Here's the story of how Canada got universal healthcare.

Hint: It was forced.

In the 30s, 40s - 2/3rds of the province of Saskatchewan lived on farms. Year after year, farmers experienced crop failure due to pests, hail and drought -- buttressed by the the Great Depression.

According to the Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan:

"In 1928, the net farming income was $363 million; by 1933, it dropped to $11 million; and by 1937, two-thirds of the farm population of Saskatchewan was destitute."

Between 1931 and 1941, over 250,000 people left the province.

Wheat was at the core of the economy of Western Canada, especially the prairies - it's how farmers survived. By the late 30s, white farmers produced the smallest harvest of wheat in three decades.

While this is happening, discontent with the economic system (the status quo) is growing. And so a new movement emerges - defined by its opposition to capitalism: The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF).

The 1933 CCF founding manifesto was very clear in its intention: to eradicate capitalism. It's a pretty radical document that also asserts the right of workers.

read in full here: https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/the-regina-manifesto-1933-co-operative-commonwealth-federation-programme-fu

At the head of the CCF was a Baptist minister, Tommy Douglas, who himself came from a working class background and had experienced, as a child, a life-defining medical choice that led him to believe that no one's life should depend on whether they can afford medical care or not.

The CCF won Saskatchewan's provincial elections in 1944 - becoming the first and only 'socialist' government in the US/Canada.

(Want to point out the CCF wasn't hard-socialist - they ultimately opted for a mixed economy, but that's outside the scope of this thread)

In 1947, Premier Douglas replaced the private healthcare system - which is what existed throughout Canada up until that point - with a tax-funded public health insurance.

Alberta and British Columbia, two other western provinces, adopted similar systems by 1950.

That was just the beginning and it was a battle. There was a lot of resistance, specifically from medical professionals.

In 1962, CCF head and Premier Woodrow Lloyd (who rarely gets credit) introduced the "Saskatchewan Medical Care Insurance Act" which would cover even more.

(Premier Lloyd implemented the entirety of the universal healthcare plan that Douglas had begun introducing during his tenure. Douglas had moved onto federal politics in 1961 with the newly established NDP).

These medical professionals warned of the destruction of Canadian democracy, that to afford this new universalized system the government would need to bring in foreign doctors (gasp!) & existing medical professionals just wouldn't be able to make a living as they had been.

But the popularity of universal healthcare (thankfully) won out. And within ten years of the physicians' strike, which lasted less than a month, Canada had universal healthcare.

This isn't an exhaustive history - there's a lot missing - but given how often there are comparisons between US/Canada, I thought some history could help enlighten on how getting universal healthcare in Canada wasn't easy but it was a forced hand.

And anti-capitalist ideology mixed in mass popularity and strong political leadership that had no interest in compromise forced that hand that led to the implementation of universal healthcare across Canada.

Please let me know if I got anything wrong, I didn't go into certain details and commentary just for the sake of brevity. I am not a Canadian healthcare specialist, just a Canadian who learned this history.