Ian Legaree, who has passed away aged 65, became a force for northern giving and youth sports as one of the NWT’s most prolific organizers.
Ian was a pillar of the Yellowknife Community Foundation for decades, a dedicated swimming coach, the man sent to help communities in need, and a central figure in the Arctic Winter Games movement.
Despite an extraordinarily hectic schedule, his children described him as a sounding board and source of inspiration who was always present.
Underpinning everything Ian did was organization.
“He was one of the most organized people I’ve run into,” said Charles Dent, the former MLA and now chair of the NWT Human Rights Commission, who worked closely with Ian to stage the community foundation’s annual gala.
When family members began the solemn process of trying to handle Ian’s death, they discovered Ian was – even now – a couple of steps ahead.
“We went onto his computer and found he had prepared a whole list of all the things I had to do in case he passed away,” said his wife of 44 years, Shawna Lampi-Legaree, through laughter. “He is taking care of me, even after he’s gone.”
Nobody who knew Ian would be surprised.
“He knew what needed to happen, he knew all the steps to get there, and he knew who to talk to,” said Janet Pacey, who came to know Ian through their mutual love of the Arctic Winter Games, a pan-Arctic youth sports contest held every two years.
Pacey trades collectible pins at every edition of the games. Ian, a longtime organizer behind the games, would stop by the pin stall and hand out hard-to-find gold pins to kids. In a moment, he would be gone – and that would be the only time she’d see him all week.
“There was so much going on in his brain,” she said. “It seemed to me like he saw everything going on around him and could take that all in – but he was very funny, very touching, very sweet, and had the most amazing memory, too.”
Ian passed away suddenly on January 17. A celebration of life is planned at the Legislative Assembly on July 17, which would have been his 66th birthday.
In lieu of flowers, family members invite donations to the Ian Legaree Youth Leadership Fund, to be administered by the Yellowknife Community Foundation in his name.
Ian Donald Legaree was born on July 17, 1959 to Don and Vivien Legaree.
He was raised in Atikokan, Ontario, where he met Shawna Lampi while the two were teenagers. At first, he was her swimming instructor, then she helped him coach others.
“One day, we were talking at the pool and I reached forward and kissed him, and then he asked me out,” she recalled. “He’s a Legaree male. They don’t seem to pick up on these things well.”
The two were married on January 24, 1981. He was 21 and she had just turned 18.
After Ian’s first job in Winkler, Manitoba, the couple moved to Iqaluit – then named Frobisher Bay – and ultimately arrived in Yellowknife in 1989. Along the way, they had three sons: Alexander, Stephen and Sean.
As the NWT government’s director of sport, recreation and youth, Ian was constantly on the move. In Iqaluit, Shawna recalls him working for 100 hours over five days to make sports events happen, yet somehow he would also complete correspondence courses at universities while hopping from flight to flight.
Amid all this, Alexander remembered a dad who was by his side.
“When he was with us, he was with us. He was a busy man – always lots going on, travelling heaps – but whenever he was with us, he was there 100 percent,” Alexander said.
“He’d get up at five in the morning and coach us, we swam with him. We never got a distracted version of my dad.”
“Ian goes to bed early. I go to bed late. That’s worked really well for us,” said Shawna. “He got the kids up and I stayed up and made sure they got home on time.”
The Legaree family loved the North. Yellowknife immediately felt like home and there was never any likelihood of Ian and Shawna leaving.
“He cared deeply for the North. He cared deeply for Yellowknife, and he was willing to work to make Yellowknife and the broader North a better place,” said Dent, one of Ian’s community foundation co-conspirators, who with him helped the foundation become a local powerhouse of philanthropy.
“Ian truly understood the importance of long-term funding, and that’s really what community foundations are for,” said Sophie Kirby, who served on the foundation’s board with Ian and later became its executive director.
“Ian was especially passionate about ensuring there was continuous support for students across the NWT through the establishment of student award funds.
“He helped provide confidence and comfort to donors and fundholders who were establishing funds. He really cared about community building.”
As they worked to host the foundation’s annual gala, Dent saw in Ian’s organizational flair not just a man in charge, but one who knew how to lead.
“The good thing about him was that he delegated. When my wife was in charge of decor, she and her partners were left to do the entire thing. There was a lot of trust,” he said.
“But he expected a lot from people, too, and people rise to the occasion when they’re given the opportunity to perform. He was great as a mentor and as a leader.”
Shawna said the foundation gave Ian an outlet for an organizational capacity he had always possessed.
“When I was dating him, I went into his bedroom and it was like, ‘Wow.’ Everything was immaculate,” she said.
“We were opposites. I learned to be cleaner along the way, and I learned to be way more organized.
“All of my friends have stories of asking their husbands to do something – and they ask them again, and they ask them again, and they still don’t do it. In my house, I wait till I’m absolutely ready for whatever it is that I want to get done, because I tell Ian and 45 minutes later, it’s done.”
The Arctic Winter Games was central to Ian’s character – he attended 19 of them and played a huge role in the NWT’s hosting of the 2018 edition – but his support of youth sport and recreation extended much further, including the Youth Ambassadors program and Yellowknife’s Polar Bear Swim Club.
“I was very busy in my career, running Shoppers Drug Mart and doing a bunch of stuff with the Stanton Foundation. I didn’t have a lot of time,” recalled Daryl Dolynny, the former Yellowknife MLA who now runs the city’s Avens seniors’ facilities.
“But somehow he convinced me that spending more time with the kids – my kids, his kids, all kids – was time well spent.”
Dolynny became a coach at the swim club. He described himself and other coaches as “mini Ians,” trying to mimic Ian’s apparently effortless ability to connect with young people and inspire them to success.
“I didn’t know a lot about the swimming part of it, but he had the ability to bring you into his world and teach you,” he said.
“And whether you were a seasoned swimmer or still swimming with a flotation device, he treated everybody equally, and they loved him.”
The swim club wouldn’t be the last time Ian signed up Dolynny for something. He would repeat the trick later, convincing Dolynny to come to a community foundation meeting at which he would suddenly find himself the foundation’s chair.
“I looked at him and said, ‘How did you do that?’ He just has that little smile, that little grin on his face. He knew exactly what he was doing,” said Dolynny.
“Ian was great at conscripting people,” added Dent, pointing to the way he had even signed up his son, Alexander, to create the foundation’s website and social media presence. (“Absolutely,” said Alexander, asked about this, before insisting that it “never felt like conscription.”)
James Williams, an Arctic sports specialist, has spent many editions of the Arctic Winter Games stunning audiences in events like the one-foot high kick. In 2010, he and Ian were part of the Northern House that represented the three territories at the Vancouver Olympics and Paralympics.
“He was very passionate about it, wanting to showcase us as people and the northern culture,” said Williams. “We had a lot of interest. Our pavilion had a lineup all the way around the corner.”
“I ran into him a couple weeks ago with my daughter at the grocery store. I’m going to miss him,” Williams added. “He was a really good man, one of those genuine people who had a lot of passion for the youth and allowing them to do their thing.”
Ian initially did a poor job of retiring.
While he technically left the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs in 2020, he was back in the office a week later when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. He helped to lead the department’s response to floods and wildfires in subsequent years.
“We had a major oil leak – a catastrophic oil leak, they called it – where they had to remove our house and then rebuild it. And so he could empathize with people whose homes were damaged, because we knew what that experience was, to be out of our home for 18 months,” said Shawna.
Though work kept calling him back, Ian gradually found more time to enjoy the likes of Blue Jays games with family or a tour through southern Ontario to see long-lost friends.
He also spent many years entertaining his passion for family history. His dedication to this was such that he learned some aspects of Swedish, French and Latin to be able to decode birth, marriage and death records going back centuries. He leaves behind a folder with nearly 35,000 files in it related to the Legaree family’s origins.
Asked how the two maintained their relationship through each other’s busy lives, Shawna said she and Ian “just fit together.”
“On the Thursday night, I finished a painting that I had really struggled with – a huge painting in a very small space,” she said of the night before Ian passed away.
“He said some very beautiful things about the painting. His very last text was about the painting and that he gets to see it in person. He was my biggest supporter.
“He did everything that he wanted to do. He wanted to do more, but he had a really good life. We had a really good life.”
