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Dryden was recruited by former prime minister Paul Martin and he was unquestionably a megastar candidate. But he approached the job with the same humility he brought to writing his 1995 book, “In School: Our Kids, Our Teachers, Our Classrooms.”

Here’s how the book is described by the publisher: “From September 1993 until June 1994, he attended a high school, folding his 6’4” frame as inconspicuously as possible into a seat at the back of the room, moving from class to class when the bell rang. He watched, while everyone got used to his presence, and he took notes.”

That was the sense one had watching Dryden at work in politics, too. He wasn’t just participating, he was taking notes. If you were lucky enough and patient enough — yes, the man didn’t speak in sound clips — Dryden would share those observations with you.

Three losses in particular, and his observations about them, have been rattling around my brain.

In 2006, he was among the Liberals left standing after a bruising defeat to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. It wasn’t the loss of power that disturbed Dryden — politics, like hockey, always comes with the risk of defeat.

What did bother Dryden was the loss of the child-care program, Canada’s first, that he had painstakingly put together, one province at a time, right up to the eve of the election that the Liberals would go on to lose.

Harper’s government killed that child-care program almost on day one of assuming power, replacing it instead with a program that sent cheques sent to parents. Dryden told me that many parents told him through the campaign that they didn’t believe the child-care program was at risk — that they would get cheques and child care.

It was a lesson in political literacy, about how elections often aren’t a considered weighing of choices. Voters come to campaigns with wish lists and even dream scenarios, in which progressive policies are never seen as imperilled.

That’s still a lesson that reverberates through today, as the Carney Liberals tack more to the centre-right, with little reflection on how that swing could affect some of the progressive steps taken in the previous decade, whether on climate change or gender equity.

Dryden would no doubt be happy, though, that a national child-care program is up and running and not imperilled — at least not yet.

Dryden would go on to run for the Liberal leadership, a hard campaign that saw him drop off the ballot after the second round, and left him with heavy debt for years.

He was as gracious in that defeat as he was in everyday life, but the next years were rough. His riding of York Centre was among those targeted by the Conservatives for wedge politics on the Middle East. I was in his riding for one event when some Conservative operatives were in the room heckling Dryden on that score. He didn’t rise to the bait.

Through all this uglier side of politics, though, Dryden was taking notes. Of course he was.

In 2010, he released a book, “Becoming Canada,” in which he laid out the ways in which politics as it’s practiced fails to rise to the challenges of the day. It was an earnest entreaty for civil debate and what he described as the need for a new national narrative.

“It’s all set up for conflict,” Dryden told me in an interview about the book. “Whether it’s question period, whether it’s sound bites … the rewards go to those who see what’s wrong.” He lamented debate that boiled down to an exchange of “punchlines.”

In 2011, he was among the Liberal giants felled in the disastrous election that sent the party to third place in the House of Commons for the first time. But Dryden carried on with his big life, taking notes and writing books.

Carney urged his audience in St. John’s on Monday to reflect on Dryden’s ambition for the country and for Canadians themselves. “He was bigger than us,” Carney said. That he was. He didn’t just live his wins and losses; he was the chronicle for his times.