Tommy Douglas, Not Dead Enough – small dead animals

The Greatest Canadian.
Kudos to London Fog for digging that up.

13 Replies to “Tommy Douglas, Not Dead Enough”

Hilarious.
Just goes to show that Canadians voted for Douglas as Greatest Canadian the same way they vote to re-elect the Liberals — without the foggiest idea of what they’re doing.

This video clip may be entertaining, but it is grievously unfair to one of the most honest politicians Canada ever had. As recently as the 1970s the Canadian Medical Association (and even later, the American Medical Association) classified homosexuality as a disease. It seems odd by today’s standards, but the only one of those politicians who supported it was Trudeau who had probably just come back from Cuba. It seems hypocritical to me that you allow yourselves to take this statement so completely out of context. You’ notice Stanfield said he was in favour of a free vote. Caouette said never. Douglas was merely saying what the vast majority of Canadians sincerely believed 40 years ago. He wasn’t posturing; it was simply a statement of common knowledge- not prejudice. In those days, people went to jail for smoking dope and got beaten by Police and riot squads for taking part in political demonsttrations. You could die getting a back room abortion. Don’t knock Douglas. He had more decency and integrity than all the current scum in Ottawa put together. Trudeau was the one person who almost singlehandedly started Canada on the road to being the pluralist, multicultural, relativist, constitutionally-challenged country that we live in today. I find it somewhat amusing that on the one hand he’s castigated for having been a socialist and on the other hand he’s appluaded for having been a socialist. I’m certain that the only person in that clip who might not be appalled at our current state of political affairs in this country would be Trudeau.
PS. In case it sounds like I belong to the Douglas fan club, I never did vote for him, but I did vote for Trudeau back when in the days when we really believed that Canada was ‘The Great Society’. No one had any idea that his ‘vision’ would lead us to where we are today.

Of course the ‘Great Society’ was US President Johnson’s brainchild. Trudeau paraphrased that and provided Canada with the ‘Just Society’ which is what I meant to say in my previous post.

Ed,
Douglas was also an advocate of eugenics, so frankly I hesitate to call him that decent, though he did back away from it when he realized the company he was in in the late 30’s. His belief in what the state could accomplish did not suffer many limits, and as a consequence his thinking does not age well.

Wouldn’t it be great if this clip finally got his daughter Shirley and grandson Kiefer to shut the up ?

At least it was a freakin’ civilized debate.

I would be more sympathetic to Douglas if I weren’t living in a part of the country that still suffers from the “politics of envy” that he he based his entire political career on.
Besides – if the left can decide that historical context is irrelevant when it comes to criticizing words and actions of the past, then they should be prepared to hold their own icons to the same ridiculous standards.

OK,if Tommy Douglas is “Greatest Canadian”, who would these people who voted choose as “Worst Canadian”?

I see Ed in cda has a very selective view of history. Coming from a catholic family, my father remembers all too well the old KKK grand wizard TOMMY DOUGLAS! T.C. was be far the most bigoted and racist politician Canada has ever had. Right from the early days when he wrote his M.A. thesis on eugenics entitled “The Mentally and Morally Subnormal Family”. Tommy enlisted his fellow Klansmen ( there were as many as 46,000 in Saskatchewan at the time ) in his first political campaign. Tommy’s campaign manager in that race was Daniel C. Grant, a very well known and open Ku Klux Klan member.
Tommy had forced labour camps in the 1950’s for all welfare receipants and cut off those who refused to work.
Tommy covered up, or tried to, the biggest finaicial scandal in Canada up until that time. Clarence Fines, Tommy’s right hand man, stole MILLIONS for the people of Saskatchewan and ran off to Florida with his secretary. Tommy refused to prosecute despite over whelming evidence. This is why he was completely obliterated when he tried to run for federal office in the 60’s ( he lost by nearly 10,000 votes ).
I am sure you’re a nice guy Ed, but learn you’re facts.

That should read MILLIONS FROM the people of Saskatchewan… typo.

I admit that I had never heard other issues mentioned before but I was only pointing out that he was espousing the prevailing sentiment concerning homosexuality at that time. Eugenics was similarly a n accepted subject of discussion only a few generations ago.
I called him great in reference to him generally being considered the ‘father’ of medicare.
As I said, I have never voted for the NDP so I have no strong feelings either way; I was only trying to point out that it’s misleading and disingenuous to ignore the context in which a controversial statement is made, unless of course, it suits one’s purpose to do so.
For all I know he may have been nuttier than a fruitcake, maybe even talking to his dog or having seances. But one I trust we can all agree on: neither he nor any other politician in the history of Canada has so blatantly and ruthlessly abused our country as Martin and his predecessors have done over the past 40 years.