Farewell, Keith MacDonald: A proud New Brunswicker, but also a proud Thompsonite, who helped make us a better community to live and work in

Keith MacDonald died a couple of days ago. That’s a big loss for his family and friends, of course, and my condolences to them, but it is also a very big loss for all of us here in the wider Thompson community, as Keith was tireless in both his work and many volunteer efforts in helping to make Thompson, Manitoba a better place to live. And he did it in a sort of low-key way with considerable humility.

I moved to Thompson in July 2007, a couple of years after Keith had arrived, and my first memories of him were serving as general manager of both the Burntwood Hotel and Thompson Inn (TI) for Winnipeg’s Manfred Boehm, who owns both hotel properties. These were nickel-fueled economic boom years for Thompson, and planned new hotels were on the drawing board. By 2010, Keith was also president of the Thompson Chamber of Commerce, and combined with his hotel management experience (which dated to back home in Moncton, New Brunswick and working as a young man for Keddy’s Motor Inns, and later for Inns of Banff), he shared valuable on-the-record insights with me about market dynamics at a time when Thompson would get 150 new hotel rooms and two brand-new hotels between 2011 and 2013.

Back in 2010, in addition to the Burntwood Hotel and Thompson Inn, guests could find accommodation at the Days Inn, Meridian Hotel, Country Inn and Suites (now known as Thompson’s Best Value Inn & Suites), Interior Inn, Mystery Lake Motor Hotel and Northern Inn & Steak House. The Interior Inn, which had burned down while under construction in October 1967, but was rebuilt, burned down again on New Year’s Day 2018, but is being rebuilt again. Choice Hotels’ 70-room Suburban Extended Stay Hotel, now known as the Quality Inn & Suites Thompson, opened in May 2011, followed by the 80-room Best Western Hotel, less than a year later in April 2012.

Another memory I have of Keith from that period is in his role as Thompson Chamber of Commerce president, as well as general manager of the Burntwood Hotel, barbecuing some choice steaks for a dinner to mark the chamber’s 50th anniversary year, out on the asphalt parking lot of the hotel, on a summer day so hot you could have fried eggs on the pavement. Such summer days are pretty rare in Thompson, so you perhaps tend to remember them. Keith, sweating over the flames, while getting smoked a bit himself in the grilling process, was, as always, the genial host. Having spent a good part of his working life in the hospitality industry, Keith was the consummate hotelier.  I also recall being at a Spirit Way gala with Jeanette about a year earlier on Nov. 12, 2009, at the North Star Saloon in the Thompson Inn, where Keith  bartended himself that evening, and had the place shipshape for the event.

Keith left the hotel business and became the property manager for the City Centre Mall in May 2011, a position he held until April 2018. While I had a number of interesting chats with Keith on any number of local issues during those seven years, one that stands out was from just after he left mall management. There were quite a few retail store vacancies at the time, so I asked him how close he thought City Centre Mall was to the tipping point where it becomes a so-called “dead mall.” Keith replied that he thought the two anchor stores, Wal-Mart and Sobeys/Canada Safeway, would both be fine, but said he worried about the future of the smaller bricks-and-mortar retail stores, national, regional and local, that fill up the space between the anchor stores in the mall. With such a competitive online shopping environment, Keith said he thought the future of such space in City Centre Mall and many other similar malls across North America, would be more about storefront government offices, along with dentists and perhaps other healthcare professionals, than it would be about retail stores and shopping.

While Keith spent most of his working life in the hospitality and retail service industries, he also studied civil engineering at New Brunswick Community College (NBCC) in Moncton between 1980 and 1982, and worked as a hydrographic surveyor for what was then Public Works Canada, and is now known as Public Services and Procurement Canada.

His volunteer service was considerable and diverse. It ranged from serving as treasurer of Spirit Way; active in leadership as president with both the Lions Club of Thompson and Rotary Club of Thompson; acting chair of the Thompson Zoological Society, and a passionate advocate for the Boreal Discovery Centre; serving as the Thompson Chamber of Commerce representative on the Thompson Regional Airport Authority board of directors; and serving as a board member of the Addictions Foundation of Manitoba (AFM).

Keith’s final gig pretty much brought him full circle as he became, as he described it, the inaugural “non-executive director” of the new Thompson Hotel Association in April 2018, a not-for-profit entity managed by a board of directors and ordinary members of the corporation, who are any proprietor who is actively engaged in the operation of the business and pays accommodation tax to the City of Thompson, acting as a lobby group for local hotels, with a mission to develop a stronger tourism presence in the area, and to get “heads on pillows.”

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