summers in a little cottage in the Pyrenees, our father forever overwhelmed by the boisterous affections of our mother’s large (in numbers if not in size) Catalan family. He never did learn to roll his “r’s”.

 

When the family moved back to Canada, our homes, first in east Toronto and then in Kingston, became sanctuaries for every kind of intellectual and friendly wanderer: Northern Irish “construction workers” who took us to a soccer game for the first time, Chilean exiles, Turkish and Iranian professors and their families, a Belgian PhD in tax, a profane British anti-poverty activist and several Cuban ambassadors. Sometimes they stayed for the afternoon; other times they stayed for months.

 

Winter meant reading by the fire, chess and skiing. Summers meant increasingly remote camping trips in Ontario’s north that devolved into mis-mapped river trips ending with our family lost and fishing for food. We have an indelible memory of our father standing on a rock overlooking untraversable rapids smoking a cigarette and scratching his head while we sat in the canoe clinging to branches hanging over the steep riverbank, our beloved West Highland terrier, Paloma, yapping at the rapids as if to scare them away. It was two or three days later before we figured out where we were. We loved every minute. It speaks volumes about our cosmopolitan (but fierce) Catalan mother that she embraced the chaos too.

 

In our teens, he plunged into a deep immersion of his Irish roots. One day, he joined Alan at a fiddle class to encourage him. Next, our house was inundated with dance sessions on Tuesdays, language classes on Wednesdays and fiddle lessons on Thursdays. The living room became a concert hall for musicians from Ireland, all over Canada and the U.S. One of his stellar accomplishments was a two volume compendium of Irish tunes complete with background stories. For more than two decades he was an active member of Harp of Tara, always willing to help out where needed. For their contributions over the years, he and Angeles received a service award presented by the Irish Ambassador to Canada.

 

His last years were hard. Our mother’s degenerative illness, four heart attacks, lung cancer and, finally, ALS wore him down. Holed up in his study, he stopped dancing in the sun porch or attending Irish language lessons still happening at the dining room table. He stopped dressing and talking to visitors. Still, the community that he had nurtured and cherished for years stayed by his side. His friends from the Irish community, the CCPA and neighbors from Barriefield and Kingston at large brought him food, cleaned the yard, took him to appointments and tried their best to sustain him. It is this kindness and love of community that will be his lasting legacy.

 

In lieu of flowers, charitable donations can be sent to Médecins Sans Frontières (https://www.msf.org/donate) or the International Solidarity Movement (https://palsolidarity.org/)

 

A Celebration of Life will be held at a later date. Arrangements entrusted to Payne Funeral Home in Odessa. Please share your memories and condolences to the family.



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