(fl. 1870s-1890s), newspaperman. Born in Glengarry. In Ottawa, he was a self-employed bookkeeper in 1881, then a family grocer in the mid-1880s. In 1879, he was president in Ottawa of Le club de discussion canadien-français. He was in charge of the administration of Le Triboulet, a bilingual Ottawa weekly with humorous and political content, which began publication in Nov. 1879, but it survived for only a few issues. Much more importantly, McDonell was proprietor and editor-in-chief of the Ottawa newspaper Le Canada around the years 1887-1890. At this time the Glengarrian (Alexandria) of 7 Oct. 1887 reported that Oscar M’Donell, a native of GC, was to be business manager of the new joint-stock company formed for the publication of Le Canada in Ottawa. (This was a re-organization, for Le Canada had been published since 1879.) Two months later, in a letter of 10 Dec. 1887 to Big Rory McLennan, Oscar McDonell of Le Canada promised to publish GC material if it was supplied to him. At this stage, Le Canada was a Conservative newspaper though later in 1891-1894 (probably after McDonell’s time with it) it was Liberal, and McLennan was, of course, a prominent and well-to-do Conservative activist. McDonell was also the proprietor in 1890 of La Vallée d’Ottawa, a weekly published as a supplement to Le Canada. In 1895, McDonell was editor or city editor of another Ottawa newspaper, Le Temps. No further information has come to light about him.

Ottawa city directories 1881-1896 * F. J. Audet, Historique des journaux d’Ottawa (1896) * Duncan McLaren, Ontario Ethno-Cultural Newspapers 1835-1972: an Annotated Checklist (1973) * Paul-François Sylvestre, Les journaux de l’Ontario Français 1858-1983 (1984) * Archives of Ontario-RRM