Tommy Douglas, by Giller Prize winner, Vincent Lam

Sample of the marvelous list of vignettes from Tommy's life in Parliament - and something of his nationalist spirit (and why the West was not won):

"During the energy crisis of 1973, the NDP held the balance of power with a Trudeau minority government. Douglas urged federal action to preserve domestic oil supply for Canadian rather than U.S.needs, and to create a publicly owned petroleum company to defend Canadian oil interests.

"Frustrated by months of inaction on the issue, Douglas and (David) Lewis eventually agreed that the NDP would have to bring down the government unless it took action on energy. Trudeau was informed. The following day Trudeau announced initiatives that would meet all the NDP's demands. When Trudeau had finished speaking , Douglas turned to his fellow MP Bill Knight and said, 'Well, how do you like that? He hardly missed a word ?' "

Douglas's critics "grumbled that he was anti-American. The truth was that he spoke on many occasions against driving out U.S.investors and opposed trade prejudices in the form of 'artificial barriers against foreigh capital, or in discrimination against foreign firms.' Rather, he felt it was Canadians' responsibility to assert more influence over their economy with new investment and initiatives. He spent far less time criticizing the United Statesthan he did questioning Canadian politicians about having given in with little negotiation to the interests of large corporations, many of which happend to be American."

Lam, a Toronto hospital physician, was very taken with "Douglas's achievement in introducing medicare," where he "convenced a nation that in a civiliz\ed society, heealth care should be considered essential to individual and social wello-being, and viewed both as a public right and a collective obligation."

Taking over a bankrupt, impoverished province, "he couldn't immediately deliver the full range of the CCF's program for social democracy within a broken economy. As the province's private and public finances strengthened, his government pressed forward with social innovations and ultimately universal health insurance."

In the battle to introduce a public medical care program,ironically, the CCF, "the party synonymous in Canada with workers' rights to organize and strike - found itself importing strikebreakers in the form of replacement doctors from outside the province...In this case the government's obligtion to ensure the delivery of essential services could, and did, trump the rights of a group of workersa to collectively deprive the public of those essential services." One gets the sense that Lam would have gone to Saskatchewan in a heartbeat if invited by Douglas.

But "Douglas's political fortunes suffered no greater short-term blow than during the birth of medicare. After almost two decades had been spent building Saskatchewan's economy, civil service (the federal Liberals would bring several of the 'Saskatchewan Mafia' to lead Ottawa's civil service), social services, the political legitimacy of the CCF, and his own credibility as premier, the birth of medicare in Saskatchewan should have been a crowning achievement for Douglas. Instead, the surrounding events meant that he left provincial politics in circumstances of conflict and failed to win his federal seat in Regina in 1962."

For this observer, who reached voting age during that struggle and understood even back then that the press could do bad things to the minds of the masses of mainstreet,it still left one in doubt about the capacity of some folks to , like the sparrow, sort the grains of reason from the surrounding turd...one among a number of rural similes that Tommy used to lighten the beginning of his speeches.