My father’s formal political career might have begun on Ottawa city council in 1980, but it peaked in the Prime Minister’s Office in the early 2010s. At least that was the little joke I told him when he visited me during my time as director of communications to Stephen Harper. That William Gregory MacDougall — Greg to all who knew him — could have stood happily in the office of a Conservative prime minister would have been news to his former self.

He was, after all, a lifelong Liberal, a firm supporter of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a man who had often lent his time and money-raising efforts to other prominent Ottawa Liberals during the 1980s, including John Manley and Dalton McGuinty. Until, that is, his son got into politics to work for a Conservative, at which point he switched allegiances. By that point, it wasn’t as much of an ideological stretch.

My father was a blue Liberal at heart, someone who believed in both fiscal responsibility and the beneficial role of the state. This was the lens he applied during his years in local politics, whether on city council or as a member of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton executive committee. But the winds were blowing another way in the mid-1980s, and a failed bid for the Liberal nomination in Ottawa-Carleton during the 1984 election sent him back to his day job.

A doctor by trade, Greg MacDougall passed away in his adopted home of Victoria, B.C., on Easter Monday following a lengthy struggle with Parkinson’s and related dementia. He was 78. Andrew MacDougall, left, his mother Barbara, and his late father, Dr. Greg MacDougall, chat with then-prime minister Stephen Harper in the Prime Minister’s Office in late 2011.

(Photo: Jason Ransom) Although born in Halifax and retired on the west coast, Ottawa was my father’s home. A graduate of Ridgemont High School, he began his pre-medical studies at the University of Ottawa at the tender age of 16 before moving to Glasgow to complete his medical degree. Glasgow was a homecoming of sorts, too, as it (along with Belfast) had been his home for a time when my grandfather pursued his work with the Canadian foreign service.

The scars of my father’s peripatetic youth were the main reason our family never drifted from Ottawa during my childhood. ADVERTISEMENT The newly credentialled Dr. Greg MacDougall — and newly married to Barbara, a British midwife whom he met and married in a six-week spell during a residency in Toronto — began his medical career in the early 1970s by setting up a family practice on Alta Vista Drive. Among his first patients on opening day were the Zouzoulas family who had moved from Greece and set up the Bella Vista restaurant across the road.

I would end up going to Alta Vista Primary School alongside their daughter Athena. Ottawa is small like that. Indeed, there wasn’t a place we could go as a family in Ottawa where my father wouldn’t bump into one of his patients or political contacts.

Whether at the then-new Rideau Centre or at the Central Experimental Farm (or a Canadian warship in Doha years later), there was always someone calling out a hello. I was forever Greg MacDougall’s kid, a fact that came back to haunt me during my first meeting with the Privy Council Office as a senior Harper staffer, when I found out that Janice Charette, the then-number two at PCO, was the daughter-in-law of my father’s former office manager, whose now-husband used to babysit me as a young child. As I was saying, Ottawa is small.

It didn’t help that my father had so many interests. Family medicine just wasn’t enough. There were the two terms on city council.

The time he learned to fly a plane. Golf at his beloved Ottawa Hunt Club. And then he went back to school to get, not one, but two masters’ degrees, during which time he worked at the Ottawa Heart Institute.

It was during the summer I worked for him following the announcement of the close of his medical practice that I found out just how much he meant to the community he served. His patients were gutted to be losing the only doctor most of them had ever known. My father would go on to put his two (more) advanced diplomas to work over 10 years as a doctor in Doha, Hanoi and N’Djamena, before coming back to Canada with my mother, going back into practice in Victoria.

He leaves behind his wife of 53 years, his daughter Anne, and a son whose love of public service sprang from the sterling example he set. ADVERTISEMENT Andrew MacDougall is a London-based communications consultant and ex-director of communications to former prime minister Stephen Harper.