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Ron Wood arrived in Ottawa early in the winter of 1964 and spent the next fourteen years wondering
why they called it "The Hill." He grew up in Calgary within sight of the Rocky Mountains,
which might explain his confusion. While in Ottawa, he covered politics from the
Parliamentary Press Gallery for radio and TV, freelanced for newspapers like The Globe and Mail and even toiled as a communications bureaucrat in the federal public service. As a broadcast
reporter, he jostled his way into many scrums with Jean Chretien. From 1975–78 he worked as
Media Relations Manager for the Metric Commission of Canada and in 1976 was sent to personally
brief the newly appointed Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce, who by coincidence was
Jean Chretien. Wood returned to Calgary in 1978 with his family and spent the next decade as
a broadcast editorialist before joining forces with a little known prairie political wannabe
called Preston Manning. Diane Francis of Maclean's magazine called them "the odd couple of
Canadian politics."
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