CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Saskatchewan and the Birth of Medicare

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Few Canadians today give much thought to who will pay when they visit a family doctor, but the arrangement is younger than many people assume, and it began in a single province. Its best-known champion, Tommy Douglas, carried a personal memory into politics. As a young boy, he developed a serious bone infection in his leg, and doctors in Winnipeg later considered amputating it. His family could not afford a specialist, but a surgeon offered to treat him free of charge if medical students could observe, and the leg was saved. Douglas later said the experience convinced him that no one’s health should depend on the size of their bank account. After his Co-operative Commonwealth Federation won power in Saskatchewan in 1944, his government introduced universal hospital insurance in 1947, the first such program in North America.

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Hospital coverage was only half the picture, however. The 1947 plan paid for hospital stays, but patients still received bills for visits to doctors’ offices, and the province lacked the money to cover both. The situation eased in the late 1950s, when Ottawa agreed to share the cost of provincial hospital insurance, freeing up funds in Saskatchewan’s budget. Douglas announced plans for a medical care program in 1959 and made it the centrepiece of the following year’s provincial election, which his party won. He did not, however, see the program through himself. In 1961 he left to lead the newly formed federal New Democratic Party, and it fell to his successor, Woodrow Lloyd, to bring the plan into force.

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When the Medical Care Insurance Act took effect on July 1, 1962, most of the province’s doctors closed their offices in protest, offering only emergency services in hospitals. Many physicians feared that government payment would lead to government control of their practices. Tempers ran high on both sides, and the province brought in doctors from Britain and elsewhere to keep some clinics running. After 23 days, a settlement mediated by a British physician, Lord Taylor, brought the strike to an end. Known as the Saskatoon Agreement, it gave doctors more choice in how they billed for their services, but the principle of universal coverage survived intact.

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Saskatchewan’s experiment soon attracted national attention. A federal royal commission chaired by Emmett Hall, appointed in 1961, reported in 1964 that Canada should adopt a similar program across the country. Parliament passed the Medical Care Act in 1966, offering to share the cost with any province whose plan met national standards, and by the early 1970s every province and territory had signed on. Those standards were later reinforced by the Canada Health Act of 1984. Douglas himself remains closely associated with the system: in 2004, a nationwide CBC viewer vote named him “The Greatest Canadian.”