It was mid-December 2003 and I’d just moved from Toronto to Ottawa’s New Edinburgh area to cover Parliament Hill.

As the gloom of early evening descended, there was a knock at the door, which revealed a clearly overserved senior bureaucrat on his way home from a Christmas party.

“Hi there, I’m your next-door neighbour. My name’s David Dodge,” said the man, with that distinctive husky intonation. At the time, he was governor of the Bank of Canada, having previously served as the deputy minister of finance and health between 1992 and 2001.

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Over the next decade, David provided me with an insider’s guide to the ways of Ottawa, most often when his wife Chris sent him out of doors to smoke his pipe.

He has proven to be a lodestar of

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