The following is a digitized version of an article from Canadian Dimension’s print archive, which is available through the University of Manitoba Digital Collections. It was first published in the April 1971 edition of CD (Volume 7, Number 8). To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, we do not alter, edit or update them.
This interview, conducted by Steven Langdon, features Tommy Douglas reflecting on the roots of his democratic socialism, the achievements of his government in Saskatchewan, and the challenges facing the NDP at the start of the 1970s. Speaking at a moment of rising debate within the party, Douglas outlines his pragmatic approach to public ownership and cooperatives, while offering candid views on the party’s future direction and internal tensions. Langdon, then a young academic and activist, would later go on to serve as a New Democratic Party Member of Parliament and leadership contender, before returning to a career in economics and public policy.
Steven Langdon (SL): The first thing that I want to ask you, because this is a commemorative issue, is what your own background was that led you to socialism.
Tommy Douglas (TD): Well, I suppose basically my background was socialist to begin with. My father had been a member of the British Labour Party. He was a soldier in the South African War. The family had been traditionally Liberal. When my father joined the Labour Party, after he returned from the war, my grandfather ordered him out of the house; and it was a long time before they were reconciled. There were eight boys and a daughter in the family—and one by one the boys joined the Labour Party. And when I was about 14 years of age, my grandfather finally joined the Labour Party. Then when we lived in Winnipeg, of course, my father was a supporter of J.S. Woodsworth, who was our MP.
So my background was socialist and I went to a lot of meetings with Beatrice Brigden and the group in the Independent Labour Party in Winnipeg. During the 1919 strike I used to go to outdoor meetings addressed by people like Fred Dixon, S.J. Farmer, John Queen, A.A. Heaps, and so on. But I had not engaged in any great political activity during the years after I left Winnipeg. I went to Brandon College. I was there six years.
I think I first began to think in political terms when I was down in Chicago University. My work was in sociology and I had a lot of contact with the unemployed and underprivileged in the south end of Chicago. I began to realize that in the United States the situation called for very fundamental changes. That was in 1931. Norman Thomas came to the university. He was running as the socialist candidate for the presidency of the US. And then I came back to Weyburn. I began to organize the unemployed and organize the farm group, and it was in an endeavour to bring these two together that I came into contact with M.J. Coldwell, who was the head of the Independent Labour Party, and with George Williams, head of the United Farmers Group.
SL: This was in 1931?
TD: Yes, in ‘31. It was in ‘32 that we managed to bring about a merger of these two groups into the Farmer Labour Party. And we also laid the foundation at that time for forming a national group on the same basis. And, as you know, in the early fall of 1932 we advocated an organization in Calgary which led to the convention in Regina in 1933 which formed the CCF. So I came into the socialist movement actively, though my roots had always been in it, as a result of the appalling conditions of the ’30s. And I didn’t go into it with ideas of making a political career of it, even when I was asked to run—as I did in 1934—for the Farmer Labour Party. I did so merely because there were so few people who could run on the Prairies. Most people were on relief or if they had a job, they were fearful of losing it, and consequently only people with some measure of independence could run. I was defeated in that election and I had no intention of running in the federal campaign. I was planning to go back to Chicago and finish up my Ph.D.
SL: With the intention of going into academics?
TD: Yes, with the intention of going into academic work; and I had a tentative offer to do some teaching at Chicago. So in ‘35 we were in the same position. It was difficult to get anybody to run. And when Mr. Coldwell and I were both elected in ‘35, I was thinking even then in terms of putting in one term in Parliament and going back to the university. Then I got elected as the provincial leader in Saskatchewan, so good-bye academics.
But if I were trying to sum it up, I would say I came into the socialist movement partly because of my background, but mainly because of the appalling conditions—very apparent injustice and inequities and repression of a capitalist society, which forced me to go back again and begin to study more realistically the whole political structure. I was convinced that a democratic socialist movement in Canada was essential if Canada was going to become a civilized society.
SL: You mentioned Norman Thomas and some of the people in Winnipeg—Woodsworth. Were there other socialist influences which might have shaped what kind of socialist you have become?
TD: Well, I did a good deal of studying of Marx and recognized the validity of his analysis of the society. I couldn’t accept the solutions that he offered. My feeling was that the democratic process has an important part to play, first in securing power and secondly in the kind of society you would set up. I’ve never envisaged transferring from the tyranny of a capitalist oligarchy to the tyranny of a bureaucratic state. I’ve always thought in terms of a kind of society in which the state would—on a federal, provincial or municipal level—own and control the major activities that were essential to economic planning. But there would have to be an important place for cooperatives—producer cooperatives or consumer cooperatives; for some participation by workers themselves, either in the ownership or management or both. What socialism has always meant to me is social ownership: the people themselves controlling their own social and economic destiny. And I don’t equate this entirely with government ownership.
I think there is a very important place for government ownership, and I suppose I’ve been responsible for more public ownership than any premier in the history of Canada. We set up in Saskatchewan, as you know, some 16 Crown corporations; we took over many of the activities that had always been considered the preserve of private enterprise. But, at the same time, what hasn’t been publicized, is the amount of cooperative enterprises which we developed. Saskatchewan had a strong cooperative movement to begin with. But the government itself actively promoted cooperatives. It guaranteed their loans; it turned over to them provincial areas on a partnership basis.
We deliberately and consciously bought our supplies from the cooperatives, with a result that our dividends from the government ran into a very substantial figure. All our government buses, all our government planes, used cooperatives’ products. Our government employees on the road carried a co-op credit card, bought at co-op service stations. Our supplies for hospitals, schools, and so on were in large part purchased from cooperatives. When we took office, we looked back through the books and for the previous 10 years the purchases by the Liberal government from the cooperative movement were equivalent to $51. And our purchases from the cooperatives ran into millions of dollars.
SL: Do you see this development of the cooperative movement as a sign of a growing socialist attitude?
TD: You see, I have always felt that genuine socialism means ownership by the people. People can own and control the economy through the elected representatives, federally, and provincially, and so forth. There are areas which are monopolistic or quasi-monopolistic, which have to be run by government or run by a private monopoly. I agree with the statement that’s in the Quadragesimo anno that said any economic function which dominates the life of the community should be owned by the community.
But unless you can involve people—this is the experience I’ve had from visiting countries where this contrast exists… the Soviet Union versus Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, up until the Russian tanks moved in. I found for instance that in the Soviet Union the people themselves have no part in decision-making. Members of the Communist Party have some part in it, but the people have no part in it, and consequently I think they’re listless. I found in Yugoslavia that they did participate—I sat in on some of the workers’ councils in some of the big plants, meetings of the shop stewards sitting down with managers and taking part in the decisions, and I found a much greater awareness and sense of participation on the part of these people than I found in a place where they are just hired workers.
For hired workers it doesn’t make much difference whether they’re working for a corporation or a government. Maybe it’s a better return, but life consists of more than just getting a slightly bigger paycheque or a better house, though those are not to be sneezed at; you also need to feel that you’re important, that you have some role to play in this whole process. This is why I’ve always opted for democratic socialism.
SL: It’s 17 years that you were premier of Saskatchewan.
TD: Yes, 17 and a half years.
SL: When you look back at it now, what strikes you as the most important thing that your government accomplished?
TD: Three categories. First in the field of health and welfare. We were committed to a very extensive program, by virtue of our convention resolutions. We started immediately. We took office on the 10th of July 1944 and by the first of January 1945 every old-age pensioner, mother’s allowance cases, blind persons, physically incapacitated persons, and so on—each had a blue card, which entitled them to medical services, physical services, dental care, optometric care, glasses, dentures, drugs—complete—health services. At the same time we moved immediately the 1st of January ‘45 in treatment of cancer, for mental illness, for venereal disease. By 1946 we had passed legislation which became effective on the 1st of January 1947 providing for complete and comprehensive insurance—for every citizen in the province. We began an intensive mental health program that provided not only free mental health care for anybody who is in a mental institution, but set up mental health clinics where the people could get free psychiatric care.
We were the first province to provide supplementary benefits to old-age pensioners. We increased mother’s allowance so there was a very extensive welfare and health program and as you know by 1961 we had passed Medicare. This was a culmination of our medical program. It didn’t come all at once. We built up to it gradually. We had set up in the southwestern part of the province, where there was the greatest amount of poverty, in 1945, a pilot project of completely free health services. And we used the data there through our IBM machines to work on costs, different methods of cost control, methods of payment and so on. We launched a very large program of hospital construction. By 1965 the Province of Saskatchewan and the State of New York were tied in having the highest number of hospital beds per thousand population. And we set up an air ambulance service—to service the people who were a long way from hospital, but were paying for hospital care and didn’t have access to hospitals.
The second broad feature was the improvement of the economic basis of government. When we took office in 1944, 81 percent of the income of the province came from farmers; only 19 percent from other sources. When I left Saskatchewan in November 1961, about 55 percent of our income was coming from non-agricultural sources, despite the fact that in the meantime, we had added a million acres of populated land to the farm sector and farm income was up. But we had developed in the meantime, oil, uranium, potash, mining.
SL: Do you find as the premier of an underdeveloped province that you had to rely on American enterprise to help with capitalist entrepreneurship?
TD: Oh yes. One of the weaknesses, of course, of the whole Canadian set-up is that our banks and financial institutions just weren’t interested in putting up capital. I have very strong recollections of the head of one of the independent Canadian oil companies coming to me with a proven oil area with contracts from the CPR and the CNR to take Bunker C fuel, and he couldn’t raise enough money to put down the rest of the well. And I came with him down to Ottawa and saw C.D. Howe, and he said no, we just can’t do it. The Industrial Development Bank and the private banks will give you money if you’re putting up a shoe factory or something of this sort, but there’s just nothing for oil in the ground. And this man was compelled to go down to the States and borrow $2 million. Now it didn’t hurt in this case because it was loan capital and I don’t think that there is harm in borrowing loan capital. It is when you allow people to get hold of your equity capital that you lose ownership and effective control.
For example, the American company who wanted to set up a Canadian subsidiary to put in a gas system was proposing to float $75 million in industrial bonds in Canada. Canadian people would have to put up most of the capital, and the gas users in Saskatchewan would have paid off that $75 million as they purchased their gas each month. By reversing the role, we put up $25 million, we borrowed $75 million on the American market which we could borrow at that time for about 1.5 percent less than we could borrow in Canada—we borrowed at 3.25 percent—and the Saskatchewan gas consumers have been paying off these (bonds). By next year they’ll all be paid off, and the ownership will stay in the hands of the people of Saskatchewan.
Now there were instances where we suffered the penalty of having a government in Ottawa which didn’t have anything like a publicly owned and publicly controlled Canada Development Corporation. And didn’t have any national plan for developing Canadian resources under Canadian ownership, and where possible under public ownership. To give you two very good illustrations—when we first discovered that we had large deposits of potash we were very anxious if possible to keep control of that potash in Canada. Very large sums of money were involved—$55-60 million for every shaft put down. We entered into negotiations with the British government. We got firm letters of intent that the British would be prepared to take potash; we got in touch with the cooperatives in the Maritimes, who used a lot of potash, and they were prepared to take delivery. And I came back to Ottawa to see if the federal government would go in with us on a joint Crown corporation to develop the potash resources, and they wouldn’t touch it. Mr. Saint-Laurent and Mr. Glen, who was the minister of mineral resources at that time, were just appalled at the very idea.
SL: Because it was public ownership?
TD: Because it was public ownership; because they just didn’t want to get involved in any kind of public development of the resources. There isn’t any doubt in my mind that we could have sold the potash just as we were selling sodium sulphate. And as we were selling timber, and as we were selling furs and fish—we were shipping fish to the Los Angeles market, the Chicago market, to the New York market, through a Crown corporation. We would have had no difficulty, in my opinion, in disposing of the potash. What we needed were the very vast sums that were required—plus the technical know-how. And we could have had the technical know-how. But we couldn’t supply the vast sums of money.
The other example is the oil industry. We would have liked to have seen the oil industry develop in the province on the basis of public ownership. We couldn’t get the federal government to move in this field. It was out of the financial range of a provincial government. We’re talking about, as an initial investment, about $8-9 hundred million, and in the long-term, it would be $2-3 billion. So we did the only thing we could do, and this is why I am a pragmatic socialist.
When you’re dealing with people and their immediate needs, you need schools, you need hospitals, and you need roads and you need electric power and you need gas to get into people’s homes, and all this costs money. And so we have to do what we can. So we checkerboard the area. When the companies came in to explore for oil, the agreement was that when we declared an area to be what we called a proven oil area, it was checkerboarded. That meant that the black squares belonged to them. They could take the oil out of the black squares and pay the royalty and pay the ground rent. But the white squares belonged to the Crown. We didn’t do what Alberta had done, we didn’t turn the white squares over to the companies by putting them up for bid. We took the squares that were left. We turned over to the cooperatives a lot of these areas on a farm-out basis, in which we shared the cost and we shared the returns.
In other words, while we weren’t able to socialize the oil industry, we were able to make sure that at least a very substantial part of the oil that came out of the ground remained under the control of the government, and we had something to say about where it went and who got it.
And as a consequence in Saskatchewan, you have the farmers owning their own wells, trucking it to the refinery, trucking it out to the filling stations, and in the bulk fuel stations for farmers and from the time it comes out of the ground till the time it goes into the farmer’s tractor or into the city dweller’s car, nobody’s making a profit out of it. The money is going in patronage dividends back to the consumer or it’s going in revenue to the provincial treasury to provide health and welfare services to the people.
SL: You said there was a third area.
TD: Yes, the third area which we would include was trying to improve the quality of life for the people. We set up an arts council and we set up adult education programs, spent a lot of money on recreation centres in towns and cities, and parks. We came across the old problem that we’ve always had of a whole lake, in several cases, the entire shoreline having been bought up by a syndicate. People who lived 20 miles from a lake could never get even to the shore. It was a private preserve. We broke those up.
SL: You sound very satisfied with what you did in Saskatchewan.
TD: When you look back, you can see things that you could have done better. When you are starting from a theoretical base, you would want first to build up the economy and then out of the revenues finance or expand the social structure. But in a movement like ours, policy is laid down by convention. And people at conventions said we had to look after the needy. You had this constant pull between your heart and your head. We were always pushing our welfare and health programs and rural electrification, which was a kind of social service—even faster than we were building the economic base. And it probably couldn’t have been done any other way.
SL: How do you feel about where the NDP has to go now? Clearly there is a big difference between Canada in 1971 and Saskatchewan in 1944. Does the NDP have to move in a different direction?
TD: It has to step up the tempo of its activities, although its objectives remain the same. We have to be pretty bold and aggressive in the things that have to be done, for there is not unlimited time in which to accomplish them. The situation in Canada is such that we don’t have unlimited time. In the field of ownership, I am convinced that unless we can stop the American takeover in the next 10 or 12 years, we’ll have passed the point of no return. The same is true for pollution and for resource development. In the next 10 years, the demand for oil will increase by 50 percent, the demand for natural gas will increase by 100 percent. We are watching, bit by bit, any control we had of oil and gas going to the US. Unless policy changes are made in the next three or four years, we are going to see Canada and particularly the Arctic develop as the “great American colony,” in which the sole purpose of American ownership will be to drain the area of oil and gas as they have already done in Venezuela and in the Middle East. The same is true for our coal, for minerals.
What we need most of all is a more aggressive style and where we have the power a stepping up of the pace. Look at Premier Schreyer in Manitoba—with a razor edge majority, he succeeded in taking over car insurance within a few months of taking office. In Saskatchewan, we had a big majority, and the question of government operated car insurance had never been raised. We could go at it more leisurely. Premier Schreyer has already been pushed into the pulp and paper industries and I think there are other areas that he is looking at. We have to move much more quickly than we ever did before. The public of today is more receptive to government intervention. In Saskatchewan, any mention of public ownership of power gave rise to a terrific outcry. And when we went into natural gas this was sheer heresy. In 1946, when we introduced government hospital insurance this was considered the worst kind of bureaucracy: bolshevism in its most virulent form. But NDP governments today can move much more quickly than we could without as much opposition. Of course the establishment will fight to the last ditch, as did the car insurance companies of Manitoba and Ontario.
SL: What is your reaction to the Waffle group within the party? The assumption on my part is that it responds to that underlying feeling in the party for a more aggressive style. Do you read it that way and what are some of the questions you would have?
TD: I have always welcomed having inside the party a group of people who keep pushing the party into being more aggressive and more radical. I think the party needs pioneers who break trail for them. It is very easy for politicians not to rock the boat, when things are going along pretty well, when they are being elected and re-elected, when the government is being re-elected. And so, they say, let’s not get anybody mad at us. So we need people in the party who will say “Just a moment, these were our long-term objectives. We haven’t reached them yet, and we’re not moving fast enough. Can’t we speed the process up? Let’s get moving.” I’ve never resented having people in the party who act as a sort of prod.
What does worry me—and I don’t say this applies to the Waffle group—only time will tell what category the Waffle group will fall into, is that a catalyst group can become a factor for division. If it becomes divisive, if it sets up a party within a party, if it feels on every issue it has to be in opposition, if it feels it has to contest every nomination or oppose every person in office, then it becomes a source of friction rather than a source of strength. The other thing that worries me is this: there is the danger that a group inside the party which is trying to move the party forward may tend to shut its eyes to political realities and may become a collection of intellectual exhibitionists who merely want to demonstrate how radical they are, without any regard to A) whether the things they are suggesting are practicable and B) whether these things they are suggesting are acceptable to the electorate, who, in the final analysis, we must win over.
SL: To come back to what you were saying about the possibility of a group becoming a divisive factor. I wonder how much of that is going to depend on the reaction of the party people to the group. If it starts out as a catalyst and most agree that its function is valuable, there comes a stage when reaction to that catalytic function, I think, could create the kind of divisiveness just in the process of…
TD: You have to make a clear-cut distinction. I have no illusion that whenever there are groups who try to move the party fast, there will always be individuals who will creep into the ranks of the group and try to use it for divisive purposes. Trotskyites have followed this policy consistently. I think that the leadership of our party has to make a clear distinction between people who are trying consciously to be the yeast in the party and people who are trying to destroy the party.
Steven W. Langdon is a Canadian economist, former New Democratic Party MP, and past leadership candidate who later served as an adjunct research professor at Carleton University.