Saint Tommy's torchbearer
 Shirley Douglas thinks Canadians shouldn't
 be sitting on their hands as the health-care
 system her father helped build collapses

 SARAH HAMPSON
 Globe and Mail, March 9, 2000

 Thursday, March 9, 2000

 There is Prairie pragmatism in Shirley Douglas, actress, activist and
 daughter of Tommy Douglas, the father of medicare.

 With a pillowy bosom and neatly manicured hands, bouncy auburn hair
 and a twinkle in her eyes, she is easily imagined as a schoolmarm who is
 willing to look anything and anyone in the eye -- a dust storm, a defiant
 horse or the kid at the back who likes to think he knows what everybody
 wants.

 As founder of the Toronto Health Coalition and spokeswoman for the
 Canadian Health Coalition, she sails down the aisle of public
 consciousness, as imposing as the prow of a ship, reminding Canadians
 about the principles and vision that brought medicare into being.

 She has become the Voice of Tommy.

 Alberta Premier, Ralph Klein, meanwhile, has morphed into a boy at the
 back of the schoolhouse. "A scrapper," Ms. Douglas calls him, shaking
 her head. Not only will he say what he thinks others want, he will even
 pretend to know what Tommy wanted.

 "If Tommy Douglas were alive today, he would be very, very proud,"
 declared Mr. Klein during a verbal shoving match in the Alberta
 Legislature not long ago. He was justifying his government's proposal to
 redesign health care. In defence of his privatization scheme, Mr. Klein
 said Mr. Douglas understood the need for a second phase.

 "Oh, yes," says Ms. Douglas, laughing good-naturedly. "Premier Klein is
 a problem." But there's no contempt in her laugh. Ms. Douglas, 66,
 displays sympathy for her political opponents, a gentle forbearance,
 really. "That's quite enough, Ralph," she seems to be saying, "you've had
 your say. Now go to your corner until you can behave." On the CBC's
 popular series Wind at My Back, Ms. Douglas plays small-town
 dowager May Bailey, and she possesses more than a little of her
 character's austere, no-nonsense authority.

 "Tommy did see the need for a second stage, but his is public-health
 clinics throughout the country that would be focused on preventative
 medicine," she explains. "He said if you don't build this section you'll
 overburden the first section." Home care was also part of Tommy's
 vision, she adds.

 Ms. Douglas understands why politicians often use her father's name.
 "You can't sell health care without explaining Tommy away," she says,
 during an interview at a downtown Toronto hotel. "If Tommy brought it in
 and you're going to take it away, you have to find a bridge."

 As premier of Saskatchewan, Tommy Douglas introduced the
 Hospitalization Act in 1946 and the Saskatchewan Medical Care
 Insurance Act in 1962, initiatives that paved the way for national
 medicare.

 "It's almost as if Tommy Douglas's ghost is haunting Ralph Klein and
 [Ontario Premier] Mike Harris," notes Mike McBane, national
 co-ordinator of the Canadian Health Coalition.

 Ms. Douglas, who is the former wife of actor Donald Sutherland and
 mother of actor Kiefer Sutherland, is not an overnight activist, roped into
 service because of her family name. She has long been involved in social
 issues. While living in California in the late sixties and early seventies, she
 supported many organizations, including the Black Panthers. In 1969, she
 had a brush with the Federal Bureau of Investigation when she was
 arrested on conspiracy charges of possessing unregistered explosives.
 She is reported to have said that the charges, which were later dropped,
 were a frame-up by the FBI.

 Ms. Douglas, who has lived in Toronto since 1977, became concerned
 about the state of national health care after a friend became ill two years
 ago. Its deterioration has happened largely unseen and unheard by
 Canadians, she says, because "unless you're in a hospital, you don't see
 it."

 She also believes "the fighting and squabbling between the premiers and
 the federal government has to stop, and the Prime Minister can begin that
 by bringing the federal and provincial leaders and health-care
 professionals together for a summit." The greatest threat of Alberta's
 proposed Bill 11, she warns, is the implications for the North American
 Free Trade Agreement: "This would open the doors to the Americans
 and Mexicans to come into our country and build hospitals."

 Ms. Douglas was "astonished" to find out how many health-care services
 are privatized already. "Right here in Ontario, 30 per cent of the health
 system is already funded by private money. Every time you get a blood
 test. Every time you get X-rayed. MDS Labs have already taken that all
 over. Those stockholders are so happy that your public money is paying
 MDS to do something as simple as take blood out of your vein and make
 a profit from it. Those American companies come for the cream off the
 top. Nobody wants to come in and take over emergency rooms. They
 take the money-makers, and we need those. What are we giving them
 away for?"

 Still, she is not discouraged. "Decisions can be reversed," she says
 brightly. Unlike in the United States, where civil action is taught in the
 school system, Canadians do not know the power they have to make
 change. It's not a matter of being too polite, she says. Canadians are
 simply not in the habit of voicing their concerns by faxing and phoning
 politicians. For instance, Canadians should insist that all provincial health
 boards be composed of both elected and government-appointed officials,
 she says.

 Her calm pragmatism about a triumph of the possible was shared by her
 mother, Irma, who once came to a Black Panther ghetto on a visit. "She
 was a tiny woman, and she looked up and down this derelict street, and
 said, 'Well, it's a difficult job, but it's not impossible.'

 "It is in my genetic map to know that if you can get three people together
 in a room who agree on certain principles, then those three get three
 more friends and so on until you have a movement," she says. It is what
 she learned as a pigtailed child, growing up in Weyburn, Sask., the eldest
 of two daughters. She was taken along to all her father's speeches in the
 small-town halls and schools during the late thirties, when he was building
 support in the province for his party, the Co-operative Commonwealth
 Federation,

 A preacher turned politician, Mr. Douglas was premier of Saskatchewan
 for 17 years and later the federal leader of the New Democratic Party.
 "Whenever someone had a problem, there was a knock at our door,"
 Ms. Douglas recalls in her deep storytelling voice. "When I went to
 school, if someone didn't have mittens I would go home to get some. It
 wasn't charity. That wasn't a word I ever heard. Father was trying to
 build a society in which people would have a feeling of some
 responsibility for each other."

 Ms. Douglas is from a time that now seems as vanished as the world of
 W. O. Mitchell. But if she is driven by memories of the salt-of-the-earth
 farm folk surrounding her father who were "funny, angry and convinced
 of their mission," she is also inspired by her father's character. "He had
 such integrity, and he didn't worry about winning the next election. People
 would say, 'Oh, you know, Tommy, I don't think people will go for this,'
 and he'd say, 'I don't care if they're going to go for it. It's what we
 promised and we're going to do it.' "

 Does nostalgia for that time play a part in her activism? "Not at all," she
 retorts sharply. "It's because I never saw anything as hard and as difficult
 to achieve." The CCF's promises threatened business interests, especially
 those of insurance companies. During the early provincial campaigns, the
 tires of their car were often slashed, she remembers, and once her father
 broke a glass pitcher on a table and held it out to defend himself. "A big
 part of the fight to save health care," notes Mr. McBane, "is
 understanding the history of it. Those same forces that tried to prevent
 Tommy Douglas are what people face now."

 Universal medical insurance was a cornerstone of Mr. Douglas's platform
 because, as a child in Winnipeg, he lay in a children's hospital on and off
 for three years suffering from a bone ailment called osteomyelitis. His
 parents, who had emigrated from Scotland, couldn't afford the services of
 a skilled surgeon, so his leg was going to be amputated. One day, a
 well-known bone surgeon who was doing charity work came in with a
 group of students and took an interest in his case. His leg was saved.

 "My father used to talk about Canada as this little jewel sitting at the top
 of the continent," she says.

 Her American-style activism has already made her a target in the West.
 An editorial in the Edmonton Sun earlier this year referred to her
 pejoratively as the "Black Panther Granny" and intimated she could "inflict
 serious credibility damage" on the Canadian Union of Public Employees'
 campaign to fight Mr. Klein. The editorial cited reports -- untrue, Ms.
 Douglas says -- that she is unable to enter the United States following her
 trouble with the FBI.

 "I was blown away by their raising of this," says Mr. McBane. "The
 right-wing press have targeted her because she is a threat to people who
 want to privatize. She is not controversial as far as we're concerned," he
 adds.

 Ms. Douglas dismisses the attack. "I'm never surprised. Anyway, it runs
 off me like water. I grew up with no paper on my father's side. I was
 used to having my father smeared."

 So be warned, Mr. Klein, and all those politicians who would invoke
 Tommy to defend changes to health care. She who carries the torch of
 Saint Tommy is watching and listening.




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