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Ken Dryden's long game

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The legendary goalie, politician and winner of the Corporate Knights 2025 Award of Distinction has spent his life in service to future generations
Author: 
Buck, Naomi
Format: 
Article
Publication Date: 
26 Jun 2025
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Excerpts 

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The childcare movement in Canada was already decades old, and Dryden entered the conversation from the outside and with his own take. Dryden’s year at T.L. Kennedy and his own experience as a father had solidified the convictions of his own upbringing. “When you see a light go off in a kid’s eyes, it’s magic,” he says. “If it doesn’t, it’s tragic.” Why would a public education system be considered so self-evidently necessary, but not childcare?

Dryden’s core ambition was to establish a system that would last. Within months of being named minister, he was invited to Winnipeg to attend the third national conference on childcare, where he met Martha Friendly, founder of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit at the University of Toronto and one of Canada’s fiercest childcare advocates. She credits Dryden for setting the bar for the work that lay ahead. “He said, ‘We need to get the system so in place that we’re painted into a corner and it can’t ever be removed.’ I still quote that today.”  

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Within two years, Dryden had accomplished the closest thing Canada had ever seen to a national childcare program: bilateral agreements with all 10 provinces to develop their own childcare systems. Dryden considered himself “the luckiest guy in government” to have such a purposeful mission, as all around him Martin’s minority government was crumbling. After it fell in a non-confidence vote, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, having won the election to follow, were quick to terminate the childcare agreements and replace the Liberals’ plans with the Canada Child Benefit – a monthly cheque to parents in lieu of a childcare system. 

“A lot of people called this crushing,” Dryden recalls. “But I knew it would come back. It was one of those lose now, win forever situations.” He was right. Some 20 years later, under the exceptional circumstance of a pandemic – with families stretched to the limit and government support flowing freely – Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government introduced a $10-a-day nationwide childcare program. 

Dryden acknowledges that while the system is far from perfect, and was a long time in the making, what matters is that it happened. The same goes, he says, for all fights worth fighting, from concussion in sport to climate change, a cause that he has mobilized behind in recent years. Dryden helped design a multidisciplinary undergraduate course on climate action for his alma mater, McGill, which launched in the fall of 2022. 

“Don’t underestimate your power,” he told students in the course’s inaugural lecture. “My generation reports to you.”

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