Growing Up in The People’s Republic of Saskatchewan
This province gave birth to Canada’s renowned health care program
Few Canadians and almost no Americans have any familiarity with Saskatchewan, a sparsely-populated, mainly rural province where the population tends to hover at just below a million inhabitants.
Canada‘s national health care program had its origin in this province in a tumultuous controversy that made international headlines.
As young citizens, we had no embarrassment joking that we were from The People’s Republic of Saskatchewan, with the distinction of being the first socialist state in North America, a description that probably mystifies and terrifies American conservatives.
They may be surprised to learn that we had no forced labor camps or indoctrination centers. Our streets were not patrolled by either secret or brown-shirt police. The only parades of heavy equipment consisted of tractors, cultivators and harvesters during country fairs. Loudspeakers did not blare messages of solidarity. If a citizen “disappeared” in the night, she or he was probably reading an old catalogue in the outhouse.
For a young province (chartered in 1905), Saskatchewan can look back on an unusually colorful history, dominated by the Great Depression of the 1930s. With an economy based heavily on agriculture, the 1930s represented disaster for scores of farm families, many of whom simply left their homes in search of jobs elsewhere. The imprint of this period can still be seen today, almost 90 years after the fact, by derelict farm properties preserved by the arid climate.
Earlier, in its formative years, the territory was the scene of a bloody rebellion in which Metis people (usually half-French and half indigenous natives) took up arms to stop discriminatory government land policies.
Headed by spiritual leader, Louis Riel, and his military commander Gabriel Dumont, the uprising was suppressed by a federal army brought in from Eastern Canada. Riel was hanged for his crime. History has since generally exonerated him.
Saskatchewan was also instrumental in the formation of the Northwest Mounted Police, forerunners of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The redcoat brigade was formed to counteract whiskey and weapons trade from the United States in 1873.
They were also tasked with overseeing the “visit” of several thousand Sioux refugees following the Battle of the Little Bighorn and led by Sitting Bull seeking the protection of ‘The Great White Queen’.
Social democracy elected in 1944
In 1944, Saskatchewan elected a government formed by the Canadian Commonwealth Federation (CCF), later renamed the New Democratic Party (NDP). It was headed by a diminutive former Baptist minister with thick-lensed glasses and an impish smile, Tommy Douglas.
The party had its birth in 1933 under a doctrine called The Regina Manifesto, which unapologetically vowed to “eradicate capitalism” and place resources and services in the control of citizens.
The charismatic and eloquent premier rapidly set about changing the way the government functioned as a social democratic entity:
· Education, health care and social programs were assigned priority status.
· The electrical system was restructured into The Saskatchewan Power Corporation.
· The telephone system was unified into Saskatchewan Government Telephones.
· The main elements of automobile insurance were taken away from private insurance companies and repackaged as the Saskatchewan Government Insurance Office and claims centers.
· The government promoted grocery and other consumer co-operatives, set up agricultural advisory agencies, and stabilized municipal governments, many of which were bankrupt or on the verge of bankruptcy.
· In banking and finance, the province promoted credit unions, citizen-owned financial institutions still popular today.
Paying controlled electricity, insurance and phone bills found favor with most farm and town residents, but there was a powder-keg waiting when Douglas turned his attention to his main passion — universal health and hospital coverage.
In the early 1960s, Saskatchewan doctors and hospital administrators “revolted” against policies they saw as turning them into state employees. Most newspaper editors, the majority of whom were Liberal party supporters, fanned the flame.
Doctors went ‘on strike’ against the government
In 1962, doctors went ‘on strike’ by closing their offices to attend ‘study sessions’, a tactic somewhat more dignified than carrying picket signs and burning stuff in iron barrels.
The government began importing doctors, mainly from Great Britain, where socialized medicine was already a fact. Hospitals, controlled by prominent local doctors, refused to grant hospital privileges to the foreign medics. Waiting rooms became two and three-hour ordeals for patients. From Wikipedia:
“The Saskatchewan doctors’ strike was a 23-day labour action exercised by medical doctors in 1962 in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan in an attempt to force the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation government of Saskatchewan to drop its program of universal medical insurance. The strike ran from July 1, the day the Saskatchewan Medical Care Insurance Act took force, to July 23.”
Under mediation and negotiation, a settlement was reached on July 23, 1962.
Ironically, Tommy Douglas had left the leadership of the province to become the leader of the federal CCF/NDP, where he led the national movement for universal health care, resulting in the Canadian medicare system known across the world. Although he never led his party to power federally, his influence steered Canada’s momentum in social programming.
A national survey by the Canadian Broadcast Corporation overwhelmingly declared him to be the country’s Greatest Canadian in 1972.
Meanwhile, a swing toward conservatism over the past decade has eliminated many of the programs of The People’s Republic of Saskatchewan, although Tommy Douglas’s political opponents didn’t dare mess with the original health care agenda.
By the time the CCF government was defeated in 1964, even Liberal editorial writers were praising medicare so it became an easy step for the federal government to launch a national version in 1984.
A family footnote in Douglas’s biography: His daughter, Shirley, was married to actor Donald Sutherland and mother of Kiefer Sutherland, also a renowned actor.
Quotes by Tommy Douglas
· We are all in this world together, and the only test of our character that matters is how we look after the least fortunate among us. How we look after each other, not how we look after ourselves. That’s all that really matters, I think.
· Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.
· Courage, my friends; ’tis not too late to build a better world.
