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We met in 1976 while I was writing a play on Les Canadiens for Montreal’s Centaur Theatre. Ken was a subscriber and agreed to help. At our first meeting he brought a sheaf of notes and many questions about theatre. When the season(s) began, he’d phone from the road with reports. That fall Quebec elected its first separatist government. The day after he called to describe a “strange game last night.” The crowd cheered way more for election results on the scoreboard than their team. It rattled them. That became Act Two.

He took a risk putting his name on the play — he got an “assist” — without any control. I only recall one disagreement, over casting Rocket Richard. “You can’t have a fat Rocket,” he said. I argued that unlike film, theatre accommodates such things. The last rehearsal before opening night was calamitous. He was there and drove me to my hotel. He tried bucking me up by recounting some abject playoffs situation that they wound up overcoming.

After retiring early, he wrote his first book, with similar doggedness. “I can’t believe how Ken keeps going back into that room,” said his wife, Lynda, as if he descended into Dante’s Inferno after lunch. But he made himself into a writer.

He had an acerbic quality that clashed delightfully with his rather bland, perfect image. Journalist/author Roy MacGregor said at a charity hockey game, “Gosh Ken, I never played before a crowd this big.” Ken said, “Looks like a book signing to me.” When he played hockey with pals from his old hood, he said, “They used to be really fast and in their own minds, some of them still are.”

In 1997 he took on running the Leafs. It meant learning to deal with heavy duty corporate backstabbing. Sometimes he’d invite me and my son to practises. Ken and Gideon, who was 5 or 6, would sit behind Eddie Belfour and discuss goaltending. When he left in 2004 to run for the Liberals, he told Gideon he thought he’d still have enough clout to get us in.

He’d been courted by all parties. When I asked why not the Conservatives, he said, “Well, to start with — the name.” In fact, he told me he’d voted for the PQ in that traumatic 1976 election, though not because he was a separatist. He wasn’t. He said it was simply the only reasonable choice at that moment.

As federal cabinet minister he created our first national child-care program. He had to take on the austerity fanatics and the inflexible lifelong activists. His chief of staff sent out a departmental memo saying Ken had clearly been right while they, with their pragmatic, compromising admonitions, had been wrong. The program died when the Liberal government fell but child-care campaigners say it laid the basis for the program we now have. It wouldn’t exist without Ken.

He ran for party leader, lost, and finally lost his seat in 2011. The Harper Tories played the Israel card heavily in his riding. Ken felt the pressure strongly — and he saw himself as someone not easily pressed. (He’d dealt with Gary Dornhoefer in the crease). The morning after losing, he stood in the rain on a main street in the riding with a sign saying Thank You York Centre.

His last obsession was ending the concussion fiasco in hockey. He felt he could do it by personally embarrassing the NHL’s frontman for the owners, Gary Bettman. At the end, he hadn’t succeeded but he hadn’t given up either.

We weren’t in touch as much in recent years but I already miss him dreadfully, as will (and somehow not just metaphorically) the country. I spent the night after getting the message that he was gone, trying to convince myself it was a massive AI-driven hoax. By morning I’d moved from denial to bargaining. I skipped anger, there was too much to be grateful for.