Tommy Douglas: The Fight Of A Lifetime includes
rare film footage and features interviews with his daughter,
actor/activist Shirley Douglas (Wind At My Back), grandson/actor
Kiefer Sutherland (A Few Good Men, Flatliners) and activist/journalist
June Callwood, among others.
Douglas is renowned as much for his spellbinding oratory
and irresistible humour as for his controversial politics.
He rose from a poor working-class background to become one
of the most popular elected politicians in Canada. From
his first election win in the summer of 1935 to his retirement
in 1979, Douglas survived 44 years in politics.
In 1961, Douglas changed the lives of every Canadian when
he legislated the first universal medicare in North America:
doctors would be paid by the government, enabling the poorest
of people to get the medical care they needed. Despite
a dramatic 23-day doctors' strike to stop it in 1962, medicare
survived.
Douglas was passionate about the need for universal health
care for a very personal reason. In 1911, when he was
just seven years old, he almost lost his leg to amputation
due to bone disease. His parents were unable to afford
the costly surgery needed to save it. Luckily, fate
intervened, and a specialist offered to operate on his leg
for free. Douglas never forgot this single act of kindness,
and later determined to change the system for others less
fortunate.
The scrappy Douglas went on to become a flyweight championship
boxer, a Baptist minister, and a political candidate for the
CCF - the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, forerunner
of today's New Democratic Party. In a dramatic upset
election in 1944 Saskatchewan, he formed the first socialist
government in North America, then became the first leader
of the NDP in Ottawa. Douglas retired from elected politics
in 1979 and died in 1986, but today his legacy lives on.
Amid news of crowded hospitals and the pressure to privatize
medicare, his family, led by daughter Shirley Douglas, is
fighting Douglas' fight once more.
Original Air Date - February 1, 2000
Links
Tommy
Douglas: CBC Archives
The
Tommy Douglas Web site
Lost
and Found Sound: Hear
Tommy Douglas on CBC Radio's This Morning
About
the Canadian Universal Medicare System
(Note: CBC does not endorse the content of external
sites)
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