Ian MacPherson

Ian MacPherson was born in Toronto in 1939. He grew up on an Ontario farm and earned his B.A. degree at the University of Windsor in 1960. After teaching high school at Streetsville, Ontario, for four years, he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in History from the University of Western Ontario. He taught history at the University of Winnipeg from 1968 to 1976 where he was also the founding director of the Canadian Studies Programme. He taught at the University of Victoria from 1976 to 2006, serving as Chair of the History Department, 1981-1989, Dean of Humanities, 1992-1999, and founding director of the British Columbia Institute for Co-operative Studies, 2000-2008. Currently, he is co-director of the Social Economy Hub, the national voice for the Canadian Social Economy Research Partnerships, a five year, $13,000,000 research project of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. It engages some 300 researchers and practitioners organized in six regional nodes across Canada or involved with Social Economy organizations nationally and provincially.

His research has been largely on the history of the co-operative movement, particularly in Canada. He has written books on the English-Canadian co-operative movement from 1900 to 1945; the Co-operative Union of Canada; Co-operative Insurance Services; Cooperative Trust Company; the British Columbian credit union movement, and the international credit union movement. He has also written, co-written, edited or co-edited another twelve books and has published over sixty academic and seventy non-academic papers, mostly on co-operative topics. He has presented papers, participated in panels, given speeches and run workshops in over 300 academic and non-academic conferences in more than seventy countries. He is preparing volumes on co-operatives among the Inuit, Canadian credit unions, some Canadian co-operative leaders, and an international co-operative journal, as well as a history of the University of Victoria.

He served on co-operative boards for over thirty years, including: consumer co-ops in Winnipeg and Victoria; a health co-operative in Winnipeg; a child care co-op in Victoria; and several credit unions in Victoria. He served on the Board of BC Central Credit Union, 1983 to 1992 (President, 1987-89), and the boards of the Canadian Co-operative Credit Society, the Co-operative College of Canada, the Co-operative Union of Canada, and the Canadian Co-operative Association. He was the founding President of the latter organization, 1989 to 1995. He served on the board of the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) 1989-1995, chairing the process and writing the documents whereby the ICA revised the international principles for co-operatives and adopted a positioning statement for the twenty-first century at its Manchester Congress in 1995.

Ian MacPherson is married to Elizabeth MacPherson. They have two sons, Andrew, a doctor, and Jonathan, a film writer, who reside with their partners respectively in Victoria and Vancouver. They have two very beautiful grandchildren and one faithful grand-dog, Jasper, easily the most intelligent and handsome canine in Oak Bay, British Columbia.