Tommy Douglas
Thomas Clement Douglas''',
PC,
CC,
SOM,
MA,
LL.D (
hc) (
October 20,
1904 –
February 24,
1986) was a
Scottish-born
Baptist minister who became a prominent
Canadian social democratic politician.As leader of the Saskatchewan
Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) from 1942 and the seventh
Premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961, he led the first socialist government in
North America and introduced universal public
medicare to Canada. When the CCF united with the
Canadian Labour Congress to form the
New Democratic Party, he was elected as its first federal leader and served in that post from 1961 to 1971. He is warmly remembered for his folksy wit and oratory with which he expressed his steadfast idealism, exemplified by his
fable of
Mouseland.
In 1930 Douglas married Irma Dempsey, a music student at
Brandon College. They had one daughter, actress
Shirley Douglas, and they later adopted a second daughter Joan, who became a nurse. Through Shirley, he is grandfather of actor
Kiefer Sutherland.
In 2004, he was voted "
The Greatest Canadian" of all time in a nationally televised contest organized by the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The
miniseries Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story, was filmed between February and May of 2005 and aired on CBC in two parts on March 12 and 13, 2006.
Douglas was born in 1904 in
Falkirk, Scotland. In 1910, his family emigrated to Canada, where they settled in
Winnipeg. As a child, Douglas injured his leg and developed
osteomyelitis. The leg would have been amputated were it not for a doctor who saw the condition as a good subject to teach his students. This rooted Douglas's belief that health care should be free to all. During
World War I, the family returned to
Glasgow. They came back to Winnipeg in 1919, in time for Douglas to witness the
Winnipeg General Strike.
In 1924, Douglas attended
Brandon College to study for the ministry. While there, Douglas was influenced by the
social gospel movement, which combined
Christian principles with social reform. He graduated from Brandon College in 1930, and completed his
Master's degree (MA) in Sociology from
McMaster University in 1933. His thesis entitled
The Problems of the Subnormal Family was on
eugenics, a way to "solve the problems of the Subnormal Family" by sterilizing mentally and physically disabled Canadians, and send them to camps. [
1] He later rejected this theory after a trip to
Nazi Germany in
1938. He rarely mentioned his thesis later in his life, and his government never enacted eugenics policies. (It may be noted that two Canadian provinces,
Alberta and
British Columbia, had eugenics legislation in the 1930s, and that the philosophy was not discredited in North America prior to
World War II.)
Following this, he became a minister at the Calvary Baptist Church in
Weyburn, Saskatchewan. With the onset of the
Depression, Douglas became a social activist in Weyburn, joined the new CCF party. He was elected to the
Canadian House of Commons in the
1935 federal election.
After the outbreak of
World War II, Douglas enlisted in the wartime Canadian Army. He had volunteered for overseas service and was on a draft of men headed for the
Winnipeg Grenadiers when a medical examination turned up foot problems. Douglas stayed in Canada and the Grenadiers headed for
Hong Kong. But for that ailment, he would have been with the regiment when its members were killed or captured at Hong Kong in December 1941.
|
Tommy Douglas during his earlier years. |
Despite being a federal Member of Parliament and not yet an
MLA, Douglas was elected the leader of the
Saskatchewan CCF in 1942 and did not resign from the House of Commons until
June 1,
1944. He led the CCF to power in the
June 15,
1944 provincial election, winning 47 of 53 seats in the
Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan, and thus forming the first democratic socialist government in not only Canada, but all of
North America as well.
Douglas and the Saskatchewan CCF then went on to win five straight majority victories in all subsequent Saskatchewan provincial elections up to 1960. Most of his government's pioneering innovations came about during its first term, including:
* the creation of the publicly-owned Saskatchewan Power Corp., successor to the Saskatchewan Electrical Power Commission, which began a long program of extending electrical service to isolated farms and villages;
* the creation of Canada's first publicly owned automobile insurance service, the
Saskatchewan Government Insurance Office;
* the creation of a large number of
Crown Corporations, many of which competed with existing private sector interests;
* legislation that allowed the unionization of the public service;
* a program to offer free hospital care to all citizens—the first in Canada.
* passage of the Saskatchewan Bill of Rights, legislation that outlawed discrimination based on gender and race (this preceded the adoption of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the
United Nations by 18 months).
Thanks to a booming postwar economy and prudent financial management of provincial treasurer
Clarence Fines, the Douglas government slowly paid off the huge
debt left by the previous
Liberal government, and created a budget
surplus for the Saskatchewan government. Coupled with a federal government promise in 1959 to give even more money for medical care, this paved the way for Douglas's most notable achievement, the introduction of
universal medicare legislation in 1961.
Medicare
Douglas's number one concern was the creation of
Medicare. In the summer of 1962, Saskatchewan became the centre of a hard-fought struggle between the provincial government, the North American medical establishment and the province's physicians, who brought things to a halt with a doctors' strike. The doctors believed their best interests were not being met and feared a significant loss of income as well as government interference in medical care decisions. Their defenders have also pointed out that private or government medical insurance plans covered from 60-63 per cent of the Saskatchewan population before Medicare legislation was introduced.
An oft-forgotten political fact is that though Douglas is widely hailed as the father of medicare, he had retired from his position as Saskatchewan's premier, turned over this job in 1961 to Woodrow Lloyd and taken the leadership of the federal New Democratic Party.
Many had doubted the feasibilty of Medicare, but the CCF showed Canada how it could work—that the doctors could accept government supervision and that through careful financial planning, enough money could be set aside to set up a universal system. Proving it was possible on the provincial scale cleared the way for a national Medicare program.
While Douglas is often described as the "
father of medicare" in Canada, the Saskatchewan program was finally launched by his successor,
Woodrow Lloyd, in 1962. The success of the province's public health care program was not lost on the federal government. Another Saskatchewan born politician, newly elected Prime Minister John Diefenbaker decreed in 1958 that any province seeking to intorduce a hospital plan would recieve fifty cents on the dollar from the federal government. In 1962, Diefenbaker appointed Justice Emmett Hall - also of Saskatchewan, a noted Jurist and Supreme Court Justice - to Chair a Royal Commission on the national health system. In 1964, Justice Hall recommended the nationwide adoption of Saskatchewan's model of public health insurance. By 1966, the House of Commons created such a program, with the federal government paying 50% of the costs and the provinces 50%
When the CCF allied with the
Canadian Labour Congress to form the
New Democratic Party (NDP) in 1961, Douglas defeated
Hazen Argue at the first
NDP leadership convention and became the new party's first leader. Douglas resigned from provincial politics and sought election to the House of Commons in the
riding of
Regina City in 1962, but was defeated. He was later elected in a
by-election in the riding of
Burnabyâ€"Coquitlam,
British Columbia.
Re-elected as MP for that riding in the
1963 and
1965 elections, Douglas lost it in the
1968 federal election. He won a seat again in a 1968 by-election in the riding of
Nanaimoâ€"Cowichanâ€"The Islands, British Columbia, and represented it until his retirement from electoral politics in 1979.
While the NDP did better in elections than its CCF predecessor, the party did not experience the breakthrough it had hoped for. Despite this, Douglas was greatly respected by party members and Canadians at large as the party wielded considerable influence during the minority governments of Lester Pearson. In 1970, Douglas and the NDP took a controversial but principled stand against the implementation of the
War Measures Act during the
October Crisis.
In 1962, Douglas received an honorary
Doctor of Laws from the
University of Saskatchewan. He resigned as NDP leader in 1971, but retained his seat in the House of Commons. He served as the NDP's energy critic under the new leader,
David Lewis. He was re-elected in the riding of Nanaimo–Cowichan–The Islands in the
1972 and
1974 elections.
He retired from politics in 1979.
The
Douglas-Coldwell Foundation was established in 1971. In 1981, Douglas was made a Companion of the
Order of Canada. In 1985, he was awarded the
Saskatchewan Order of Merit. In the mid-1980s,
Brandon University created a
students' union building in honour of Douglas and his old friend,
Stanley Knowles.
He became a member of the
Queen's Privy Council for Canada in 1984. In 1998, he was inducted into the
Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.
Douglas died of
cancer on February 24, 1986 at the age of 81 in
Ottawa.
In the two
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation mini-series about
Pierre Trudeau,
Trudeau and
Trudeau II: Maverick in the Making, Tommy Douglas is portrayed by
Eric Peterson. In the biography mini-series,
Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story, aired on March 12 and 13th 2006 also on CBC, Douglas was played by
Michael Therriault. The movie was widely derided by critics as being historically innaccurate. Particularly, the movie's portrayal of James Gardiner, premier of Saskatchewan from the late 1920s to mid 1930s, was objected to by political historians and the Gardiner family itself. In response, the CBC consulted a "third party historian" to review the film and pulled it from future broadcasts, including halting all home and educational sales. [
2][
3]
*
Tommy Douglas and his Government 1944-1960*
Biography of Thomas Clement Douglas*
CBC Digital Archives - Tommy Douglas and the NDP*
Order of Canada Citation*
Federal Political Biography from the Library of Parliament*
Douglas-Coldwell Foundation - Promoting Eduation and Research into Social Democracy*
Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story*
Tommy Douglas - The Man & The Myth: Tommy Never Let Ideology Get In The Way (.pdf)*
about he T.C. Douglas Centre, Formerly the Calvary Baptist Church*
Weyburn Review's Tommy Douglas website
