Tommy Douglas

Thomas Clement Douglas (1904–1986) was a Scottish-born Canadian Baptist minister and politician who served as the seventh Premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961, leading the first social-democratic government elected in North America. He is most remembered as the founding architect of Canadian universal public health insurance, a system that became known nationwide as Medicare.

Born in Falkirk, Scotland, he immigrated to Winnipeg with his family in 1919. A childhood bone infection nearly cost him a leg until a Winnipeg surgeon treated him for free, an experience he later cited as the seed of his commitment to public medicine. He studied at Brandon College, was ordained a Baptist minister, and earned a master's degree in sociology from McMaster University.

Elected to the House of Commons in 1935 as a Co-operative Commonwealth Federation member, he switched to provincial politics in 1944 and led the CCF to a sweeping Saskatchewan victory. Over seventeen years his government balanced the budget every year while introducing publicly owned auto insurance, paved farm-to-market roads, rural electrification, and in 1962 the country's first universal hospital and medical insurance plan, despite a twenty-three-day doctors' strike.

He resigned as premier in 1961 to become the first leader of the federal New Democratic Party, serving until 1971. In a 2004 CBC poll, Canadians voted him "The Greatest Canadian" of all time, ahead of Terry Fox and Pierre Trudeau, and he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1981.

The name Tommy is a familiar form of Thomas, derived from the Aramaic te'oma meaning "twin." Worn with affection by the man Canadians called the father of Medicare, it suited his disarmingly plain-spoken public persona.