Mandryk: Medicare lessons can still apply today

By Murray Mandryk

To maybe better understand the fight over COVID-19 in the last two years, let's explore the fight to bring in Medicare 60 years ago.

In one major way, it's quite similar and boils down to one single word.

"The sentiment expressed today is: 'freedom,'" said author and former newspaper political column Dale Eisler in a recent interview with Postmedia.

"It (the medicare fight) was about overreach by the government. The doctors at the time used the term conscription: 'We are being conscripted into this.'"

Immediately after the former Co-operative Commonwealth Federation government (that morphed into the NDP) implemented the province's universal medicare law on July 1, 1962, most Saskatchewan doctors went on a 23-day strike.

Eisler wrote about the 1962 medicare implementation crisis in his books Rumours of Glory: Saskatchewan & the Thatcher Years and False Expectations: Politics and the Pursuit of the Saskatchewan Myth, noted doctors of the day were even more politically charged than today.

In fact, this was something that at least one doctor later admitted:

"We were clumsy, awkward, we were highly rhetorical, we used all the antics of bad politicians: exaggeration, dire threats of what might happen," said the late conservative Senator Dr. Staff Barootes in an interview with Eisler for his book False Expectations. "Our concern was that once government took physician care services, we would become technicians or tradesmen being paid salaries by only one paymaster."

And doctors received plenty of high-power political and heavyweight support. One such supporter was Ken Kramer of Kramer Tractor, then president of the Saskatchewan Roughriders.

After attempting to get Roughrider players to speak out against the implementation of Medicare, Kramer solicited Father Athol Murray of Notre Dame Hounds-fame for a speaking tour during the doctors' strike.

The fiery Catholic priest did not mince words:

"We must get off the fence and make our views known," Murray said in a July 8, 1962 speech in Prince Albert reported by the Prince Albert Daily Herald. "This thing may break out into violence and bloodshed any day now, and God help us if it doesn't."

Murray's rhetoric became even sharper at a later rally that day at a Saskatoon high school.

"A wave of hatred is sweeping Saskatchewan. There has been a death. There will be violence, and there will be bloodshed," Murray said in his speech broadcast provincewide. "There are Reds here. I can't see them. I can smell them. You communists may think we're naive and hollow-chested, but we gave 100,000 boys fighting for the freedom you are fighting against.

"You Reds, I want you to know that we're proud as hell when it comes to Canada. I loathe the welfare state, and I love free-swinging freedom."

But notwithstanding the anger, fierce rhetoric and rallies at the Saskatchewan legislature attracting thousands, the then-Woodrow Lloyd-led CCF government did not budge. On July 23, 1962, an agreement was reached with the doctors, which allowed them to opt out, ending the strike.

The CCF would pay a significant political price, losing the 1964 provincial election. Also, the architect of Medicare, Tommy Douglas, who by that point had left provincial politics to lead the newly formed NDP, would lose a seemingly safe Regina seat.

But the Ross Thatcher Liberal government that replaced the CCF did not scrap mediocre. In fact, within a decade, it would be adopted as a national policy by ensuring Progressive Conservative and Liberal governments.

To this day, public health remains imperfect, but it also is a source of immense national pride.

So perhaps the lesson of its implementation 60 years ago is that even the most vitriolic political/health care debates do simmer down.

After all, if we could survive the Medicare fight 60 years ago, one suspects we could survive most anything.