History has a habit of reducing exceptional people to a singular achievement: John A. Macdonald to confederation, Nellie McClung to women’s suffrage, Frederick Banting to insulin. But just as these accomplishments are never the work of one person alone, so too are these people more than one consummate feat.
When most Canadians hear the name Ken Dryden, for instance, they think hockey. And for good reason. Four decades after the legendary Montreal Canadiens goalie retired his pads for good, many still consider him the GOAT. Standing at six foot four, the “four-storey goalie” played only eight seasons in the National Hockey League, but his performance was unparalleled: six Stanley Cup wins and a .922 save percentage, making him a five-time winner of the Vezina Trophy, awarded annually to the NHL goalie who lets in the fewest goals.
But later in life, Dryden played a pivotal role in a very different arena: paving the way for a national system of childcare that is set to become an integral part of this country’s social fabric. And while the trajectory from hockey to childcare may seem anything but obvious, it makes sense in the context of a life lived in pursuit of a greater good.
In fact, the most remarkable aspect of Dryden’s hockey career is, arguably, not how he played, but how he regarded it: not as an end, but as a beginning. While he loved the sport from the get-go, he never expected it to define him. Growing up in Etobicoke, a suburb of Toronto, Dryden’s greatest aspiration was to the thing his parents did not have: a university education. With that, he wanted to become a lawyer, the profession attached to the important people he read about in the newspaper. And with that, he wanted to work for the government. “I always thought of government as an ultimate career,” says the 77-year-old Dryden, speaking on the phone from his home in midtown Toronto. “It was the thing you did after many others – once you had come to an understanding of why things are the way they are.”
Never losing sight of this larger goal, Dryden’s path followed the arc of his childhood imaginings. When he was first drafted to the NHL at the age of 17, he opted instead to spend those valuable learning years at Cornell University in New York, doing an undergraduate degree in history. After joining the Canadiens in 1971, he managed to combine professional goaltending with a law degree at McGill University. And when the contract the Canadiens offered him in 1973 was not to his liking, he turned it down and spent the year articling for a law firm instead.
Dryden’s commitment to education endured. Five years after retiring from the Canadiens in 1979, he was appointed Ontario’s first youth commissioner, an experience that confirmed for him the importance of schooling to long-term success. He also wrote two books on hockey – genre-defying reflections on the demands of sport and its role in the Canadian imagination – before returning, remarkably, to high school. In September of 1993, at the age of 46, Dryden enrolled at T.L. Kennedy High School in suburban Mississauga, to spend a year in careful observation. The book that resulted, In School, explores the inner workings of a system that, as he puts it today, “is so central to how we live and who we become.”
As planned, Dryden did ultimately enter politics. After winning the Liberal seat in York Centre in the federal election of 2004, he was invited to serve as minister of social development in Paul Martin’s government. The focus of this ministry – and a key plank of Martin’s election campaign – was to deliver the country’s first-ever universal childcare system.
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.”
I always thought of government as an ultimate career. It was the thing you did after many others – once you had come to an understanding of why things are the way they are.
— Ken Dryden
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.”
This year, Corporate Knights honoured Dryden with its 2025 Award of Distinction. Past recipients include former federal NDP leader Tom Mulcair, former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty and former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell.
