Penguin Canada recently
released a biography of Tommy Douglas, one volume of their Extraordinary
Canadians series. I received it for
Christmas, and finished reading it on December 27th. At only 221 pages it was a light and fun
read, a brief outline of the career of the Greatest Canadian (as Douglas was
voted in 2004) that gave a strong sense of his character and personality. By the end of the book I had a great sense of
loss: we need Tommy Douglas in Canada
today, just as much as we needed him in his own time.
I was not yet two
years old when Tommy Douglas died, so I have never known a Canada without
his incredible contributions. He’s known
as the father of Medicare in Canada, which (in spite of its problems) is an
institution that is treasured by most Canadians, but he and the Cooperative
Commonwealth Federation (CCF, the fore-runner of the NDP) were the first to
promote many ideas and institutions that I’ve always known to be a part of life
in Canada. The original CCF mission
statement, The Regina Manifesto (1932), called for the protection of rights for
ethnic and religious minorities; a Canadian constitution, charter of rights,
and central bank; national workplace standards, EI, CPP, and public healthcare. At the time, they were called Communists for
suggesting such things; now, at least thirty years after we’ve adopted all of
those ideas, we take them for granted.
Fairly impressive work, considering that Douglas, the CCF, and the NDP
that followed it have never formed a federal government! Their small voice in government and the
Canadian public square, over time, have had great effect.
Throughout this
biography I was struck by the ways in which our situation today reflects the
situations that Douglas faced. The rhetoric used against Douglas and the CCF
in political campaigns, both in Saskatchewan and federally, compared them to
Nazis and Communists in the same sentence, charged that they would confiscate
farms and require all citizens to work for the government, and many other
baseless claims; these make our attack ads today seem petty and tame by
comparison. And the reaction against
their proposed universal health care included the charge that “bureaucrats
would commit women with menopausal symptoms to insane asylums”, which sounds
just as bizarre as the reaction to the so-called Obamacare that continues to
rage in the US .
Today, all of the angry rhetoric and
baseless claims are against the suggestion that we need a system that is
environmentally and economically sustainable.
Sustainability, like universal health care, is a sensible solution to
problems caused by our society. It's not
partisan ideology. Like healthcare, a
government policy on sustainability is simply Canadians doing together what we
already do individually: take care of each other. In the midst of all of the debates about
climate and oil, it's easy to lose sight of that. We need new Tommy Douglases to rise above the
rhetoric and insist on what is right.
Jeff Wheeldon
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