The Life and Political Times of Tommy Douglas

David E. Smith is a professor of political Studies at the University of
Saskatchewan. He is the author of Building a Province: A History of
Saskatchewan in Documents, The Invisible Crown, and Republican Option in
Canada, Past and Present.

Neither Tommy Douglas nor Walter Stewart need any introduction to the
readers of Canadian political history. Douglas helped make it, Stewart
writes about it. Stewart’s approach to biography is captured in the
title of an earlier book on Pierre Trudeau, Shrug. The result here is
irreverent, synoptic, almost staccato, a style promoted by the use of
subheadings throughout the book’s 18 chapters. This is an approach not
calculated to prompt reflection on its subject matter.

In light of two recent biographies of Douglas, Stewart justifies a
third on the grounds that he will “look at the man ... in the context
of his times,” and he wants to provide Canadians with a portrait of
the founder of medicare. Neither of these goals is achieved nor does
this account improve upon existing biographies.

Few would quarrel with the proposition that Canadians have Douglas to
thank for medicare (anymore than without Trudeau there would be no
Charter of Rights and Freedoms). The questions that should be addressed
are, why at that time and why that way? Stewart tells the reader almost
nothing about the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation’s
administrative revolution that modernized government in Saskatchewan,
was copied elsewhere, and provided the necessary capacity to implement
health-care reform. Nor does he explain how Douglas’s original vision
of a national plan contracted into an operational provincial scheme,
which only later became the template for a Canada-wide program.

Stewart intends, he says, to put Douglas in context. He fails in this
attempt. The life overwhelms the times. Perhaps this is inevitable given
the subject’s robust personality. If so, it is unfortunate, for among
Douglas’s formidable talents was to know how, and when, to use
circumstances to his and his party’s advantage.